WANT TO TALK

ABOUT RACE?:

SEE A 30-YEAR-

OLD MOVIE.

BY MARK GAUVREAU JUDGE | It wasn't the biggest grossing picture of all time, it didn't cost $200 million to make and teenage girls didn't go back again and again to the local multiplex to moon over its dreamy leading man. But the movie that won five Academy Awards, including best picture, 30 years ago has much more to say about America than "Titanic" ever will.

The film is "In the Heat of the Night," and while it doesn't have any sinkings, explosions or an army of extras, it addresses what has been America's central problem for more than 200 years: race. And it does so with a sophistication and intelligence that has become foreign to us, in spite of President Clinton's much vaunted but largely worthless "dialogue," a never-ending stream of books and Hollywood's latest mea culpa on the subject, "Amistad."

Amid all the post-O.J. racial obsessing, few have acknowledged the movie's timelessness, or even its anniversary. "The Graduate" got far more ink on its 30th anniversary, despite the fact that "In the Heat of the Night" beat it for best picture. Perhaps that's because its subtlety and ambivalence do not comport with the ham-fisted sensibilities of today's hypersensitive Hollywood.

"In the Heat of the Night" tells the story of a black police detective from Philadelphia, Virgil Tibbs, played by Sidney Poitier, who finds himself stranded in a small Mississippi town where a murder has recently been committed. Tibbs is sophisticated and articulate, in sharp contrast to the down-home ways of Sheriff Bill Gillespie -- Rod Steiger won the best actor award for his brilliant portrayal -- and his department, who are quick to jump to conclusions -- including initially blaming Tibbs for the crime.

This sounds like a typical "Mississippi Burning" liberal morality tale -- good Northern cop vs. racists lunkheads -- but the film, employing remarkably candid dialogue -- which earned it the Oscar for best screenplay -- conveys the depth, subtlety and complexity of race relations before they were reduced to today's easy clichés and slogans. The movie's plot device might be standard, but the message was profound: that education, intellect, decency and elegant self-comportment are the surest and best ways to eradicate racism.

N E X T+P A G E+| "Not my people -- yours."