Blaxploitaudient: They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

This is the second in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies I haven't seen.

It being Black History Month in February, I tasked myself with finding just the right title to watch for this series, but it's possible that effort may have backfired.

It was a bit doomed from the start. Although I reckon there is something empowering about any blaxploitation film, when considered through the right lens, any blaxploitation film is also necessarily going to include disempowering elements that lean into hurtful stereotypes, even if the ultimate goal is to undermine those stereotypes.

My first port of call, among the movies I've already identified in a Blaxploitaudient Letterboxd list, was those that at least also empowered women. But the two different movies I will watch this year starring Pam Grier, Coffy and Foxy Brown, both mentioned drug dealers or pimps or some other unsavory element of society in their brief plot descriptions, so I steered clear of them -- at least for this month. March and beyond, these will be fair game again.

Then I saw there was an obvious option staring me in the face: They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

(Incidentally, in the movie itself, the title is listed as They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! But it goes against my sense of correctness to capitalize only a single word in the title, even to provide the correct emphasis when spoken out loud. At least I include the exclamation point, which my iTunes rental did not.)

This being a sequel to In the Heat of the Night, I never would have thought it could qualify as a blaxploitation movie. But in my research leading up to this series, I saw the 1970 film listed as a "pre-Shaft blaxploitation movie," which implies that Shaft is considered the inception point of the genre. Clearly that assignation would have been given in hindsight, if people were not even talking about blaxploitation at the time it came out. In fact, given that the term was coined in 1972, that's obviously the case. 

Given Sidney Poitier's proximity to the civil rights movement and prominent role in the emergence of Black leading men in Hollywood, I could think of no better choice for Black History Month.

Here's why it may have backfired: 

Most of this cast is white. As is the director, Gordon Douglas.

It's true, Virgil Tibbs and his family are all Black, and there's a lot more time spent with his family, particularly his son, than you would expect in a movie that is largely the case of a murdered prostitute. (Even though I used this unsavory subject matter as a reason to exclude the Grier movies, you can't fully escape it, I suppose, because that's one of the things that makes it blaxploitation. At least Poitier's dignified presence takes the edge off it.)

And there are one or two more other Black characters, one another prostitute and one a mentally slow handyman who discovers the first prostitute after she's been killed. (An opening scene that actually has a bit of a giallo flavor to it.)

In general, though, you've got a bunch of white guys filling out the rest of the cast, including three very familiar faces: Martin Landau, Ed Asner, and Anthony Zerbe, whom I know from a lot of things but who I initially mistook for Tom Skerritt. (Which allowed me to look up Skerritt and remember that he is still alive and kicking at age 90.)

Given that this movie comes only three years after Poitier's watershed twin appearances in In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, it's not surprising that this would still be the sort of template in which he'd be fed to mainstream audiences. This is distinguished from other films considered blaxploitation by the fact that indeed, it would have been clear that the studio wanted the same audience from In the Heat of the Night to watch this. As it would develop, the blaxploitation movement would be a lot more clearly aimed at Black audiences than this movie is.

I said the choice of They Call Me Mister Tibbs! was sort of a backfire, but I don't have any objection to it being included in a blaxploitation series, and am very glad I've seen it. Let's talk about the parts that do resemble a blaxploitation movie.

One is clearly the groovy score by Quincy Jones. It's very seventies, even in only the first year of the seventies. I'm not musically literate enough to talk about the instruments that give away the score's placing within this landscape, but let's just say the score did definitely put me in mind of other blaxploitation movies I've seen, especially the way it gets ramped up and almost over-emphasized in action moments.

And those action moments are also noteworthy in terms of our genre expectations. There are only a few moments where Tibbs has to become a man of action and take out a potential assailant, but given that this was never Poitier's primary mode on screen, they are striking for using karate chops and other moves with heavy genre associations. So while I think the movie on the whole is not so different, tonally, from In the Heat of the Night, these individual moments do set it apart. 

Because I have, up to this point, failed to bring you up to speed about what this movie is about, I thought I should include a few thoughts on that quickly here. Virgil Tibbs and his family have relocated to San Francisco -- reason unknown -- and Tibbs is a lieutenant in the San Francisco Police Department. He's called in to investigate the death by strangulation and bludgeoning of a prostitute being protected by her pimp (that's Zerbe), and the prime suspect is a minister involved in the passage of a local proposition for an upcoming vote (that's Landau). In fact, given that the project relates to urban renewal, and the precariousness of the vote is one of the factors why they are being delicate with the investigation, it does make this probably a good choice for Black History Month, at least in that respect.

As alluded to earlier, it's interesting how much of this story is related to Tibbs' family dynamics, specifically the way his son (played by George Spell, whose real-life sister plays his sister in the film) is reaching an age where he's talking back to his parents and even experimenting with smoking. There's a memorable scene where Tibbs makes the boy (Andy by name) smoke a cigar and drink what appears to be some whiskey, which he predictably reacts to by vomiting in short order (since he seems to be about 11). Today, that kid would be taught a lesson in a different way, just because the idea of showing children smoking is so taboo. (Also taboo: hitting children. Tibbs hits a defiant Andy a couple times in this movie, though each time it is a slap on the face that is a very small percentage of his capabilities, which we saw on full display in In the Heat of the Night.)

