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

Everything was going so well in Sparta, Mississippi. A new factory had been built. Business was booming, and new jobs were being created. The factory’s owner got murdered, but the police had the whole 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 actually is: 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) suddenly walks in 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 ("My father used to say that to me... even did, once or twice"). 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.

Agnes of God (1985)

Norman Jewison’s Agnes of God (1985) was a profound work of bravery in the religiously-obsessed Hollywood of the 1980’s. The director of The Cincinnati Kid, In the Heat of the Night and A Soldier’s Story had alarmed studio executives when he came to Columbia Pictures in 1985 with a proposal for his next film: an adaptation of a Broadway play about a murderous nun. It was not the first time he had asked to adapt a religiously-themed play to the big screen; his Fiddler on the Roof (1971) was a masterfully-directed story about a threatened Jewish family. But Jewison, a Catholic, had not yet made a successful film with similar insights into Christianity. With Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) he had achieved a musical that was glossy and exuberant, but also astonishingly banal and impersonal—given the director’s Catholic roots. Agnes of God allowed Jewison to go back and try again.

In his 2005 autobiography, This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me, Jewison devoted individual chapters to each of the films he made in his 40-year career, carefully explaining how they were made and how he was able to get studio executives to greenlight them. It was particularly challenging for him to convince Columbia president Guy McElwaine to greenlight a project as fundamentally disturbing as Agnes of God: where was the dramatic appeal? Could the story be as provocative on the big screen as it was on the stage? What could audiences possibly get out of the experience? Adamant that he could film a successful adaptation of the play, Jewison responded that the film would have the potential to “test our ability to believe in miracles.” That did the trick.

Other great filmmakers had made fantastic pictures about nuns before, particularly Michael Powell with Black Narcissus (1947) and Fred Zinnemann with The Nun’s Story (1959). But as Jewison explains in his autobiography, he had another plan entirely in developing an approach to the subject matter. “I think most people,” the director wrote, “regardless of their religion, regardless of logic, want to believe in something outside of their daily lives. Outside of themselves. Agnes of God gave me the opportunity to explore that timeless human conflict between believing what we can see, and believing what we can’t see or experience. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that the world is in dire need of angels.”

Nevertheless, Jewison realized that John Pielmeier’s play, which had starred Geraldine Page and Elizabeth Ashley on Broadway, would require a major do-over if it was going to make a successful transition to the screen. To do this, Jewison decided to recast the whole show: Ashley was replaced with Jane Fonda, and Page was replaced with Anne Bancroft—after Bancroft convinced that Jewison that she was no longer a sexy Mrs. Robinson and was now capable of playing older, harder characters. And Jewison armed himself with industry professionals: Pielmeier, whose screenplay was adapted from his own play; Georges Delarue, who composed an eerie musical score; and Bergman veteran Sven Nykvist, whose cinematography sets up the mysterious visual atmosphere almost immediately, as the movie opens with a shot of a chapel sitting peacefully out in the woodsy Canadian distance. In a haunting title sequence, a group of nuns roam around a crucifix, praying softly—before the lights go out and a scream is heard in the night. Nuns run frantically up stairs, a door is burst open, and there is a brief glimpse of someone’s hands wrapped in a bedsheet. Covered in blood.

A serious crime has been committed. One of the nuns, Sister Agnes (Meg Tilly), has strangled a newborn baby and has stuffed it into a wastebasket. The church calls for justice, Sister Agnes won’t talk, and Dr. Livingston (Jane Fonda), a psychiatrist, is appointed by the court to investigate. At first she protests, but the court is insistent: “They want a woman.” Nobody wants the case to go to trial or for Sister Agnes to go to jail, so Livingston is given a simple task: find out who fathered Agnes’ baby, and find out why she strangled it to death. On the first day she visits the convent, she is greeted by a smiling Mother Superior (Anne Bancroft), who allows Livingston to call her "Sister" because the term "Mother" “brings up the most unpleasant connotations in this day and age.” It is only a matter of seconds before the Mother Superior suddenly breaks character, warning Livingston not to corrupt Sister Agnes with her unpopular psychiatric methods. “I know what you are,” she hisses. “I don’t want that mind cut open.”

