In the Heat of the Night (1967): The Hands of Virgil Tibbs

Everything was going so well in Sparta, Mississippi. A factory had just been built. Business was booming, and new jobs were being created. The factory’s owner was murdered, but the police had the situation under control. The fact that the town was called Sparta in the first place told you everything you needed to know about the police themselves: they dispatched justice quickly, asked questions later, showed no mercy, paid no attention to the advice of outsiders.

All of that changed one hot summer night, when a stranger entered town and meddled in their affairs. He began touching everything. Their evidence. Their witnesses. Their suspects. And the police were appalled—because his hands were of a different color than theirs.

That’s one way of interpreting Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967), one of those great American classics which nobody ever forgets. Winner of the 1967 Academy Award for Best Picture, it is sometimes dismissed as a film that won the Oscar out of sheer political correctness, but far too many moviegoers in recent years have overlooked the significant accomplishments of the movie Jewison actually made. The first two times I saw In the Heat of the Night, I admired it as an entertaining but seemingly conventional murder story. A third viewing enlightened me to what the film really was: an aesthetic portrait of a black cop’s gradual deconstruction of a white justice system. When Jewison told Senator Robert Kennedy about the project at a New Year’s Eve party in Sun Valley, Idaho, the former U.S. Attorney General was astonished. “It’s very important, Norman, that you make this movie,” Kennedy advised him. “The time is right for a movie like this. Timing is everything—in politics, in art, and in life itself.”

In the Heat of the Night works so well, I think, because Jewison is one of those special directors with a talent for determining the creative differences in a narrative. The film’s mostly-white cast (Rod Steiger, Warren Oates, Lee Grant, Larry Gates, Scott Wilson, Anthony James) is broken by the commanding entrance of Sidney Poitier, who steps off a train in the film’s opening scene and leaves behind a shadow so dark it obscures a puppy trailing curiously outside the train station’s screen door. One of the pleasures of In the Heat of the Night is in watching as Poitier’s presence slowly begins to throw off the film’s white supporting characters, one-by-one. Jewison’s camera is primarily in love with Poitier’s black hands, which serve multiple purposes in the film—whether they’re inspecting a white corpse, consoling the white hands of a witness, examining the white hands of a suspect or returning the blows of a man’s white hand with a counterblow to that man’s white face.

If this sounds like a far-fetched interpretation, consider one of the first scenes in the film. The police have found the dead body of Colbert, the factory owner from Chicago whose murder will probably cause an upset in the town’s economy (“He came all this way to build a factory, make something out of this town, before they got him,” mutters an undertaker). The undertakers are alarmed, then, when Virgil Tibbs (Poitier) walks in out of nowhere to inspect the body for himself, and Jewison’s camera closes in on Poitier’s hands as they slowly move up and down the dead white flesh, in Tibbs’ attempt to determine Colbert’s time of death. From this point onwards, Jewison signifies the crucial direction in which the film is headed: that the delivery of justice for a white man’s death now rests in a black man’s hands.

Virgil Tibbs is a police officer from Philadelphia. He has come to Sparta to visit his mother, and is not a happy camper when the Sparta police pounce on him just hours after Colbert’s murder; with his black skin, well-dressed appearance and wallet chock-full of money, he sticks out like a sore thumb in town, and that’s all it takes for the Sparta police to arrest him as a suspect. The first time Tibbs meets Gillespie (Rod Steiger), Sparta’s burly old police chief, Gillespie is first amused, then annoyed, then embarrassed, then outraged by Tibbs’ presence. Amused that a well-dressed black man appears to have murdered Colbert. Annoyed that Tibbs professes ignorance when Gillespie excitedly asks him, "What'd ya hit him with?" Embarrassed when Tibbs reveals he’s a cop from Philly. Outraged when Tibbs proudly declares that he makes “a hundred and sixty-two dollars and thirty-nine cents per week.” It is only after Tibbs makes a phone call to his supervisor in Philly that Gillespie considers, hey: why not let Tibbs stay in town and help them solve the case?

