Dani's Blog: In the Heat of the Night

“In the Heat of the Night” I felt was a very slow moving movie, but then again look at the time that it was made. Movies such as this one give me a new perspective of what times were like back then. I felt that in this movie Virgil was kept back in this town against his would and all he wanted to do was go home. He also would provide important information but because of his color he was considered to be not be as reliable as he was. He seemed to be the most intelligent out of all of the characters, not jumping to conclusions, and using his intuition wisely. While the other characters such as Chief Bill Gillespie was a white, middle-aged man whom I felt would watch people physically abuse Virgil and wait till the last second to say something to stop the act from happening. He was “not racist” in the way that he would defend verbally Virgil but in scenes where Virgil was fighting with three men it seemed that the Chief waited for the last second to go in and say, “Ok, Stop”. What the Chief did have was an obedient staff which showed that although I didn’t think he was very intelligent, the people who worked under him did. They listened to everything that he said to do. His men would run on a cliffy rock side next to water to catch the wrong guy, while the Chief would be lazy and sit in his car and wait. This could have been their plan to lure the guy towards the car but I thought it looked more like a lazier, easier way out. When they had discovered the dead body, he immediately told the officer to do something, the officer listened as if it was his father yelling at him, and obeyed his wishes. I felt that the movie was highly racist, and also showed that white people were stupid while the black person was the smart one.