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Oscars Retrospective: In the Heat of the Night (40th Academy Awards Review)

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In the Heat of the Night~Ray Charles           This one is going to be a real treat to write about. In the Heat of the Night is that rare old movie, let alone Academy Award-winning one, that exists at the perfect nexus of being any movie critic’s ability to gush about. It started a whole new movie genre, it pioneered some new cinema techniques, it was very historically relevant at the time, it undermines multiple clichés, it has unique protagonists and, above all, it’s still a pretty great movie to boot.           In the Heat of the Night takes place in the rural hamlet of Sparta, Mississippi. A rich industrialist named Phillip Colbert (Jack Teter), who is building a factory on the outskirts of town, has been found murdered in the street. This being rural Mississippi, police chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) and his department try to pin the murder on the first black person they find, a man named Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitie...
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Success or Snub? In the Heat of the Night (40th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

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To see part 1, click here . You Only Live Twice Suite~John Barry - You Only Live Twice           As mentioned in the previous entry, this installment I actually have a lot of detail on as there’s an entire book written upon it that acts as a paired making-of book between the 5 nominees for Best Picture. 1967 is an inflection point in Hollywood and film history as this is the year that the Hollywood New Wave began. Baby boomers had come of age, were the prime movie-watching demographic and the artistic tendencies of an entire generation were to be the most lucrative moviegoing audience for the next decade as Hollywood had been losing money so consistently for so many years they had no choice but to gamble on these up-and-coming filmmakers. You ask any film expert or lover worth a damn and they'll all universally agree that the 1970s (give or take a few years on either side) was the best decade for filmmaking that ever was and probably ever will be. Several g...
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