I’ve seen Agnes of God twice now, and on both viewings I’ve found that the movie works best during scenes of quiet, unsettling ambiguity. Consider the scene in which Livingston first meets Sister Agnes, who—like a child—always smiles, always reacts merrily to everyday situations, always claims innocence to occurrences that seem to be her fault. She is maddeningly unhelpful when Livingston inquires about the murdered baby, which Sister Agnes claims ignorance to: “I never saw the baby, so I can’t talk about the baby, because... I don’t believe in the baby.” The performance by Meg Tilly, which netted the film one of two richly-deserved Oscar nominations (the other for Bancroft), is one of the film’s strongest assets. Cleverly masking the dark secrets of the Sister Agnes character, Tilly finds a way of her own to make Jewison’s nightmare of depraved piety become a reality.

Another important factor in the movie’s narrative is the side-story of the character of Dr. Livingston, played by Jane Fonda as an atheist whose involvement with the case shines a light on her recent loss of faith, among other skeletons in her closet. Her personal life is in disarray, and we get the obligatory sequence of the lonely heroine going home alone on the night of her birthday, with nothing left to do except play out the endless string of messages on her answering machine. We learn that she once had a sister who became a nun and later died in a convent, and this is a predominant theme in the film: the consequences that arise when a family gives up one of its own to the church. There is a scene towards the end of the film in which Fonda watches another girl being inducted into the church as a nun, hugging her family goodbye.

What makes Agnes of God so remarkable is how it sets up a system in which the Catholic Church has both rewarded and ruined the families of all three of these women. The Mother Superior was married for 23 years, and admits that “my children won’t even see me anymore. That’s their revenge. I think they tell their friends that I’ve passed on.” The Fonda character had a falling out with her Catholic parents in the wake of a teenage abortion, and her senile mother now spends her days watching Spider-Man cartoons at a local nursing home. Sister Agnes, it is revealed, is the Mother Superior’s niece, rescued from an alcoholic mother who molested her as a child. She seems to have found salvation in the church, but her murdering of her baby may suggest otherwise.

Of course, the scenes focusing on the murky details of the murder case, as mentioned above, are the best scenes in Agnes of God; it is only when the movie goes off-topic and shows its stage origins that it begins to go wrong. A scene in which Fonda and Bancroft share a forbidden cigarette out in a gazebo, musing about whether “the saints would have smoked”, completely takes the viewer out of the movie. A subplot involving Fonda and her boyfriend, a district attorney, is boring, and reveals nothing more about her character that we don’t already know. These arbitrary scenes feel like they were concocted by John Piehlmeier during individual moments of writer’s block, and it’s a mistake for Jewison to keep them in the film.

There are sequences that feel inspired by elements of film noir, as when a discreet nun drops by Fonda’s door, gives her a helpful bit of advice about the convent records and then leaves without a trace. Or when Fonda, in trying to determine the father of Sister Agnes’ baby, discovers the location of a secret entrance to the convent’s attic: “That’s how he got in! Or how she got out!” Other sequences feel inspired by Hitchcock: there is a sly nod to Vertigo when Fonda and Sister Agnes climb a spiral staircase all the way to the top of a bell tower. And there is a flashback sequence in which Sister Agnes goes hysterical after her hands begin bleeding in a stigmata of sorts, and the blood is as nerve-racking as the blood which so terrified the innocent heroine in Marnie.

