ho-lee-crap this filmed bowled me over. i've gone back to watch classic oscar-winning films plenty of times, and 9 times out of 10, they seem dated and i have a hard time appreciating them. not so, here. it's every bit as relevant today as in 1967, sadly. the racism, of course, and the stereotyping. but also the resentment between big city and small country town. the divide between northern life and southern life. and of course the way the richest among us dominate others, both through explicit effort and through accidental influence. i had only caught a few scenes of the late '80s tv show inspired from this, and i was probably too young to appreciate whatever it was doing well. it left me not expecting much from the original film, but watching it now, i could see why it spawned the show and two movie sequels. from the very opening scenes, this film stands apart from many others of the time. it establishes a tone, dark and rootsy and full of confidence. it's not introducing you to the main characters, it's telling you what kind of story this is going to be. then when the characters come along, rod steiger's performance as the police chief got the lion's share of attention. and he's great, but he has the juicier role, and i think he's guilty of overacting it as much as pacino in his biggest shouts. to me, the superior performance is in the measured restraint and emotional release of sidney poitier as detective (mister!) tibbs. he's magnetic in a way that a younger denzel washington might've modeled himself on, before he started chewing up the scenery in his roles. the story itself is also a pretty neat bit of a murder mystery, but one that emulates real policework more than a detective novel. the morally-reprehensible chief gillespie is eager to arrest anyone he can for the murder and file one in the 'win' column for his department. a small man in a small town, he shows almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever during the film, only occasionally doing 'the right thing' because he has a canny judgement for what is most likely to benefit himself in the long run. det. tibbs, on the other hand, is the moral center of the film, but he brings a ground level humanity to it that makes him believable, and not just some stereotypical moral paragon. he truly connects with people, and he also has his limits and weaknesses. tibbs has to spend most of the film restraining himself while he disqualifies potential murderers, inadvertently saving a series of people that would normally hate him and that you would've thought would side with gillespie. the portrayals of these two characters and how they constantly butt against each other is the crux of the film, but don't write this off as some "buddy cop" flick. most of those films feel the need to show the cops as ...'separate but equal'. not so, here. like in real us history, there's nothing equal about them. the film has the guts to go for extremes at times, and play subtleties when you don't expect it. how the ending plays out really seals the deal and differentiates it. i won't spoil it except to say don't expect some typical hollywood resolution of differences. sometimes the most honest thing you can hope for is just a glimmer that someone acknowledges the basic humanity and rights of another person. we often don't get more progress than that in the real world.