← In the Heat of the Night
In the Heat of the Night poster

In the Heat of the Night · reception & legacy

1967 · Norman Jewison

How In the Heat of the Night has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A hit and Best Picture winner in its moment, it later got recast as the 'safe' old-Hollywood choice of 1967 next to Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate — yet the slap scene and Poitier's Virgil Tibbs have kept it feeling far more alive than that reputation suggests.

What's debated

The perennial fight: did it deserve Best Picture over Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, or is it the establishment pick that beat the New Hollywood revolution?

Its footprint

'They call me MISTER Tibbs!' is one of the most quoted lines in movie history (AFI-ranked, and literally the title of the 1970 sequel), and the moment Tibbs returns Endicott's slap — 'the slap heard round the world' — is still cited as a landmark of American cinema.

Where it stands

A fixture of the classic-Hollywood canon and the 1967 conversation — the 'you must have seen this' entry in any Poitier or Best Picture rundown.

★ Did you know? Sidney Poitier refused to shoot in the Deep South after being threatened by Klansmen on an earlier trip to Mississippi, so this Mississippi-set story was filmed mostly in Sparta, Illinois — and it went on to win Best Picture at the 1968 Oscars ceremony that was postponed two days following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.