Here, then, is the movie’s second running theme: the fluctuations in mood and decision-making of the Gillespie character, who doesn’t want a black man helping him track down Colbert’s killer but doesn’t really have much of a choice. Whenever Gillespie enlists the help of Tibbs, he makes progress; when he doesn’t, he makes none. It is Gillespie who allows Tibbs to inspect Colbert’s corpse, and it is Gillespie who allows Tibbs to question Endicott (Larry Gates), who would rather see blacks working as fieldhands out on his plantation than listen to one interrogate him in his own greenhouse. But Gillespie also wants to hurry up and be done with the case, and, thus, acts irrationally whenever Tibbs is quick to invalidate his evidence. When Tibbs, for example, proves that Harvey (Scott Wilson) is innocent, Gillespie throws Tibbs in jail; and when Tibbs proves that Officer Sam (Warren Oates) is innocent, Gillespie angrily orders Tibbs to take the next train back to Philly. In a town where the air conditioner never works and everybody drinks Coca-Cola to stay cool, Gillespie has no patience for Tibbs and his process of logic and reason.

The town itself (actually, Sparta, Illinois) serves as an exhilarating backdrop for the Tibbs/Gillespie conflict at the center of story, and Jewison and his cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, take advantage of the crisp Southern setting. In the daytime, their camera zooms in on convicts running across high suspension bridges while Hal Ashby’s editing allows them to transition to POV shots of dogs charging through the grass down below. At night, they use optical close-ups of the taillights of Officer Sam’s police car to signal the danger that lies ahead. Aided by a jazzy Quincy Jones score, which boasts a now-famous title song by Ray Charles, their technical contributions help to enhance the conflict between Tibbs and Gillespie, which seems to grow worse and worse with each passing day.

They don’t like each other, clearly. Jewison boldly suggests that they both harbor prejudices. Gillespie may not be a full-fledged racist—he’s on good terms with a black mechanic (Khalil Bezaleel) who resides on the outskirts of town—but he nevertheless takes offense at the prospect of Tibbs, this “nigger boy from Philadelphia,” telling him how to do his job. Tibbs, during his phone call to his supervisor, insists, “No sir, I’m not prejudiced,” but later salivates over the prospect of showing every white man in Sparta just how stupid they are (“You wanna know something, Virgil?” hints Gillespie, “I don’t think you can let an opportunity like that pass by!”). Both men are egged on by their superiors—Tibbs by his supervisor, Gillespie by Sparta’s mayor (William Schallert). But the supervisor in Philly probably just wants Tibbs to play the role of the good Negro archetype; and the mayor of Sparta later wonders why Gillespie doesn’t shoot Tibbs in “self-defense” after Tibbs starts getting on the townspeople’s bad side.

Not a single major player in the movie is without prejudice, either, as demonstrated in the movie’s best-remembered scene, in which Tibbs and Gillespie come to question Endicott, the bigoted plantation owner. Endicott thinks it will be easy to handle Tibbs; he lives by a code in which black people, like orchids, “need care, and feeding, and cultivating—and that takes time.” Tibbs remains cool, continues with his line of questioning, and that’s when Endicott snaps. You cannot call yourself a knowledgeable moviegoer and not be familiar with that famous moment when Endicott walks up to Tibbs and slaps him across the face—and Tibbs smacks him right back.

If you have to, look at this scene twice. Notice the differing ways in which characters in the background react to the two consecutive slaps. Gillespie shows minimal alarm at Endicott’s slap, and even greater alarm at Tibbs’ slap; never before has he ever seen a black man strike a white man. Endicott’s colored butler Henry (Jester Hairston), meanwhile, can be seen in the background reacting with utter horror at Endicott’s slap; he’s obviously seen that kind of bigoted mistreatment on the plantation before. We don’t get to see Henry’s immediate reaction to Tibbs’ counterblow, but once Tibbs and Gillespie are out of the greenhouse, here’s what we do see: Henry shaking his head, disapprovingly, at the pathetic Endicott, who is left sobbing over his orchids.

This scene alone is enough to earn the movie its place in the history of American cinema. If Endicott has charged that it “takes time” for blacks to be cared for, fed and cultivated, then Virgil Tibbs’ slap—a slap heard all around the world in 1967—effectively fast-forwarded through that “time”. We saw a black kid beat Steve McQueen at penny-pitching in Jewison’s The Cincinnati Kid (1965), and now here was Jewison allowing a black man to strike a white man across the face. It was as if Jewison had ripped ten, twenty or maybe a hundred pages out of American cinema’s future, thus eliminating the convention of the loyal, obedient black character that would have plagued movies for the next decade. No: not this time. You couldn’t have later moments in cinema like Mookie’s destruction of the pizza parlor, in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), if Poitier’s assault on the plantation owner had not helped paved the way for it.

