9 Great Best Picture Winners That You May Not Have Seen

In The Heat Of The Night (1967)

If you are a lover of film history and have a special interest in the New Hollywood of the 1960s and 1970s, I highly recommend Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution. The book focuses on the changing face of the industry by looking at the preparation, production and cultural impact of the five films nominated for Best Picture for the year 1967. The best film from that bunch is The Graduate, and its success marked a major shift in American cinema. Regardless, another strong contender took home the top prize that year: In the Heat of the Night.

Norman Jewison’s drama focuses on a thorny partnership between a bigoted police chief and an African-American detective, during a time when the civil rights movement was front-page news. The film didn’t shy away too much from the prejudice of the American south. Sidney Poitier’s performance as the hardened Virgil Tibbs remains his most iconic role, even though it was fellow leading man Rod Steiger who took home the coveted Best Actor trophy. (It could have just been the Academy’s way of awarding Steiger for his powerful work in The Pawnbroker a few years earlier.)

Both incendiary and intelligent, In the Heat of the Night felt connected to the pulse of American life and therefore became one of the decade’s most vital films. With prime subject matter, exceptional acting and a fiery score from Quincy Jones, this drama is still a milestone in American film history. (That scene when the black Virgil slaps the white Eric Endicott, meanwhile, is a noted moment from modern American history. The audiences went wild.)