Truth Takes A Backseat

A racially themed road-trip drama stays within the white lines.

The 1967 Best Picture Oscar went to In the Heat of the Night, a muggy potboiler in which Rod Steiger’s Southern redneck cop shed his prejudice by working alongside Sidney Poitier’s black detective. That film set a precedent. It became the model for Hollywood pieties about racism in America: a fantasy of conciliation and harmony – can’t we all just get along? Novelist and critic James Baldwin saw through it. In the Heat of the Night, he said, was astounding for “the speed with which it moves from one preposterous proposition to another”, searching for ways to make a racist white police chief a hero.