Analysis Of Sidney Poitier In The Heat Of The Night

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Recommended: Depiction of blacks in films

Justin Choe
ENG 380
Dr. Holmes
May 27, 2014
Sidney Poitier & In the Heat of the Night

In the Heat of the Night is a film starring Sidney Poitier as an African-American homicide expert, who assists white southern lawman, Chief Gillespie in Sparta, Mississippi on investigating a murder of a white businessman. Along the ways, Poitier’s character is met with racism and bigotry left and right in which he endures with his economic and social intelligence. His role in this movie as well as several others, can be categorized as a biracial “buddy film” which were immensely successful in Hollywood and made Poitier very well known, but how effective is this form of film in breaking color barriers and challenging society’s stereotypical conventions? How did mainstream audience at that time react to a portrayal of a black man that is much more intelligent and economically superior than a white man, Gillespie? These stereotypes are worth exploring. Poitier received numerous accolades for his work but also received much criticism for various reasons and a deeper look into the roots of these criticisms answer such questions.
Cinema had a history of being “selfish” with the use of the black actor and as Guerrero states in Framing Blackness, blacks were rarely cast as complex characters and used as the problem in which the white man would “fix”. This characterized the mainstream expectations in film then and into Poitier’s emergence into Hollywood. With Poitier however, he worked alongside those directors in Hollywood who looked down upon racism and shared the same views as he, working together to push the political message of racial integration both within the films and off the screen. With the mainstream audience being that characterized by...

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Although the concept of historical and non-historical has dominated studies of Black representation, if stereotypes are used in certain ways, they can serve different purposes, in which can be historical. Stereotypes indeed have harmful effects to subjects, but analysis on how these stereotypes are used, especially in Poitier’s films, allow more understanding by scholars and other filmmakers. In In the Heat of the Night, it provides many examples of stereotypes that can be examined in such way. Poitier may be critiqued as an individual but there is no question that the films he is a part of and the stereotypical representations he is surrounded by behind the camera can serve as a reflection of the shifting historical values, evolving civil rights movement, and personal morality that serve to be progressive anecdotes of the civil rights movement as a whole.

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