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I watched this recently last year and realized I had always confused it with "Fierce Creatures" (1997)
Not a mistake I'd make unfortunately. I remember seeing that turkey in the cinema all too well! 🤮 (with my Python-fan family).
The problem is, it paints the victim as playing a part in "deserving" her fate, while making the murderers sympathetic.
The second part is certainly true to some extent but not the first. The film is careful to portray the working class mother/victim as desperately wanting to understand what is going wrong with her daughter and showing her love and affection right to the last scene in the cafe and completely undeserving of her fate. The cold, callous, loveless middle class parents (who seem to find having a daughter an irritating inconvenience) are portrayed as the "villains" to us the audience (if this film does have pure villains) but the two disillusion girls (mostly Parker) are shown to have it backwards in their warped perception of reality, idolising the more cultured/higher status parents and looking down on the lower status/simple parents, who actually do love them/her.
I wish that Walsh would've changed more of the names, locations, and other details and just made a fictional story inspired by this but which no one would connect with the actual Parker–Hulme murder case....
It's a movie, you can't (by definition) get every detail right in 2-hours but I think Jackson and Walsh made a lot of effort to get a lot of it right, while still telling a story their way.
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Director: Norman Jewison
Country: United States
Length: 110 minutes
Type: Crime, Drama
Given that this is a 55-year old film talking about racism in the US, I thought it might be a bit dated and/or simplistic but some films are "classics" for a reason. I knew within a few minutes that 'In the Heat of the Night' was one of those peerless classics. The fractious relationship between Sidney Poitier's (Sherlock Holmes level) big-city Homicide detective Virgil Tibbs and Rod Steiger's small-town, small-time, Police Chief Gillespie, is wonderfully nuanced and multi-layered. Both men have issues with controlling their anger but once Gillespie calms down, he's always prepared to admit Tibbs is damned right and to force himself to humbly ask for Tibbs' help with a case in which Gillespie is totally out of his depth. Both men have an excess of pride but Gillespie frequently swallows his. Like seemingly everyone in the town, he's prejudiced but he's at least trying to contain it. Virgil Tibbs is our brave, upright, proficient, inspiring hero but Steiger manages to keep the gum-chewing Gillespie somewhat sympathetic, from a character that could've been another straight villain in a lesser film. 'In the Heat of the Night' is also just a great murder mystery plot that had me guessing 'til the end.
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