Certainly the rest of the movie holds up well. Poitier and Steiger are flanked by an impressive supporting cast, with each character afflicted in one way or the next by Virgil Tibbs’ interference in their private affairs. Observe Lee Grant as Colbert’s wife, nearly panicking over her husband’s death before Tibbs clasps her hand in his, in a quiet maneuver to ease her pain. Or Warren Oates as Sam, embarrassed to admit to Tibbs that he’s a Peeping Tom. Or Scott Wilson as Harvey, loudly distrustful of Tibbs until Tibbs silences him with his index finger, assuring him that he’s on his side. Or Quentin Dean as Delores, the buxom babe who delivers a speech about sex on gravestones in Tibbs’ presence. Or Beah Richards as Mama Caleba, the black abortionist to whom Tibbs warns, “There’s white time in jail and there’s colored time in jail—the worst kind of time you can do is colored time.” Or Anthony James as Ralph, the diner owner who fiddles with a rubber band, hides lemon meringue pies from his customers and dances to imaginary songs like “Fowl Owl on the Prowl” when no one’s around. He’s the bad guy.

And then, of course, there’s Gillespie, played by Steiger in a towering, Academy-Award winning performance. Steiger had worked with great filmmakers before (Fred Zinnemann on Oklahoma!; Elia Kazan on On the Waterfront; Samuel Fuller on Run of the Arrow; Sidney Lumet on The Pawnbroker; David Lean on Doctor Zhivago), but his work with Jewison on In the Heat of the Night would spawn a lasting friendship that led to two more collaborations, on F.I.S.T. (1976) and on The Hurricane (1999). Here, he plays Gillespie as a man with credible authority but a dismal social life, loathed by the townspeople, ostracized by his deputies. It isn’t until 50 minutes into the film when he actually manages to get Tibbs to smile, when he threatens to “horsewhip” Tibbs and Tibbs responds with a burst of laughter: Gillespie’s threats remind him of his own father. Steiger has a great scene in which he invites Poitier over to his house, and the two men have a revealing moment in which Gillespie admits he’s a miserable man, and asks Tibbs if he’s got a girl. “Don’t you just get… a little lonely?” Gillespie asks, only to be insulted by Tibbs’ sincere reply: “No lonelier than you.”

The final scene is the only scene in the movie that doesn’t really work. Tibbs and Gillespie don’t get to have the profound moment of reconciliation they should have had, and all Jewison and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant can muster up is a last-minute handshake between the two men, with Gillespie wishing that Tibbs “take care.” It’s a curiously emotionless moment. Even though the movie has already broken a lot of significant ground up to this point, an emotionally-powerful ending would have been icing on the cake. We get, instead, a thankless, insignificant parting.

Such an ending may have something to do with the movie’s unpopularity amongst moviegoers who don’t think it deserved to win so many Oscars. Looking back, 1967 was, indeed, a strong year for cinema, and many feel—not without good reason—that either Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde or Mike Nichols’ The Graduate should have walked off with the top prize instead. Even something like Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood, which wasn’t even nominated, looks like a better movie today.

So maybe, on an emotional level, In the Heat of the Night lacks the power of those aforementioned films. On an analytical level, however, it can be argued that Jewison’s film holds a candle to them. Watching the movie, we are, essentially, watching a color barrier being smashed to pieces before our very eyes. Whether Poitier is running his hands across a dead white corpse, or the cushions of a car, or the stems of a fern twig which he promptly twirls in front of the camera lens, he’s doing something that would have been unheard of in the 30’s, 40’s or 50’s: he’s permeating an entire town with his touch. For the first time ever in an American movie, a black actor was taking control in a story about the South.

“They call me MISTER Tibbs!” Poitier roars, in that famous shouting match with Steiger. And he means it. Until he came to town, everybody thought they knew how to handle things. But Sparta, Mississippi doesn’t know Virgil Tibbs.

Behold A Pale Horse (1964)

There is an unforgettable moment in Behold A Pale Horse when Fred Zinnemann brings two of Hollywood’s greatest action stars together at last, in an unforgettable sequence of unrelenting tension. We see Omar Sharif, dressed in a black priest’s robe, walking peacefully down a road in the French countryside when a car suddenly pulls up beside him, and Gregory Peck steps out. Angry and impatient, he grabs Sharif by the arm.

