Pictures at a Revolution
Page 39
Columbia didn’t realize that Poitier had been building a tremendous audience base thanks to television, where his movies were showing up more frequently. Until 1965, home viewers had rarely seen black performers on TV outside of guest shots on crime dramas, singing and dancing appearances in variety shows, or Amos ’n’ Andy and Beulah comic stereotypes, but the emergence of Bill Cosby in I Spy and, a year later, Greg Morris in Mission: Impossible brought a new kind of self-assured African American star into American living rooms and tapped a previously unrecognized viewing audience. During the 1966–1967 season, Variety described Poitier as “redhot in TV ratings,” pointing to huge numbers for telecasts of Lilies of the Field and The Long Ships as well as for the actor’s appearance on a variety show celebrating the history of black humor.29 When To Sir, with Love opened, the studio found out that Poitier was not only review-proof, but a much bigger star than anyone in the movie business had guessed. The film was an immediate and sustained hit that played for months and made the actor a rich man. His deal to take just $30,000 up front in exchange for 10 percent of the gross turned out to be one of the biggest paydays an actor had ever engineered. In Poitier’s contract, Columbia had stipulated that his yearly take would be capped at $25,000 for as many years as it took to pay him in full. The studio realized it would have to revise that deal when To Sir, with Love took in so much money that it would have taken eighty years to fulfill the contract’s terms.
Poitier himself agreed with some of the criticism of To Sir, with Love. “The guys who write these parts are white guys, more often than not,” he said at the time. “And there are producers to deal with who are also white, and a studio with a board of directors, also white. So they have to make him—the Negro—kind of a neuter…. You put him in a shirt and tie…you make him very bright and very intelligent and very capable…then you can eliminate the core of the man: His sexuality.”30 For the first time, Poitier decided to channel his frustration into producing: He made a deal with ABC, which was then launching a motion picture division, to produce and star in For Love of Ivy, which would mark the first mainstream romantic comedy about a black couple’s relationship.31
The success of To Sir, with Love was good news for United Artists, which had chosen the beginning of August as a release date for In the Heat of the Night and was counting on Poitier’s growing popularity to boost the chances of a movie for which the studio had planned only a modest publicity campaign. UA seemed remarkably short on inspiration when it came to selling Jewison’s movie; the ideas it sent out to local publicity teams felt almost deliberately designed to avoid any mention of race, conflict, or civil rights. “It’s a natural for stores selling air conditioners!” UA suggested. “Don’t Lose Your Cool In the Heat of the Night…. Reverse angle, for cooler nites, is ‘When Winter Winds Blow, Sleep “In the Heat of the Night” with (furnace, fuel, or heater tie-in).’” Some posters carried the tagline “They got a murder on their hands. They don’t know what to do with it”; other ads featured a still from a seconds-long shot of a strategically concealed nude woman from an early scene and built an entire campaign around her, with the slogan “She always traipses around with the lights on. Somebody sure oughta make her stop it!”32 No poster mentioned race at all. Jewison, who was in Boston shooting Thomas Crown, saw the posters for the first time when he passed the Music Hall and, not for the first time, complained bitterly to UA.* “I hate to keep flogging a dead horse,” he wrote, “but the picture deserves a little better than this.”33
United Artists had not had a hit all year and was counting on one movie, the James Bond adventure You Only Live Twice, to turn its bottom line around. The fortunes of the Bond franchise had grown exponentially with each installment, and a new Bond rip-off opened almost every month, but just before the massive success of Thunderball in early 1966, another studio decided to take direct aim at the value of UA’s hottest property. What’s New, Pussycat? producer Charlie Feldman owned the rights to Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, the only 007 story that producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli hadn’t acquired. Feldman initially approached Saltzman and Broccoli about going into partnership with them; when they stiff-armed him, he decided to make a bigger, wilder, more expensive Bond movie than any that had come before and took the project to Columbia. Creatively, Casino Royale was a disaster of fascinatingly outsize proportions: Six different directors and at least seventeen screenwriters (including, at various points, Woody Allen, Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, and Billy Wilder) were swallowed by Feldman’s $12 million sinkhole, an incoherent spoof involving a half-dozen would-be Bonds played by, among others, David Niven and Peter Sellers, that was condemned as “total chaos,”34 “unfunny burlesque,”35 and “a frightful mess”36 by the very people who made it.