But the movie’s highpoint, it must be said, is the climatic sequence in which the Mother Superior and the Fonda character interrogate Sister Agnes and force her to reveal the true identity of the man who fathered her child. This sequence has Agnes flailing around the room and smearing bloody handprints all across the white walls; it’s by far the goriest sequence in Jewison’s career, even in comparison to the cyberpunk violence of Rollerball (1975). In a speech that shares an uncanny resemblance to Harriet Andersson’s speech in Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly (1961)—in which God rapes the heroine in the form of a spider—Agnes claims that God raped her in the convent attic after taking the form of owls and doves. This can only suggest one thing: that God, not Agnes, is the one who is truly responsible for the death of Agnes’ baby.

It was this incendiary plot point of the film that so infuriated Roger Ebert, who launched a vicious attack against Agnes of God in a thought-provoking 1-star review during the movie’s initial release. In the review, Ebert lambastated the film for disguising a theological morality play in the form of a murder mystery. “This is a very badly confused movie,” he wrote. “If God indeed conceived the child in Sister Agnes' womb, then why did he in his omnipotence allow her to kill it? But of course (you argue), God also gave Sister Agnes free will, so she was free to kill the child no matter what the details of its conception. True, and yet then, we must ask, why did God create a baby to be killed? Here we enter, of course, into the still larger question of why God has created all of us and placed us in this life where we will most assuredly all die.”

Ebert’s criticisms are valid, and, unhappily, I am unable to produce a convincing counterargument. It’s certainly an element against the movie’s favor that Agnes of God leaves some important questions unanswered: why did God want a baby to be killed in the first place? On what grounds does the judge finally rule that Agnes “was in no way responsible for her actions”? Who is the movie blaming, exactly, for the baby’s death? The movie provides no straight answers. And while some of those questions are best left unanswered, others feel like they were left unanswered simply because the filmmakers took the day off.

Perhaps some of those answers lie in the last scene of the film, in which the Fonda character declares, over an ambiguous voiceover, that she wants to believe that Agnes may have been a saint after all. That there’s room in the world for miracles. That, in the unforgettable final shot of the film—in which Agnes catches and releases a dove into the wintry distance—another miracle is being released into the world once more, ready to be used again. As Jewison writes in his autobiography, perhaps this is what Agnes of God is really about: a Lamb of God who takes away sins and, through her own personal sacrifice, helps bring a doubtful psychiatrist back into the church. The comparison isn't a coincidence, either—because “Agnes”, in Latin, means “lamb”.

The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

Imagine you're Norman Jewison. You've been spending the first half of the decade as a director-for-hire, directing studio vehicles for Tony Curtis, James Garner and Doris Day. So far, it's a modest filmmaking career; indeed, it's the kind of career that usually befalls young filmmakers trying to get into Hollywood's big time. You're not exactly recognized as an artist at the moment, although you have made a friend in Sam Peckinpah, the breakthrough artist who crafted Ride the High Country -- one of the greatest Westerns ever made. There is some question as to whether or not you will ever achieve that level of success. Then Peckinpah is fired from a movie he has been working on with Steve McQueen, and suddenly you have been hired to replace him.

This is what was happening behind the scenes during the making of The Cincinnati Kid. Before Jewison came onboard, the end result was destined to be something completely different from what it is now. Peckinpah's original vision for The Cincinnati Kid was to shoot the film in black-and-white, and fill the story (in typical Peckinpah fashion) with visceral sequences of sex and violence. But Hollywood was not yet ready for Peckinpah's “fascist works of art” (as dubbed by Pauline Kael in her Straw Dogs review), and with Jewison replacing Peckinpah as director, Steve McQueen's next anti-heroic vehicle was about to become something more passive, less aggressive. Arguably, it ultimately became a better film.