“Get in, priest!” he growls.

“Beg your pardon?” Sharif asks, confused.

“I said GET IN, PRIEST!” Peck roars.

He shoves Sharif into the car with two other people, interrogates him, mocks him and—at one unexpected moment—smacks him hard across the face. Up until now, we haven't been too involved in the movie. But now Peck and Sharif have finally been brought together, and suddenly we're drawn in.

A $3.9 million movie headed by a strong director with an impeccable cast, Behold A Pale Horse was a notorious box office flop in the summer of 1964, grossing a mere $900,000 and embarrassing Columbia Pictures’ reputation in international cinemas overseas. The movie, a political thriller about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, was made at a time when Franco was still in power in Spain; the Spanish government was reportedly so offended by the film’s subject matter that Columbia was even forced to sell its Spanish distribution business. Advertised as a reunion between Peck and Anthony Quinn after The Guns of Navarone (1961), and also as a reunion between Quinn and Sharif after Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Behold A Pale Horse promised audiences an action-packed Hollywood vehicle and gave them, instead, a moody, meditative morality play.

If Behold A Pale Horse has been all but forgotten today, it’s easy to see why. Shortly before his death in 1997, Fred Zinnemann admitted, “The film didn’t really come together… it was interesting, but it did not really feel right except in a few spots.” Zinnemann may have been ruminating over the film’s disappointing finale, in which Peck—portraying an aging Spanish assassin—walks out to San Martin for a final showdown with Anthony Quinn, who plays a military police captain. We expect Peck to kill Quinn at the end. Instead, Peck wastes his ammo on a former friend—a “traitor”—and dies in a hail of bullets, while Quinn walks off scot-free.

The movie's ending was not a happy one, but that's not the only reason why audiences didn't take a liking to it. The ending was bad for a variety of reasons. It offered no catharsis. It failed to deliver on the promise of the film's earlier, greater sequences. Most importantly, the dying actions of the protagonist were not in the least sympathetic. The Day of Jackal (1973), arguably Zinnemann's richest masterpiece, is another film that ends with the hero getting killed immediately after failing his mission, but at least in that film the hero has an excuse: he simply misses his target. The same cannot be said for Behold A Pale Horse, in which the hero fails not because of bad aiming, but because of his own stupidity; it doesn't make for very exciting cinema, nor does it do much in the way of inspiring intelligent critical perspectives. The film’s central question (why doesn’t Peck shoot Quinn at the end?) is not a very compelling one.

Watching Behold A Pale Horse today, I’ve found that the most compelling aspect of the film is the onscreen relationship between Peck and Sharif, both of whom are, in a sense, playing quintessential Zinnemann-type heroes in the film. Peck’s character, the Spanish bandit Manuel Artiguez, is a lone gunman plagued with feelings of self-doubt, much like Robert Ryan’s Joe Parkson in Act of Violence (1949) and Gary Cooper’s Will Kane in High Noon (1952). Sharif’s character, an innocent young priest named Father Francisco, is torn between following the customs of his church and doing what is right for his country. He might as well be a cousin to Audrey Hepburn’s Sister Luke in The Nun’s Story (1959). Whenever Peck and Sharif are onscreen, playing Artiguez and Francisco, respectively, they succeed in delivering material that is pure Fred Zinnemann. The other characters in the story—the ones played by Anthony Quinn, Marietto Angeletti, Paolo Stoppa and Raymond Pellegrin—are not nearly as interesting: they are bland, uninspired and two-dimensional, and they have no business being in a Zinnemann film.

Zinnemann’s decision to cast Gregory Peck as Artiguez (a role originally meant for Quinn) caused bitter sniping amongst critics at the time. They didn’t take too kindly to seeing Peck cast against type as a crotchety old Spanish mercenary. Richard Schickel complained in Life magazine, “What is needed is the internal stimulus of a powerful performance from Artiguez… what we have instead is gentle, attractive, intelligent Gregory Peck, an actor who sometimes smolders but is quite incapable of bursting into angry flame.”

It is possible that critics like Schickel were too accustomed to Peck’s image as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) to imagine him playing tougher characters by that point in his career. While Peck might not have been the right ethnicity for Artiguez (the character was based on a real-life anti-Franco rebel named "Zapater"), he got everything else nailed down perfectly about the character: his laziness, his grumpiness, his method of viciously pulverizing all those who lie to him or stand in his way. Zinnemann, who in his autobiography praised Peck as having turned in a “riveting performance," was right to cast him.