Feldman oversaw a comically disjointed production during which scenes were sometimes written just to utilize elaborate sets that had been built for other purposes or to work in actors who happened to be in London for a few days, but he nonetheless succeeded in getting Casino Royale into theaters two months before You Only Live Twice. Abetted by a slogan that sold its gimmick effectively (“Casino Royale Is Too Much…For One James Bond!”) and an eye-catching psychedelic poster of a nude woman covered in tattoos, the movie drew huge initial crowds. Bad word of mouth spread quickly, but Columbia had made its money (the film was the third-highest grosser of the calendar year) and done its damage. When You Only Live Twice finally arrived, audiences were oversaturated by Bond and his rivals. Even the film’s nominally topical plotline, the space race, had been chewed up and parodied by everything from the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie to Don Knotts in The Reluctant Astronaut. Time magazine’s critic called the movie a “victim of the same misfortune that once befell Frankenstein: there have been so many flamboyant imitations that the original looks like a copy.”37 The comparison was not lost on Sean Connery, who had already given his producers notice that he would not play Bond again. “The whole thing has become a Frankenstein monster,” he complained. “The merchandising, the promotion, the pirating—they’re thoroughly distasteful.”38 UA could take some consolation in the fact that the movie managed to outgross Casino Royale, but for the first time, the franchise started to contract instead of expand—You Only Live Twice, the studio’s most expensive Bond film yet, grossed significantly less than Thunderball and signaled a dip in Bond’s drawing power that would not turn around until the late 1970s.
The notion of a summer movie season as a business model wasn’t yet formed in the 1960s, but in 1967 the studios began to grasp that there was money to be made by releasing movies with broad appeal while their potential audience was on vacation or out of school. Two weeks after You Only Live Twice opened, just in time for the July Fourth holiday weekend, MGM released The Dirty Dozen across the country and made the Bond film look puny. For twenty years, World War II movies had been a reliable box office staple, but they had begun to run out of steam as their plots became repetitive and moviegoers grew bored with their drab, earnest storytelling. The studios were still putting out several war movies every year, but there hadn’t been a truly crowd-pleasing entry in the genre since 1963’s The Great Escape. When Dirty Dozen director Robert Aldrich read seventy-year-old Nunnally Johnson’s original script about twelve thuggish criminal soldiers in military prison who are melded into a ragtag unit and given a mission to bomb a German château, he thought it “would have made a very good, very acceptable 1945 war picture. But I don’t think that a good 1945 war picture is a good 1967 war picture.”39 He hired the German-born screenwriter Lukas Heller to overhaul the screenplay and made a picture that was far more gory and violent, and far less interested in conventional military heroics, than any action movie Hollywood had produced about World War II. The Dirty Dozen’s antiauthoritarian message appealed to war movie buffs who wanted an unsanitized look at tough guys in combat, but it also found a tremendous audience of moviegoers in their twenties who had generally stayed away from the kinds of war movie
s their parents liked. “We got on a wave that we never knew was coming: not a wave, a tidal wave,” said Aldrich. “Younger people by the bushel thought it was an antiestablishment movie.”40
If United Artists had any doubts about whether moviegoers were ready to accept an angrier black man on screen than they had seen before, the success of The Dirty Dozen erased them. One of the film’s most popular characters was played by former NFL fullback Jim Brown. Aldrich treated Brown’s role carefully in some regards: Where almost every other member of the dozen has a record of irredeemable criminality, audiences were told that Brown’s character had been jailed for attacking a group of white men, “cracker bastards” who had tried to castrate him. After thus preemptively exonerating Brown from any real wrongdoing, the script went on to turn his character into an anachronism in every respect. He’s a street-talking separatist who sounds nothing like a jailed GI in the 1940s. When he’s first told to join the unit, he declines, shrugging: “That’s your war, man, not mine.”