Let me put it this way: wouldn't The Cincinnati Kid feel a lot like a rip-off of Robert Rossen's The Hustler if it had been shot in black and white? The stories of the two films are definitely similar: both are about hotshot sports talents who get in over their heads, womanize their female companions, are excruciatingly tested by their opponents and, tragically, manipulated by their own mentors. But The Hustler was a film about pool, whereas The Cincinnati Kid is about stud poker; and what was so wise about Jewison's decision to shoot The Cincinnati Kid in color instead of black-and-white was the fact that the many colors of red, yellow and green seen throughout the picture could then be illuminated to striking effect. Such memorable images as a glowing lamp fading to a golden blur, the provocative red dress of a girl in attendance at a cockfight, and the illustrated graphics of the actual poker cards, would never have endured if Jewison and his cinematographer, Philip H. Lathrop, had not been afforded the wonders of Metrocolor photography. To be sure, Jewison has fun with some shots that probably could have looked just as great as they do without color, from the camera's constant habit of peering through curtains (in doorways and on beds), to the startling transitional image of an antagonist pointing a gun straight at the camera (for the purpose of target practice).

The screenplay for the film, based on a novel by Richard Jessup, was originally written by Ring Lardner Jr.; when Jewison found it overly serious, he brought in Terry Southern to polish it up with more humor, particularly towards the monologues of the film's villains that threaten McQueen's protagonist. Jewison himself was responsible for the film's remarkable narrative framing device. The film begins with McQueen's character, the Kid (his real name is “Eric Stoner”, although he is rarely ever referred to by that name during the picture) passing through a lively African-American funeral in New Orleans. He is then approached by a beaming young African-American Shoeshine boy (Ken Grant), who challenges him to a quick game of penny-pitching on the sidewalk, and who will challenge him again in the middle of and at the end of the film.

“Hey, man, hey Cincinnati- come on, man!” exclaims the eager boy. “I'm gonna get you one more time! Come on, man!” We presume that the Kid and the boy have been at this before, and that the boy has always been unsuccessful in the past. The Kid consents, but of course, being the experienced poker player with the fast hand, he ends up winning. “You're just not ready for me, yet!” he reminds the boy. Normally this would be a crushing experience for a young child, but it is not: the little boy is filled with a sense of awe. In the course of this film, the characters will suffer a multitude of crushing disappointments and losses, but in this opening sequence between McQueen and the boy lies the film's ambition, as well as its undying love of the game. This scene is followed by a sequence in which the Kid ends up fleeing from thugs running a shady game of poker; we watch, exhilarated, as he beats the living heck out of the bad guy, runs across a platform spinning over a gorge (McQueen did this stunt himself), and dodges some moving trains on the way. Already, Jewison and McQueen have us intrigued.

The internal conflict of The Cincinnati Kid springs forward when poker legend Lancey Howard (an excellent Edward G. Robinson, who literally enters the picture through a cloud of steam) comes into town for a lunchtime poker game with the wealthy gangster Slade (a young, unrecognizable Rip Torn), who -- with his homely wife and children, menacing bodyguard and exotic mistress- doesn't seem like he necessarily needs to be wasting his money losing thousands at stud poker, but no matter. When the crusty old Lancey easily beats him in the lunchtime game, Slade vows revenge.

“I wanna see that smug old bastard gutted!” Slade hisses to his loyal dealer, Shooter (Karl Malden). He then informs Shooter of a nasty plan he is hatching: in the upcoming, much-anticipated game that will take place between Lancey and the Kid, Slade will bet on the Kid -- and, to ensure that things go his way, he wants Shooter to deal the game and secretly fix it so that the Kid wins. Shooter initially refuses, but then Slade blackmails him, reminding him that he's “carrying markers” on Shooter, while adding that he can always recognize his markers as “null and void, if I happen to suddenly realize that you are not of sound mind.”

The first hour of the film generally consists of the events leading up to the showdown between Lancey and the Kid. We meet the Kid's girlfriend, Christian (Tuesday Weld), who loves him and maybe even wants to marry him, but feels rather shut out by his poker addiction. Midway through the film is a sequence in which the Kid tries to show how much he cares about Christian by visiting her at her home in the country. In an ordinary film, this kind of sequence might have felt pointless, but there is a wonderful moment when the Kid impresses Christian's socially impaired parents (Karl Swenson and Irene Tedrow) with his card tricks, somewhat miraculously casting off the awkwardness of his being there. Even though the Kid isn't too charismatic a person, there's no doubt about it: he's got a hell of a way with cards.