Peck’s performance in the film is matched by the equally riveting performance of Omar Sharif, whom Zinnemann had met through David Lean at a screening of Lawrence of Arabia. Zinnemann thought Sharif was a “terrific” actor with “an enormous capability.” Many of the best scenes in Behold A Pale Horse depict Sharif, as Father Francisco, reflecting quietly on individual circumstances, choosing his words carefully and responding to arguments with effective counterarguments. Consider the scene in which Captain Vinolas (Anthony Quinn) captures Artiguez’ ailing mother (Mildred Dunnock), and then asks Francisco—who witnessed her death—to reveal her dying words to the police. Francisco refuses, warning Vinolas, “If you try to force me to tell you something my vows forbid me to tell, then you are also desecrating the church.” Or look at the scenes in which Francisco is accidentally separated from his party of priests during a trip to Pau, as he finds himself wandering helplessly in the menacing streets all around the French underworld. In each of these scenes, Sharif’s panic and desperation are essential in order for the audience to identify with him.

Both Artiguez and Francisco are suffering an unbearable crisis of conscience. Artiguez is afraid he’s grown too old to kill Vinolas. Francisco wants to warn Artiguez of the trap Vinolas is setting up for him in San Martin, but isn’t sure if doing so would violate the doctrines of his church. Zinnemann first attempts to bring the two characters together when Francisco stops by Artiguez’ apartment to deliver a letter, which—for complicated reasons—finds itself flushed down a toilet. Normally the delivery of a letter in a Zinnemann film means bad news: think the opening sequences of High Noon or A Man for All Seasons (1966). When Artiguez and Francisco finally do meet, however, it results in the film’s single-greatest sequence, in which they sit across from each other in Artiguez’ darkened apartment, breaking bread and exchanging religious disagreements. When Francisco, for example, brings up the subject of a brain-damaged priest (Jean-Paul Moulinot) who may have been assaulted by Artiguez during a bank robbery, Artiguez is unsympathetic: “Priests should stay out of banks!” A discussion about a neighborhood in Lorca, however, leads to smiles, a toast over wine and an area of mutual understanding.

Unfortunately, when Zinnemann is left with the other characters, he finds less dramatic ammunition. The character of Paco, a 10-year old boy who asks Artiguez to kill Vinolas for executing his father, is admirably portrayed by Marietto Angeletti, but harbors a burning desire for vengeance that he is too young to fully understand. The occasional father-son type rapport between Peck and Angletti, while amusing, has none of the depth that we got between Montgomery Clift and 9-year old Ivan Jandl in Zinnemann’s The Search (1948). Both Paolo Stoppa, as the bandit Pedro, and Raymond Pellegrin, as Carlos—Artiguez’ best friend who is secretly Vinolas’ mole—are left with thankless parts.

But the most disappointing character is far and away Anthony Quinn’s Captain Vinolas, a surprisingly boring villain. We see him romancing a mistress and lighting candles asking God to help him slay Artiguez, but that’s it as far as his psychological troubles go. Zinnemann also fails to draw striking parallels between Vinolas and Artiguez. You’d think Quinn and Peck would have a lot in common, but the most Zinnemann can do is make them both out to be incredibly salty, lecherous men who can’t seem to resist checking out a fine woman’s ass.

To be sure, it sounds like everyone had a lot of fun making the film. Anthony Quinn would often bring his newborn son onto the set to watch bull fights; Zinnemann described Quinn as "colorful", “cooperative”, “professional” and “very entertaining" on the set. Omar Sharif was thoroughly impressed with Zinnemann’s directorial technique, raving in the New York Herald Tribune about how he believed the director had “a marvelous rapport” with his actors (Sharif would later dismiss Behold A Pale Horse as one of many “bad movies by good directors” he made late in his career, long before his excellent comeback in 2003's Monsieur Ibrahim). Gregory Peck’s biographer, Gary Fishgall, reports that the actor considered the overall shoot to be “a marvelous experience”; he was allegedly so impressed with Zinnemann’s technique that he believed it to exceed even that of Hitchcock.

