Sherry Chandler

There was a time when I could have had you shot

Endicott: Gillespie?
Gillespie: Yeah?
Endicott: You saw it.
Gillespie: I saw it.
Endicott: What are you gonna do about it?
Gillespie:I don’t know.
Endicott: I’ll remember that.

Watching In the Heat of the Night, my younger self saw the heroism of Tibbs and the stubbornness of Gillespie. Watching In the Heat of the Night again this sultry weekend, my older self saw the heroism of Gillespie and the stubbornness of Tibbs.

My husband remarked that it’s a buddy flick. And so it is.

My son remarked on the elegance of Sidney Poitier’s hands, which led me to notice how often the movie focuses on those long fingers probing and picking at the evidence of the case. I don’t know that that has any significance whatsoever. Except, of course, that he uses one of those same elegant hands to console the white woman, Mrs. Colbert, and to slap the white plantation owner Endicott.

That most famous movie slap leads to the dialogue above, which is as revolutionary in its way as the slap itself. Because what Gillespie was supposed to do is clear and the result of his refusal to do it is also made clear.

The way Steiger delivers that simple line, “I don’t know,” is to my mind what won him the Oscar for this performance.

Where Tibbs’s stubbornness manifests is in his desire, manipulated by Gillespie, to show up the rubes and to put Endicott in the frame, to “pull that fat cat down. . . bring him right off this hill!”

The impetus for watching the film again was to take note of the performance of Kentucky-born Warren Oates as Deputy Sam Wood.

In John Ball’s novel, In the Heat of the Night — the Edgar-winning first novel in his Detective Virgil Tibbs series — Sam Wood is a central character, possibly the most upright white man in the town. In the film, the character’s role is significantly reduced. Still, according to Oates biographer Susan A. Compo, director Norman Jewison picked Oates for the role over Ed Asner, in part because he was casting genuine southerners in the supporting roles but also because Oates “had this twinkle in his eye” and “he had so much energy on screen.”

Here is what Compo says about Oates’s Sam Wood:

Sam Wood provided Oates with the opportunity to examine his role in a new way. Wood is neither stock nor caricature, although in the wrong hands he could have been both. “I tried to see him as a man who had real problems. I wanted the audience to see him that way too,” Oates said. There is humor in the scenes between Steiger (who played Bill Gillespie) and Oates, and in the scene in the diner where he never gets his pie, but Oates and Jewison were united in their desire to keep his performance subdued. “It’s easy to unconsciously steal a laugh, but we hoped to preserve Sam’s dignity and avoid anything that would reduce him to a cliché statement,” Oates said. Wood “was written a little, we felt, on the clichéd side and I was anxious to make the film very real,” Jewison said. Oates “was very concerned that it not be someone we’ve seen before. He was on a constant search for that kind of unique character.”

. . . I think Warren had his eye on Steiger as someone who had a tendency to go over the top,” Jewison said, and Oates’s quiet assessment prompted him to turn in a performance that was far more muted than his previous works on film. Oates’s tendency toward the manic . . . is entirely absent from In the Heat of the Night. [Warren Oates: A Wild Life (Univ Press of Kentucky, 2009, pp. 149 - 151]

Oates is capable of a lot of power on the screen as evidenced by small films like The Shooting, where he holds his own against Jack Nicholson in the role of bounty hunter Willet Gashade. But he was also a very generous supporting actor.

My son said “Barney Fife.” I quote my son a lot because he is an astute viewer but in this case I think he’s wrong. Sam Wood, who lusts after pie and authority and Delores Purdy, who is all elbows and toothy grin, is considerably darker than Barney Fife.

A couple of trivia notes: the red high-finned Plymouth with the Rebel flag license plate that is used by the gang of rednecks out to do to Virgil Tibbs what Bill Gillespie would not, belonged to a local man named George L. Kirkland. Kirkland was Oates’s stand-in and also one of the chain-wielding thugs who accost Tibbs.

and

the song “Foul Owl on the Prowl” that is playing on the diner jukebox was sung by Glenn Campbell. The original intent had been to use Sam the Sham’s “Little Red Riding Hood,” and that is the song the character is actually dancing to. But the movie was made on a tight budget and Glenn Campbell was cheaper.

“Not so much seedy as downright abject”

It is the sad poetry of that line that expresses Peckinpah’s vision, in which people find the courage to do what they must do in a world with no choices.

So says Roger Ebert about Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).

The line in question is Elita’s. Elita the prostitute and Bennie the bartender’s lover. She says it to Bennie as she is being led away to be raped by a nameless biker, played by Kris Kistofferson. “‘I been here before and you don’t know the way.”

According to Susan Compo in her biography Warren Oates: A Wild Life (Univ Press of Ky, 2009), Peckinpah had originally intended the movie as a vehicle for Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda, a casting that, in hind sight, I find utterly unthinkable. Cat Ballou, this is not.

Compo says that Peckinpah also tried James Coburn and Peter Falk before he finally offered the part to Warren Oates.

Oates was never, ever going to say no. “If a director like Peckinpah offers me a film tomorrow, I’m not going to read the script,” he told Image et Son. “I wouldn’t know how to stop myself. There aren’t many people I’d say that about.” [p. 275]

If it had not been for my interest in Warren Oates, I would not have watched Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Having seen it, I can’t imagine anybody but Warren Oates in the lead role. With any of those other actors, the movie would probably have been a more typical Hollywood adventure, and a Hollywood adventure is not what Peckinpah had set out to make.

I have to say that he got me in this one. Two-Lane Blacktop, the other cult film for which Oates is famous, struck me a pretty lame. The only vital thing in it was Oates’s performance. But Alfredo Garcia is a gripping film.

According to Compo, Oates got $50,000 for doing the film and his co-star Isela Vega got $7,000 for the role of Elita. Vega’s performance is compelling. I have a lot of respect for Jane Fonda, but she could not have done this role the way Vega did it. Jane Fonda has no idea of a world where there are no choices.

Indeed, when Bennie proposes to Elita during a picnic, there were tears from onlookers and actors. “I just knew there was no place to hide in that scene,” Oates told Donnie Fritts, who played a biker in the movie. “She had me, and I was cryin’ too.” [Compo, p. 280]

For a plot synopsis, see Wikipedia. For a great review, see Roger Ebert. For the story of on-the-set hi jinks, see Compo’s biography.

“The script deals with female vengeance,” Peckinpah said. [Compo, p. 275]

So it does. Maybe that’s why it resonates so with me.