Adapted from the novel In the Heat of the Night by John Ball
When a white man's murdered body is found in the middle of a road in a small town in the American South in the middle of the night, the unfamiliar black man at the train station with a wad of cash in his pocket is an immediate suspect. Upon questioning by the police, the black man reveals himself to be Virgil Tibbs, who just so happens to be a police officer himself. Not only that; he happens to be a homicide expert. Reluctantly, Chief Gillespie and Officer Wood allow Tibbs to help them solve the case they initially arrested him for.
This is one of those adaptations where the gist of the overall story is the same, but the details are a lot different. The murder victim in the book is an orchestra conductor who's trying to hold a huge concert in the town, which is supposed to bring in lots of tourists. In the movie, he's trying to build a factory that will create lots of new jobs for both black and white people. Tibbs is from Pasadena in the book and Philadelphia in the movie, but that doesn't really make much difference; either way it's a faraway place that had slightly better race relations at the time. But his whole attitude is significantly different. In the book, the way he's treated by the white people he encounters is obviously very upsetting to him, but he's very non-confrontational about it. When he does things that flout the social rules, like sitting in the front seat of the police car next to a white officer, he does it quietly, almost nonchalantly. The book describes the white people's confusion and hesitation, and occasional revulsion, when he does such things that indicate that he expects them to treat him as an equal, but usually they decide to let it slide. Book Tibbs doesn't seriously break any major rules until towards the end, when he's about to catch the killer. In the movie, Tibbs is much more confrontational. Instead of casually breaking minor "rules" without drawing attention to them, Tibbs calls white people out for their racism. Perhaps the most significant example is when he's visiting Endicott. (Side note: there's a character named Endicott in both the book and the movie, but in the book he's originally from the north and is one of the few white people who willingly works with Tibbs, whereas in the movie he's a bigot with lots of black servants.) In the movie, Tibbs makes it clear that he suspects Endicott of the murder, and Endicott slaps him in the face. Tibbs immediately responds by slapping him back. This is in the presence of Chief Gillespie, who does nothing, which Endicott and others make clear is not acceptable, as pretty much any other white police chief would have immediately shot Tibbs in "self defense". There is nothing that even remotely resembles this incident in the book, but in the movie it stirs up the town and ultimately leads to a would-be lynch mob.
I had seen this movie several times, both because it won Best Picture and because it's a really good movie, but one thing had always bothered me: the murderer kind of seems to come out of nowhere. It's a great film about racial tensions in the American South in the 1960s, but the mystery part isn't very well done. This was the first time I had read the book, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the quality of the mystery is much better there. There are a lot of clues pointing to the killer in the novel that were cut out of the film. I can't elaborate too much without spoilers, but the movie kind of makes it seem like Tibbs himself doesn't even know exactly who it is until the murderer dramatically steps out of the shadows, which makes sense because nothing has been revealed to particularly implicate this person in the crime. In the book, on the other hand, while Tibbs admits that he's spent most of the time pursuing the wrong person, he ultimately recognizes the clues and figures it out without the killer having to dramatically pull a gun on him.
There are several other differences between the book and the movie, but I think the ones I've described and the others I noticed mainly boil down to this: the book is intended to be a murder mystery with racial undertones, whereas the movie is intended to be a story about racial issues that happens to involve a murder mystery. They both do their job very well, so even though this isn't the most consistent adaptation to win this award, I would call it one of the best.
Next up: The Lion in Winter, for which Katharine Hepburn won Best Actress (although technically she tied with Barbra Streisand)
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