The film’s technical aspects have aged nicely. The score by Maurice Jarre, while not one of the composer’s most memorable efforts, makes chilling use of drums and isolated guitar chords. The black-and-white cinematography looks beautiful today, although Zinnemann hated working with DP Jean Badal, admitting, "On occasion, I had wish-dreams about putting a match to his beard." The film's story was adapted by J.P. Miller (scribe of Days and Wine and Roses) from the book Killing A Mouse On Sunday by the great Emeric Pressburger, although Zinnemann, fearing the title sounded too Disney-like, had it changed. The current title of the film, taken from the Book of Revelation, is just as misleading, although perhaps it makes for a more appropriate title for a political thriller.

And yet, despite the solid craftsmanship of the film, one thing has always kept Behold A Pale Horse from going down in history as the masterpiece it should have been: that damned ending. It stops the movie from taking off around the tracks, just when it’s gaining momentum.

Oh, it starts out well. Artiguez sneaks into San Martin, climbs up a rooftop, aims his sniper rifle and locates Vinolas in his sights. Then he takes aim… only to shoot Carlos instead. It’s a truly crummy anticlimax—although Zinnemann, at the time, went to great pains to defend it. “In my opinion,” he told reporters, “Manuel, when faced with the choice of killing a lifelong enemy or somebody who he considers a traitor, would kill the traitor. Perhaps in some way his enemy is an honorable adversary, but a traitor is like vermin.”

A valid defense, but Zinnemann ignored the central problem behind Artiguez’ decision: how selfish it is. By refusing to eliminate a totalitarian Spanish dictator, Artiguez is not only doing Vinolas a favor—he’s depriving the people of Spain of the democracy they won’t be getting for several more decades. His decision to shoot Carlos, instead of Vinolas, feels more inspired by stupidity than anything else.

One striking detail of the ending that is often overlooked, however, comes in the seconds just before Artiguez dies in a hail of bullets on a hospital staircase. As Zinnemann’s camera spins faster and faster around the hospital ward, the last image that pops into Artiguez’ head is the memory of young Paco kicking a soccer ball into the air. It seems like a random image, at first, but maybe it’s reminding Artiguez of a time when he was younger, and was happier—before he devoted himself to a life of crime.

In a sense, the movie is Zinnemann's most potent description of a man whose entire life has ended in failure. Manuel Artiguez had this one chance to eliminate a lifelong enemy, and he blew it. He had a grand opportunity to lead his country one step closer towards freedom, and he threw it away. Life as a bandit, it seems, has condemned him to one sorry disappointment after another. Consider that scene between him and Father Francisco, in Artiguez' darkened apartment. The young priest can do nothing more except stare in amazement at this tired, pathetic old man. “Go ahead, priest,” Artiguez raves, “tell me I’m a bandit!” And Father Francisco has a simple, five-word answer for him: “You know what you are.”

The Thin Red Line (1998): Nature's Cruel

Some people are born on the wrong side of war. They were once like you and me: happy, nonviolent individuals who thought that God was on their side. Then, one day, a military knocked on their doors, took them away from home and threw them into the line of fire—to fight for a cause they didn’t believe in. Although Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) is told primarily from the points of view of soldiers on the “right” side of war, there is one scene where we listen to the words of an enemy Japanese soldier—crushed beneath a mound of rubble—who speaks directly to the audience in a voice beyond the grave. “Do you imagine your sufferings will be less because you loved goodness?” he asks us. “Truth?”

Nature, you see, has a wicked way of determining who will have the opportunity to fight for truth and justice in war, and who will not. The Japanese soldier didn’t choose to be born on the side that lost the war; Nature chose for him. And we, as Americans, were fortunate enough to be on the winning side of the war because of sheer, dumb luck. This is the central philosophy at the heart of The Thin Red Line: that wars are won by soldiers who just so happened to be there at the right place at the right time. Nature selects winners and losers, and we have no say over the matter. It’s all processed by default. Consider another moment in the film, in which a soldier looks up curiously at a mammoth-sized jungle leaf, opens his canteen, and pours water down the leaf’s edges to see where the droplets will fall. The way he pours water onto that leaf, you’d almost get the impression he’s testing out his own brand of chaos theory.

