To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and In the Heat of the Night (1967) are movies that deal with similar themes in similar settings, but otherwise could not be more different. To Kill a Mockingbird is an adaptation of Harper Lee’s famous book by the same name; set in 1932, it centers around lawyer Atticus Finch as he tries to defend a black man falsely accused of rape in a small Southern town. In the Heat of the Night also deals with relations between blacks and whites in a Southern town, this time in the 1960’s. It also deals with a crime: a black homicide detective from Philadelphia, Virgil Tibbs, must work together with a white police chief to find a murderer. Both movies have to do with race relations in the South; both have to do with crimes. Yet, though the movies were released within five years of each other, I believe there are fundamental differences between them (and between the cultures that produced them) that affect how well they work as stories, how they draw viewers in. Because of these differences, in my opinion, In the Heat of the Night pulls in its viewers in a way that To Kill a Mockingbird just does not.
To Kill a Mockingbird was released in 1962, by which point color technology was available, but the film is in black and white. At least to me, it appears to be one of the last survivors of the Silver Screen era. This manifests itself in a multitude of small ways: Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck (himself a famous Silver Screen actor), wears a three-piece suit, always maintains poised, utters sophisticated lines; likewise, there is a sense in which the movie remains poised, theatrical. It never crosses the lines that modern movies do, to become coarse or flamboyant or melodramatic. The movie still follows the Hays Code, which would be abandoned certainly by the time of In the Heat of the Night: this Code, followed for decades now, prohibited strong language, sexual content, and so forth from entering movies. In all these ways, I think To Kill a Mockingbird represents an era of movie-making that is gone: when movies remained poised and professional, where the acting style was more theatrical, when cinema was conscious of itself as an art form and followed certain rules – all of this, perhaps, at the expense of pulling viewers in.
In the Heat of the Night, on the other hand, is a modern movie. It contrasts with the Silver Screen in many ways, the most basic being that it is filmed in color. Also, the acting style and characters are fundamentally different. These characters are not always poised, do not always wear suits and ties, and the dialogue does not sound so much like it was written beforehand. We have overweight police officers, and a shifty-looking white kid in jeans and a sleeveless denim vest. The people do not look like actors – the actors look like people. The movie gets across the idea of a small, poor town in the South in the 1960’s in a way that To Kill a Mockingbird did not get across the idea of a similarly small, poor Southern town in the 1930’s. Another difference that we see is that In the Heat of the Night does not shrink from effective action sequences: we have the police chasing a runaway in quite a dramatic scene; at one point we are looking at the fugitive from beneath his feet, but at other times we zoom out and watch him as a tiny speck racing across a bridge. This is a cinematographic style, I think, that differs from that of older films. Finally, another difference that is evident in In the Heat of the Night is that the Hays Code has been abandoned. The language – though not as strong as in many later films – is certainly stronger than it would ever have been in older movies; the sexual implications are stronger in this film than they would have been a few years earlier. All of this – the color filming, the acting style, the filming style and action sequences, and even the abandonment of the Hays Code – pulls viewers in (whether in a good way or a bad way) more effectively than older movies, including To Kill a Mockingbird, ever did. Regarding my personal experience of these films, I found To Kill a Mockingbird an effective movie, but one that left me more detached – more conscious of the movie as a movie – than In the Heat of the Night.
I stated earlier that To Kill a Mockingbird is, in my opinion, representative of an age of movie-making that is gone, while I see In the Heat of the Night as a modern movie. To make a general statement, I think modern movies, movies that focus on a certain gritty realism, on dramatic filming of action sequences, movies that have abandoned the Hays Code – I think these movies pull viewers in more effectively, in both good and bad ways. Yet I think this might have come at a cost: movies today may draw people in by tossing in incredible special effects, thrilling chases, or titillating scenes, but I wonder if people today have forgotten that movies used to be not just entertainment, but also art. I think that in the days of the Silver Screen, directors, actors, and everyone else were somehow self-conscious regarding the artistic side of cinema; cinema was like theater, except more convincing. The culture has changed dramatically since then, though, and so have the movies.
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