. . . does it make sense as a whodunit?
Maybe I need to watch it again. Which would be a pleasure, the performances are excellent.
Courtney and the girl tried to frame Officer Wood for Colbert’s murder and the girl’s pregnancy. They would have had to know that Officer Wood had $600 cash on him (the amount stolen from Colbert’s wallet). How did they know that?
Courtney hitches a ride with Colbert. Was it for the express purpose of robbing and killing him? If so, how did he know Colbert would be carrying cash?
Courtney must have taken Colbert’s car back to the hotel, and then walked to work at the diner. Nobody saw him driving the car? Nobody noticed he wasn’t at the diner when he should have been? Colbert’s wife didn’t notice that the car was there but her husband was nowhere around?
Does the timing work out? He kills Colbert at about 11, drops off the car, walks to the diner and is there at 1 or 1:30 when Officer Wood stops by. The diner seemed to be out in the country, or at least at the edge of town. Long walk in a short time, during which time the diner is closed, and anyone could have seen Courtney.
Anyways, great movie, but maybe with some holes in the plot, or some explanatory scenes that were edited out.
Great soundtrack. Hard to track down the CD, but worth it.
Possibly the thread title should have included the word “spoilers”.
One of my favorite movies; I just acquired it on DVD, and will keep those details in mind next time I watch it. There may be logical holes, but it’s certainly an interesting whodunit, in that there are, in succession, four different suspects for the same crime (five if you count Virgil Tibbs himself): the young cracker they lock up early on, then the rich plantation owner, then Sam the cop, then finally Courtney, the actual killer.
Each of these represents a Southern “type”, and has some meaning. The unfortunate young redneck locked up initially is a good ol’ boy, but not really a racist or a bad guy. The rich orchid-growing plantation owner is an arrogant genteel racist, and for a while Tibbs focuses on him out of a desire to “bring that fat cat down” – Tibbs, so often on the wrong end of bigotry, is blinded by his own prejudice against the rich white asshole. Sam Wood, the officer who (improperly) arrested Virgil, while not a virulent racist, definitely starts out with bigoted assumptions typical of a small-town Alabama cop. Courtney really is white trash.
Good points, Baldwin, about those characters. It’s hard to think of any of them as stereotypes, because the writers did such a good job fleshing them out.
When I’ve watched this movie before, I paid attention mostly to Poitier, but this time I watched Steiger. He was good when he was being the typical southern sheriff, but he was better when he showed that he really didn’t fit in. Or maybe it was that he realized that times were changing, and he was okay with it. I half expected him to go back to Philadelphia with Virgil.
It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but I agree the mystery was weak and the killer obvious. Still, Steiger and Poitier make the movie a great one, so the plot holes don’t really matter.