Overall I was quite impressed with the film. There are some subtle bits of technique on display, and Poitier is brilliant as always. If it does ultimately feel fair to include They Call Me Mister Tibbs! in the blaxploitation genre, only just barely, it is likely one of the finest example of the form in terms of the overall quality of its craftmanship, to say nothing of the caliber of its performances.

Unlike In the Heat of the Night, in which the topic of race is quite foregrounded, They Call Me Mister Tibbs! basically includes no discussion of race whatsoever. It isn't even really an elephant in the room, since Tibbs is generally treated with respect. And perhaps that explains the existence of this and one other Virgil Tibbs film, 1971's The Organization, which I may or may not watch in this series depending on how much it is viewed as blaxploitation: They want to show this character become post-racial, at least for a little while. Mission accomplished. 

Before I leave you, I did want to mention a funny random pickup I made during the film. There's a scene outside a church where you see a lot of extras, and in probably no more than three seconds of screen time, I picked up actor Al White in his first (uncredited) screen appearance.

Don't know the name Al White? Allow me to refresh your memory:

He's the one on the left.

Yep, with just a few seconds' exposure, I picked out "Second Jive Dude" from another movie with an exclamation point in its title, Airplane!

Come to think of it, there may be more blaxploitation in that one scene of Airplane! than there is in the entirety of They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

R.I.P Sidney Poitier

At a time of year when I'm inclined to write a lot about film, and the posts are already backing up for future publication, I haven't paused to acknowledge the passing of some recent greats, including Betty White and Peter Bogdanovich. I was going to write a post about David Gulpilil, the indigenous Australian actor, and even watched a documentary about him, but it got lost in the ether of moving and other end-of-year activities.

The passing of Sidney Poitier has finally forced me to pause from whatever else I was doing, in among however many posts are starting to back up, to acknowledge a great, even though as I'm typing this I don't know exactly what I'm going to say about him.

As an indication of the ways my head is still in the clouds a bit, I didn't hear about Poitier's passing through the normal channels of news or social media. It was actually going on to my old website, AllMovie, that exposed me to an article devoted to him on the landing page. That was only 15 minutes ago. Now I'm writing this.

Poitier was not "my guy," as such, in that I didn't see that many of his performances all told (only eight out of more than 50). But there was something about his presence that just seared into you, even when he was not playing a man of extreme intensity. I fondly remember his performance in Lillies of the Field, for example, where he plays a very affable character, one not burdened by the responsibility of trying to explode the prejudices of white society.

This last was indeed the form in which Poitier made his greatest mark. In the year 1967 alone, Poitier appeared in two of his most iconic roles, each of which was conceived as a way of directly addressing the racial divide between Blacks and whites in America. Those were Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and In the Heat of the Night, the former of which found him as the boyfriend of a white girl trying to be excessively polite to win over her parents, the latter of which featured his Detective Tibbs working to pierce the racial preconceptions of a southern police force during a murder investigation. Both films were at the forefront of the discussions of social justice in 1967, flawed though they may have been in some respects, especially as viewed through a modern lens.

As the face of the attempt to truly integrate popular cinema, Poitier was, in many ways, the perfect candidate for this role, for better or worse. He could, in fact, be extremely "polite" -- and I use that word knowing it carries an insidious implication that "politeness" was something that did not occur naturally to Black people and had to be specifically striven for. However, "politeness" was a necessary first step with a white audience, when anything more radical would have been rejected out of hand.

To the credit of Poitier and the writers and directors who provided the content for him at that time, though, he rarely was forced -- in the roles I've seen anyway -- to just purely subjugate himself to the needs of this integrating venture. That's particularly the case in In the Heat of the Night, where he'd shrewdly toe the line in order to keep the peace, but only to a point -- and then he would stand up for himself in no uncertain terms, and by extension, anyone else who looked like him.

The usage of Poitier throughout his career was likely not perfect. Having seen only eight of his films, I can't really speak to that with authority. With any guinea pig, there would be teething issues, if that's not a mixing of metaphors.

But given the task he was saddled with, he accomplished it admirably, becoming a beloved figure both in the Black community and well beyond it. I know that every time I saw someone call his name at an awards ceremony, as he received some richly deserved career achievement award, I felt inclined to join the standing ovation along with the people who were actually there in the room with him.

At age 94, Poitier could not have been expected to live much longer. He's kind of like Betty White in that way. He lived a good long life that no one can reasonably say was too short. I hope he was happy for much of that life, even though I know it was not always easy for him.

That doesn't mean I'm not still a bit sad this morning as I contemplate the man's departure from this world. Great artists leave a mark, and even though we were never going to get another performance from Poitier, I'll miss seeing him stand at an awards ceremony, smile a smile of exquisite gratitude, and wave at his adoring fans, of which I was one.