So if you know one thing about this movie, it’s the clip you see in the Oscar montage every year where Sidney Poitier is all, “They call me Mr. Tibbs!” and so you might have the idea that this is one of those anti-racist civil-rights-era movies. As it happens, you have a correct idea, because the starting conceit is that Poitier is a cop from Philadelphia who gets arrested while traveling through the South and then ends up helping the super-racist (and also buffoonishly incompetent and corrupt) local cops solve a murder.

But so the murder itself has nothing to do with racial tensions at all, it’s just a basic case-of-the-week murder, and the path to solving it is straightforward police procedural stuff, enlivened mostly by Poitier having no real reason to stick around at all, and the movie trying desperately (and only semi-successfully) to find a reason why it makes sense for him to do so.

They made a TV show that’s meant to be an explicit sequel to this movie, back in the late ’80s/early ‘90s. Apparently the conceit of that show is that Tibbs comes back to this terrible little southern town and joins their police force, and then they solve crimes together. On the one hand, it seems unnecessary — the movie already said everything it had to say — but on the other hand, this really does seem to lend itself to that kind of premise, so.

Taken as a movie, it’s… basically fine. It feels kinda television-ish, honestly, with the kind of straightforward “people pull up in a car, go into a house, have a conversation” kind of scenes that you’d expect from the genre, and little that’s visually interesting or novel. Taken as a piece of political agitprop, it is of its time; by today’s standards, the villains are too obviously villainish, and the movie simultaneously lets them off the hook way too easily; it’s like the ancestor to Green Book. But things were different in 1967, and it’s arguably a mistake to try to map today’s attitudes onto it.