1967
Directed by Norman Jewison
Starring Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates and Lee Grant
All three of you who read my 30 Flicks reviews might remember that I repeatedly stated my love for the murder mystery genre. There's nothing better when it hits. So go figure that I was severely underwhelmed by the movies of this type that I watched for 30 Flicks. The Third Man, Chinatown, Blow Out...I didn't HATE the movies, but they left me cold for wildly different reasons. In the Heat of the Night is a murder mystery on paper, yes, but it has a well-earned reputation for being much more than that. Based on that reputation, I decided to take the plunge and make the blind buy. Was it a wise decision? Let's dive in and find out.
After the awesome Ray Charles theme song that opens the film, the story begins with Sparta, Mississippi police officer Sam Wood (Warren Oates in an early scenery-chewing role) discovering the dead body of industrialist Phillip Colbert. The murder coincides with the chance arrival of Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), Philadelphia police officer passing through Sparta while visiting his mother. After being arrested as a suspect by Wood, the script gives us the textbook 10-page meeting complication in the form of Sparta police chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger), who immediately makes it clear to the outsider that his presence is not welcome. Too bad Tibbs' superiors in Philadelphia think that it's a good idea that the homicide expert should assist the locals in solving the crime.
That's the setup of In the Heat of the Night, and it's a premise that is definitely four stars on paper. In execution, I think that the movie loses a little steam at points when it comes to the leaps that the much more accomplished homicide detective Tibbs makes. I don't feel the screenplay is as succinct as it should be in regards to explaining the flow of logic that lead Tibbs and Gillespie to their next destination, and the movie sometimes feels like a series of vignettes rather than a story that logically leads from one breadcrumb to the next. In the end, it doesn't matter, because the content of those scenes is often electric stuff. Like most residents of this 1960s small southern town, Gillespie is highly prejudiced, tossing around racial epithets casually and berating the educated black man as an uppity interloper. The film combines its police procedural with plenty of social comentary, as Gillespie slowly sees how effective his unwilling partner is at pursuing the killer while facing pressure from the locals to run the interloper out of town.
Watching this film, it was again apparent to me how vastly different the movies of the past were when it came to dealing with social issues. These days, the villains in movies that tackle subjects like race tend to be cartoonish and one-dimensional. Gillespie, as masterfully played by Steiger in a role that won him an Oscar, begins as an unlikable character but is never an out-and-out villain. This character is the one who takes a journey during the film, as the stoic Tibbs remains relatively static throughout the 110-minute running time. As a result, In the Heat of the Night is a movie that has stood the test of time. I'm no longer a fan of the term "more relevant than ever," so instead I will say that this film is equally relevant, with its message of overcoming preconceived notions being something that we desperately need in 2021.
Rating time: *** 1/2 out of ****. For the performances (especially by Steiger and Lee Grant in an incendiary role as the murdered man's wife), the strong characterization and the setting, this flick is worth a watch. The mystery is merely the backdrop.
1985
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Starring Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan and Kim Greist
I have to preface this review by stating that I'm a HUGE fan of the Monty Python crew, the legendary British comedy troupe that director Terry Gilliam was a member of. Well, at least the films that they made. Seriously, is there a funnier movie in all of existence than Holy Grail? If there are, there certainly aren't many of them. It's a series of sketches all built around the central theme of medieval adventure films that all hit the mark with razor-sharp precision. They would reach that same level of near perfection twice more in the ensuing Life of Brian and Meaning of Life films. However, I've always found the Flying Circus TV show that preceded the movies to be hit-and-miss at best and damn near unwatchable at worst. For every Parrot Sketch, there were ten sketches that started nowhere and just kept dragging on being painfully unfunny.
Brazil is structured almost like one of those Monty Python films, feeling more like a collection of skits than a coherent narrative. Unfortunately, it's a movie that misses much more than it hits, and it does this for a very bloated 140+ minutes. The story, as it were, concerns Sam Lowery (Jonathan Pryce), low-level bureaucrat in a world where bureaucracy is the end-all be-all of what society is trying to attain. In this movie, the world that director Gilliam creates really is the most important character. It's a system where a form must be completed to do absolutely everything, where private sector employees essentially don't exist and everyone works for the government in some capacity. It's not exactly a dictatorship or oligarchy in the vein of 1984-style dystopian fables. Instead, we get a world where government red tape is the tool used to control people.
There are some great gags in the movie. The best is undoubtedly the sequence where Sam accepts a promotion and enters his tiny new office, engaging in a tug-of-war with the worker next door over their respective chairs. Another great bit occurs in the first five minutes of the film, where a government hit squad invades an apartment by cutting a hole in the ceiling and then promptly tries to fix the hole with a nice punchline. As Gilliam was given $15 million to make this movie, it also looks like a million bucks. There is SO MUCH attention to detail shown in the way that all of these sets and settings were designed, with countless whirring machines and contraptions occupying nearly every single shot. Looking at Brazil really does make me weep for the days when set designers were required to make films visually interesting rather than nerds on laptops.
The problem with this movie? The story, to me, was not interesting AT ALL. Notice how I really haven't talked about it. There is no central goal for the character of Sam Lowery in this film; early on, there is a bit of a mystery angle when a random citizen is randomly killed by the government during the hole-in-the-ceiling scene, but that quickly gets dropped. There are recurring bits where Lowery has fantasies of saving a damsel-in-distress played by Kim Greist, and his search for a fugitive who looks like said fantasy woman. That gets dropped just before the third act begins. The narrative is completely aimless, messy with its handling of the social commentary and managed in a way that made me not care what happened to anyone on the screen. It's a shame, because there is a theme here about technology run amok and government overreach that could have been mined for much more relevance than it was. For that reason, Brazil is a very frustrating film, one with limitless potential that ultimately gets wasted with a script that veers off in 27 different directions.
Rating time: * 1/2 out of ****. I think the film would have been much better served being a straight-up comedy, and with at least an hour trimmed from its running time. As it stands, Brazil is a bloated, sloppy film with occasional brilliant bits. Avoid this one.
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