Ever since its release in 1998, The Thin Red Line has worked wonders, captivating not only those who fondly remembered Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) but also a whole new generation of moviegoers, those of whom are being introduced to the world of Terrence Malick for the very first time. Malick’s film is based on a 1962 novel by James Jones, a book I once attempted but never finished; Jones’ prose struck me as uninspired and pedestrian, and I slowly began to realize that it actually had very little in common with the Malick film. The Jones book, which had been “cheerfully dedicated to these greatest and most heroic of all human endeavors, WAR and WARFARE”, was vehemently antiwar; the Malick film is more insightful, and open to all kinds of arguments. Critic Matt Zoller Seitz has called it “the greatest antiwar movie ever made—not in the sense that it is against war as a practice, but that it is an anti-War Movie.”

Though Malick retained some elements from Jones—he screened Fred Zinnemann’s film version of From Here to Eternity (1953) for the cast and crew (which may explain why Tim Zinnemann, the son of the aforementioned director, is thanked in the end credits of Malick’s film)—the truth is that the worldviews behind The Thin Red Line have more to do with Malick’s experience as a philosophy major than with Jones’ own personal experiences in WWII (the story’s title comes from Kipling, who once said, “It’s ‘Thin Red Line’ of ‘eros’ when the drums begin to roll”). The film seeks to illustrate the culture clashes between two kinds of individuals in wartime: realists and romantics. To do this, Malick tells three parallel stories. One has Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) being chastised by Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) because he is always going AWOL. Another has Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) being hounded by Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) for caring more about the lives of his men than the importance of his mission. And yet another story has Private Bell (Ben Chaplin) writing letters of love to his wife (Miranda Otto) back home, unaware that she no longer takes his soliloquies very seriously.

What Malick illustrates with these three parallel stories is a universal truth: that war is no place for a dreamer. Both the realists and the romantics in the film are burdened by their decisions, but ultimately the romantics are the ones who pay a heavier price. Romantics see too much beauty in wartime; they are blindsided to the actual horrors at hand, and their awareness to these realities often comes at a moment that is too little and too late.

Take the subplot involving Private Bell and his wife, for instance. Bell gave up his career as a ranking officer for his wife, and writes back to her, “I want to stay changeless for you.” His lovestruck devotion to her, he claims, helps him to stay alive. But his wife is finally granted the upper hand: tormented by sexual frustration, she runs off with an Air Force captain and sends Bell a request for a divorce. She recognizes her own human weaknesses, and yet Nature ensures that she act on impulse: “I can’t stop myself,” she writes back. Nature has dictated that, realistically, a wife can only stay celibate for her husband for so long.

The conflict between Captain Staros and Captain Tall is even more troublesome. Staros has a deep bond with his men, puts them ahead of his mission and wishes them luck in Greek. Tall, perhaps envious of Staros’ bilingual abilities, touts that he’s enamored with Homer and Greek history, even though he is clearly not; he seems to identify more with the Roman Empire, as one of his own self-doubting voiceovers (“The closer you are to Caesar, the greater the fear”) helpfully illustrates. But in the middle of fierce combat, Nature dictates that no matter which of the two men is smarter, the one who should ultimately prevail is the one who’s not afraid to run away from a fight. And Staros, the guy who tearfully prays over candlelight for heavenly help from above, is certainly not that kind of soldier; as Tall tells Staros to his face, he’s “too soft-hearted” and “not tough-fibered enough.” It doesn’t matter if Tall doesn’t know how it feels to have a comrade die in his arms. Tall, at the very least, understands that the fight must go on—even if lives are lost—and that Nature wouldn’t have it any other way. “Look at this jungle,” he says. “Look at those vines, the way they twine around the trees, swallowing everything. Nature’s cruel, Staros.”

Perhaps most complex of all is the relationship between Private Witt and Sergeant Welsh, this time because the realist himself is captivated with the romantic, and admits it. Welsh cynically believes that “we’re in a world that’s blowing itself to hell as fast as everybody can arrange it” and that the best thing anyone can do is “look out for himself.” At the same time, he admires Witt’s incredible optimism in the face of death: “You’re like a magician to me,” he confesses. The fact is, however, that Witt, a pacifist, is plagued with far greater difficulties than Welsh. Witt has gone into the war seeking immortality, and is disappointed not only because he never finds it, but because even the local Melanesian children are said to “always fight”. The conclusion Witt finally draws is that he can only achieve immortality through death, kind of like the one his mother had: peaceful, quiet, calm. But Nature dictates that Witt should instead die a bloody death at the other end of a Japanese rifle; an “immortal” death cannot be achieved in a war as destructive as this one. “Where’s your spark now?” Welsh sneers over Witt’s grave. He’s not proud to be a realist, but at least his cynicism helped him survive the war.