Aldrich denied that his intentions in making the movie were explicitly political: “When we planned The Dirty Dozen in 1965 do you think for one moment we knew that by the time the film came out the French kids would be in revolt and Americans would be sick of Vietnam so the mood would be just right for our picture? Rubbish,” 41 he said. But he admitted that the film’s climax, in which Brown’s character throws bombs down a ventilator shaft and burns a group of trapped Germans alive, was intended to discomfort audiences by evoking the use of napalm. The scene was shocking, in part because almost no Hollywood movie had yet made even an oblique reference to the Vietnam War and in part because Aldrich had found a way to make an audience cheer a lone black man killing a huge group of white people. Jim Brown could have been the embodiment of Stokely Carmichael’s declaration in the spring of 1967 that “black people are now serving notice that we’ll fight back.”42
The Dirty Dozen became the year’s biggest box office hit, and its unmistakable Vietnam-era resonance might have gotten more attention had it not opened at a moment when the news was filled with the war at home. On July 12, after John Smith, a black taxi driver in Newark, was seen being physically dragged into a police station after a minor traffic violation, two hundred protesters gathered outside the precinct; the assembly dissolved into an unruly ramble in which store windows were broken and a few Molotov cocktails were thrown. Two days later, state troopers and National Guardsmen moved into the city, an overreaction that was met with escalating violence. By July 17, 1,200 people had been jailed, 600 injured, and 23 killed; H. Rap Brown became famous that week when he called for “guerrilla war on the honkie white man.”43 The following weekend, Detroit exploded into riots and looting after a raid on illegal gambling dens; another 1,200 people were arrested, and four thousand fires were set. Again, federal troops rolled into the city. Even as President Johnson was increasing the number of American soldiers in Vietnam to nearly a half million, worries about the war were temporarily overshadowed by stories about “the fire this time,” hugely exaggerated reports of property damage (the $25 million of wreckage caused in Detroit was widely reported as $500 million)44 and a storm of “Who says it can’t happen here?” editorials.
The poor, angry black man from the ghetto, ready to loot, shoot, and kill, became as much of a focus for the fears of Middle America—and of Middle American media—as the acid-tripping hippies and runaways pouring into San Francisco had been a month or two earlier; and Sidney Poitier, on a press tour for In the Heat of the Night, found himself asked again and again to denounce the rioters or ally with them, to identify himself politically at a moment when the ground was constantly shifting. “You ask me questions that pertain to the narrow scope of the summer riots,” he seethed into a bank of microphones. “I am artist, man, American, contemporary. I am an awful lot of things, so I wish you would pay me the respect due.”45 “He was the only black leading actor out there for fifteen years,” said Lee Grant later. “It was a terribly unfair responsibility for him…he was carrying this alone, and it was not a burden that he welcomed.”46
But the relentless call for Poitier to become a political spokesman was also an indication of his growing cultural significance; To Sir, with Love was becoming Columbia’s biggest hit since Lawrence of Arabia, and Variety called Poitier “the only Negro which myriads of Americans feel they know and understand…a symbol of the thoughtful, efficient Negro whose technological knowhow (no dropout, he) enables him to help, compete with, and, when necessary, show up whites.” In a season during which the country was “stained by ugly race riots,” the paper said, Poitier was now so popular that if he declines a role, “they rewrite the part for a white actor!”47 Poitier heard that quasi compliment many times in 1967, usually from people who hadn’t an inkling of the condescension that was built into it, and generally responded by politely acknowledging that, yes, he had heard that people were saying that, and quickly moving on to another subject. During the press junket for In the Heat of the Night, he was barely asked anything about his work; instead, he had to compose answers to questions about whether it was inherently offensive to depict black people in a cotton field in the movie. At one point, he was required to list other talented black actors for an indignant reporter from Boston who didn’t believe she knew of any. (Although I Spy had been on the air for two years, he had to spell the name “Cosby” for her.)48
