When it won the Best Picture award some forty years ago, it marked the official debut of Oscar's social conscience.
Yes, the odd message picture had won before - The Best Years of our Lives, Gentleman's Agreement and On The Waterfront, for example - but these were deviations in a long tradition of rewarding the popular and the sentimental.
1967 ushered in a new age. When the top prize went to Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night, it confirmed once and for all that the political Oscar was here to stay, a tradition that has continued through such subsequent Best Picture winners as Deer Hunter and Crash.
Heat, in fact, beat out the most popular film of that year, Mike Nichols' The Graduate, the first counter-culture film to break through to a wide demographic (though Nichols garnered the Best Director award over Jewison.) Both broke ground, and traces of both, it can be argued, can still be found coursing through the bloodstreams of today's filmmakers: The Graduate in films such as Rushmore and Garden State, and Heat in examinations of race like Glory and the aforementioned Crash.
Of the two, though, it's Heat that seems less dated today. Yes, because the counter culture has come of age, and yes, because the race issue remains (sadly) relevant, but also because, civil rights aside, the film a tightly wound thriller with dimensional characters, an energizing central dynamic, and outstanding cinematic atmosphere.
When Jewison read Sterling Silliphant's well-rounded adaptation of John Ball's book, he instantly recognized a vehicle in which he could comment on the rampant racism that had irked him since his first trip through America as a young navy man from Canada.
Heat, then, was a calculated step in Jewison's transition from maker of light, commercial comedies to voice of mainstream cinematic consciousness. The popularity of Heat allowed him to continue to explore the plight of oppressed cultures - Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar, A Soldier's Story - and to tell offbeat tales of political wrongdoing - And Justice For All, In Country, Hurricane - for a broad audience.
No doubt, then, given this penchant, that the veteran filmmaker found this year's crop of Oscar hopefuls - from Babel and Letters from Iwo Jima to The Last King of Scotland and The Queen - much to his liking, recognizing therein the continuation of a practice he began the night his little thriller with the big statement took home the top prize.