And that’s what war is, really. It’s full of betrayals, back-stabbings and barbarians on either side of the battlegrounds. As the soldiers in The Thin Red Line move across those tall, green fields, under an “eos rotodoctolos — rosy-fingered dawn”, Malick catches individual moments of characters who must think fast and—sometimes—make ruthless decisions in order to survive. Storm (John C. Reilly) survives because he no longer feels any pity for the dead. Doll (Dash Mihok) promises to the dying Keck (Woody Harrelson) that he’ll write home to his wife, but then goes back on that promise; he’s not going to sacrifice his machismo by letting his heart bleed for some dead guy’s gal. Ash (Thomas Jane) drops out of battle due to a busted leg, and retreats happily on the other side of the island. Not so lucky are others like the disoriented McCron (John Savage), who waves a handful of grass at his fellow men and cries, “That’s what you are. That’s all there is for us. That’s us—that’s us!” Originally, I assumed that Malick might have cast Savage in this part because of his electrifying performance as a crippled veteran in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978). A quick glance at the actor's online bio reveals a more personal reason: Savage's own father fought at Guadalcanal.

Some of Malick’s other decisions with the cast members are strange. A last-minute cameo by George Clooney has always felt arbitrary: apparently, 20th Century Fox had forced it down Malick’s throat in order to boost the film’s struggling publicity campaign. Even stranger is Malick’s decision to give most of the film’s voiceover narration to the decidedly minor character of Train (John Dee Smith), who orates the film’s opening monologue (“What’s this war in the heart of nature?”) as well as the final monologue (“…all things shining”). Giving the narration to Train, of all characters, has never made much sense to me; I can’t help but wonder how much more effective the film's narration would be if it had been given to a more recognizable minor character like Fife (Adrien Brody), or Gaff (John Cusack), or even Savage’s McCron. A compelling defense has been offered by critic David Sterritt, whose Criterion essay on the film argues that Malick “wants to underscore the fact that human beings are bathed in language at every moment, and that language may ultimately be the best, most lasting facet of human experience, able to glide and soar even when the bodies associated with it are dying and decaying in killing fields below.”

Now we come to the matter of the competing war films. Much like the High Noon/Rio Bravo debate, there has always been a temptation amongst cinema-literate fanboys to compare Malick’s approach with The Thin Red Line to Steven Spielberg’s approach with Saving Private Ryan, in a rather futile attempt to determine which of the two films is better. One of the most absurd arguments thrown around by critics and fans is that Malick’s film is supposedly designed for hippies and that Spielberg’s film is supposedly designed for lovers of war. This is the sort of opinion generated by partisans who refuse to go into both films with an open mind. One little known fact is that Malick and Spielberg actually complimented each other during the summer of ‘98, blessing each other’s productions with war-oriented props. In a commentary track on The Thin Red Line's new Criterion DVD, Jack Fisk, Grant Hill and John Toll all reveal that Malick sent Spielberg a Japanese battle flag during production; Spielberg then returned the favor by affectionately sending Malick a crew jacket.

The humorous aspect about all of this is that Spielberg is one of the few filmmakers alive who can actually claim to have made contact with the elusive Malick, and yet there was no tension between the two directors. Odd, considering that they wound up competing against each other for Best Director at the Academy Awards the following year. In actuality, the two films aren't that much different in perspective. Both The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan have aged gloriously; rather than waste time determining which of the two films is better, moviegoers should, instead, examine how closely-related they are, in worldview and in theory.

Both Malick and Spielberg recognize that Word War II was a necessary conflict, but that it was also skewed, difficult and ugly. Both films are quick to illustrate that the war reduced men to dogs—to creatures that were incapable of fully comprehending the horrors around them. The one distinctive difference between the two films lies in their narrative, aesthetic approaches, arguably predetermined by their settings and their subjects.

On Spielberg’s side of the globe, in Normandy, men have raped, pillaged and torn up Nature, and have taken the rules of war into their own hands. On Malick’s side of the globe, in Guadalcanal, Nature is still the dominant factor in war. The birds are alive, the bats are alive, and the Earth swallows the soldiers up whole.