When In the Heat of the Night opened in New York on August 2, critics, perhaps inevitably, treated the movie as if it had been hatched overnight in response to the long, bloody summer, and most of them approved of what they saw. Although the film had nothing to do with race riots, Bosley Crowther announced that “the hot surge of racial hate and tension as it has been displayed in many communities this year…is put forth with realism and point,” praising “the crackling confrontations between the arrogant small town white policeman…and the sophisticated Negro detective with his steely armor of contempt and mistrust.”49 A number of critics besides Crowther strained to find parallel flaws in Tibbs and Gillespie, unwilling to see In the Heat of the Night as anything other than a movie in which the black man needs to learn a lesson, too: Time magazine praised it for showing “that men can join hands out of fear and hatred and shape from base emotions something identifiable as a kind of love,”50 and Life called it “a fine demonstration that races can work together.”51 Pauline Kael liked the film but hated the tone of most of its positive reviews; she had been relieved to discover that Jewison hadn’t made a “self-righteous, self-congratulatory exercise in the gloomy old Stanley Kramer tradition” but complained that too many of her colleagues praised it “as if it had been exactly the kind of picture that the audience was so relieved to discover it wasn’t.”52
A few prominent critics dissented strongly. Andrew Sarris’s dismissal of the movie as a “fantasy of racial reconciliation”53 was echoed by The New Yorker’s Penelope Gilliatt, who was then in a relationship with Mike Nichols and had seen a screening of the movie during production of The Graduate. The film, she said, “has a spurious air of concern about the afflictions of the real America at the moment…. There is a predictable night interlude when the rivals suddenly come together and speak for a second of their common loneliness, thus tritely demonstrating that we are really all the same, though I can’t think of any really first-rate film, play or book that isn’t unconsciously dedicated to the fact that we are all inconsolably different.”54 The most pointed criticism In the Heat of the Night received stemmed from the decision Jewison made early in the development of Silliphant’s screenplay to strip away scenes in which Tibbs faced the systemic racism of a small southern town and to boil down the movie’s racial politics to a single relationship. “Jewison and…Silliphant are running on the premise that movies can correct the world by describing it incorrectly,”55 the critic Ethan Mordden wrote later. And Esquire’s Wilfrid Sheed remarked, “If that were all Mississippi amounted to it wouldn’t take much courage to march down there; one Poitier per town wo
uld soon bring the rascals to their senses…. Our peoples will work this thing out some day. Yeah, sure.”56
The vast majority of reviewers weighed in with strong praise for the movie and its two stars, with the New York Daily News claiming that “nobody but an actor of Poitier’s stature could have characterized [the] Negro detective with any amount of forcefulness”57 and Newsweek’s Joseph Morgenstern writing that “Poitier, who could be ruling the roost if parts were handed out on the basis of talent instead of pigment, gets a rare opportunity to demonstrate the full sweep of his powers.”58 The Chicago Sun-Times and The Boston Globe both suggested that Steiger was headed for an Academy Award.59 But Poitier—and what he represented—was also coming under harsher scrutiny. “He is not a Negro before being a man. He is a Negro instead of being a man,” wrote Sarris in the Village Voice, dismissing the movie as “liberal propaganda…. Nowadays…Negroes are never condemned in the movies. Their faults, if any, are tolerated as the bitter fruits of injustice, and thus their virtues are regarded less as the consequences of free choice than [of] puppetry…. All that is expected of the Negro…is that he be inoffensive, and Poitier [is] heroically inoffensive…. It is not Poitier’s fault that he is used to disinfect the recent riots of any lingering racism. It is his destiny to be forbidden the individuality to say ‘I’ instead of ‘we.’”60
Sarris underestimated how unusual In the Heat of the Night would look to most moviegoers. Audiences reacted so strongly to the chance to see Poitier fight back, and the politics behind it, that In the Heat of the Night soon acquired the jokey nickname “Super-Spade Versus the Rednecks.”61 And, as Jewison had predicted, the scene in which Virgil Tibbs delivers a backhand slap to the face of a white racist became a galvanizing moment. “Sidney and I used to go to the [Capitol] Theater in New York to see the scene,” Steiger said later. “You could hear the black people say, ‘Go get ’em, Sidney!’ and the white people going, ‘Oh!’ And we used to break up. We could tell how many white and how many black were in the theater.”62 Anthony James, the young actor who had made just $100 a day to play the counterman in a Sparta diner who turns out to be involved in the murder, went to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles and listened to the gasps. “I have young African American friends who have seen the movie, and they don’t really notice the scene now,” he says. “But at the time, it was really startling.”63