Knowing that first Peckinpah and then Jewison were involved in the making of The Cincinnati Kid, it's astonishing that another future great filmmaker was also involved: Hal Ashby. At this point in the 1960's, Ashby was an editor, and his editing work on this film is- to put it mildly- sublime. It's the fast-paced last forty-five minutes of The Cincinnati Kid, crisply edited by Ashby and expertly crafted by Jewison, that everybody always remembers. These scenes are so captivating, and so thrilling, that one not even have to be familiar with the rules of stud poker (this writer included) in order to be entertained. We watch as inferior players such as Yeller (Cab Calloway) and Pig (Jack Weston) are forced to drop out of the game, one by one, until only Lancey and the Kid are left. And, of course, there is tension behind the scenes, as we realize that Shooter is under constant pressure by Slade and his gang to keep fixing the game in the Kid's favor. As we watch with some amusement at the silly, laid-back behavior of Lady Fingers (Joan Blondell), who usually switches off with Shooter as dealer, we can sense that Shooter only wishes he could be just as relaxed.

It doesn't help that the Kid is under some pressure of his own. For example, Shooter's flirtatious, puzzle-cheating wife Melba (Ann-Margaret) has got the hots for the Kid, and is continuously trying to steal him away from Christian; earlier in the film, Melba almost succeeds in tempting the Kid, until he gives her a good spanking for stepping out of line (only McQueen could make something as vicious as a spanking look sexy on-screen). Melba's advances are bizarre, considering that she's best friends with Christian, and also when considering that both girls share each other's boy problems on a daily basis. Melba complains that Shooter is too controlling and not a whole lot of fun, but Christian is not convinced. “At least you know how much you mean to somebody”, she sighs. The idea is that Christian's relationship with the Kid will improve eventually, but, sadly, it does not: during the poker climax, Christian comes to the game to show her support... only to find the Kid and Melba in bed together. In the film's final scene, the Kid and Christian reunite on the street after the game, but this cheap, unjustified “Hollywood ending” was forced into the film at the last minute, against Jewison's wishes.

For me, the best performance in the film is by Karl Malden, whose Shooter was unquestionably one of his finest post-On the Waterfront roles. As the film moves along, we actually feel more sorry for Shooter than we do for the Kid; even though the Kid is the one running the risk of losing his money, it is Shooter who is being held tight on a leash by his boss, forced to cooperate, perhaps even in danger of being whacked if things don't go as Slade has planned. Malden has a great scene in which he confronts the Kid in-between rounds, wanting to know why the Kid folded winners in the last hand. Then the Kid, already suspecting Shooter of foul play, grabs him and throws him against the wall. There is a real sense of fear in Shooter's eyes; Malden was reportedly stunned by McQueen's unexpected force. “Kid... you gotta understand,” he tries to explain, “...this wasn't my idea! Slade's got the squeeze on me! You think I wanna deal a phony hand? You think it don't mean something to me?” But the Kid doesn't sympathize with him: “I'm gonna win this game, Shooter! And I'm gonna win it my way! And you ride along with it, or you're out. You're finished!”

