Tonight we watched ‘In the Heat of the Night,’ the 1967 movie about a black cop (Sydney Poitier) who after getting falsely arrested in Sparta, Mississippi ends up leading the murder investigation for the white police chief (Rod Steiger). Although much of the movie trades in the more cliched (if not exactly irrelevant) stereotypes about racism in small-town America, the real revelation for the modern viewer is perhaps the simmering chemistry between Poitier and Steiger. Make no mistake about it: underneath the crime and racism, this is effectively a love story between the two men that comes within a fraction of an inch of being consummated during a drunken seen where — both ‘bachelors’ — they confess a loneliness to each other that could not happen today without explicitly disavowing (and most often in mocking tones) the possibility of what seems to be unfolding. Let’s hope that at some point in the future, such mystery and ambiguity can return to the movies in a context where non-heterosexual affairs are neither gawked at or ridiculed, but simply one continent on the complicated emotional landscape of love.