All of this is only a warm-up for the last remaining minutes of the poker game, during which Jewison raises the suspense to almost unbearable levels. It's that moment at which Lancey and the Kid each have only one overturned card left that is the most suspenseful moment of all; Ashby edits the sequence so that we see the various expressions of the spectators watching over the game, their faces enshrouded in shadow. The Kid has an ace of hearts, and thinks he's got Lancey right where he wants him. Then Lancey flips his card over, and... damn it all, it's a jack. The Kid jut sits there with a wide-eyed look of shock on his face; Lancey, meanwhile, happily puffs on his cigar, pleased to have beaten yet another potentially serious player. “You're good, Kid,” he cracks- in the way that only Edward G. Robinson could say it- “but as long as I'm around, you're second-best. You might as well learn to live with it.” As the Kid walks out the door, he thinks he's got a chance at redeeming himself with a final game of penny-pitching with the Shoeshine boy (who, hilariously, appears out of nowhere), but even this simple effort ends in vain. “You tried too hard, man!” pipes the boy, using the Kid's own lines against him. “You just ain't ready for me, yet!”

Listen to Jewison's priceless commentary track on the Special Edition DVD. One of the most interesting aspects of the production he reminisces over is his relationship with McQueen on the set. At first, the star was at odds with his director, and Jewison recalls incidents such as McQueen's bafflement at not being allowed to see the film's dailies, instead being told to concentrate on his own performance. “What are you trying to do, man- you tryin' to twist my mellon?” he allegedly snapped at Jewison at one point, in that hippy action-hero sort of way that McQueen usually talked in. Observing that McQueen was probably in need of a father figure, Jewison eventually came up with something of a peaceful resolution for his star. “Look, Steve, I'm not old enough to be your father,” he claims to have told McQueen, “but I can be you older brother, and I'll always look out for you... you just relax, and do your job- and I'll always protect you.” From then on, things were different between star and director.

Three years after The Cincinnati Kid, Jewison and McQueen made The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) together. On a technical level, it's a superior film, thanks to Pablo Ferro's split-screen imagery, Ashby's advanced editing style (perhaps improved thanks to his winning an Oscar for his editing on Jewison's In the Heat of the Night), and the infamous “chess with sex” sequence (innovatively shot by Laszlo Kovacs) between McQueen and Faye Dunaway. Yet for all of its stylistic accomplishments, The Thomas Crown Affair is awfully shallow in terms of narrative storytelling; if I prefer The Cincinnati Kid by comparison, it's because I cared about its characters more, and because McQueen and Jewison's healthy working relationship comes into stronger focus. On the DVD commentary for The Thomas Crown Affair, Jewison recalls visiting McQueen in the last months leading up to his death; McQueen had grown a caveman's beard by then, and a sort of "wild" expression was starting to grow in his eyes. It's amazing to wonder about the kind of film that they could have made together by the time McQueen was in that state of health and grace.

Think about the amazing effect that The Cincinnati Kid had on the filmmakers involved. In some ways, being fired from the film was one of the best things that ever happened to Sam Peckinpah- it allowed him to spend the next four years recuperating from the embarrassment, before reemerging with the masterwork that is The Wild Bunch. Ashby's editing career led him to further exceptional editing work until he transitioned into becoming one of the best filmmakers of his generation. But by the 1980's, Peckinpah and Ashby had both succumbed to drugs and alcohol, and both had dropped dead.

Fortunately for Jewison, he survived. His legacy, however, has yet to be as respected as that of his two deceased peers. Which is a curious matter, considering what many of his greatest films have in common. When the Kid is beaten at penny-pitching by the African-American boy at the end of The Cincinnati Kid, it is the budding scene in what would eventually flower into some of the most unforgettable sequences in some of Jewison's later films. Could it possibly, for example, have served as the spark for the landmark scene in In the Heat of the Night (1967) -- another film with a Ray Charles theme song -- in which Sidney Poitier slaps the white florist? Isn't this influence also felt during the scene in A Soldier's Story (1984) in which Howard E. Rollins fiercely questions a couple of racist white soldiers? Just as Sam Peckinpah and Hal Ashby once did, after a long and rewarding career in the movies, Norman Jewison has established himself as a born filmmaking artist -- and it all began with McQueen.


Submitted to Jason Bellamy's Steve McQueen Blog-A-Thon.