They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! (1970)

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

A prostitute is murdered, and the first suspect is a liberal preacher. The detective in charge of investigations is a personal friend of the suspect; he investigates a series of persons who might have done it: a realtor from whom she was subletting the apartment where she lived; a pimp who owned the building where she lived; the building's janitor.

Moderately pleasurable policier. In the realm of ideas, the film draws an interesting parallelism between the several subplots , a fact which has been noted by Christopher Mulrooney (see my links). The unifying theme of the movie seems to me to be Impotence, in a general sense. The titular character has a son and a daughter, the former of whom is a lazy, disobedient kid who watches TV all day in his pajamas and mistreats his little sister. His father's idea of an education is based on talking to his son as a "friend", attempting a sort of alliance of the "boys" versus the "girls" (i.e., Tibbs' wife and his daughter). This tactics doesn't work at all, and when the boy simply shows his utter contempt for his father's authority, the latter slaps him in the face, and that doesn't work either. It becomes clear that Tibbs is utterly impotent to deal with his family. On the other side of the movie, we have this preacher who is engaged in passing a law which supposedly would improve the lives of poor people. He gets involved with a woman, a prostitute, whose life he tries to change by giving her books, and with whom he sleeps. So, if you compare the two strands of the plot, the thematic convergence becomes clear: authority presupposes respect, and respect presupposes a certain distance from the people from whom you want that respect. Violence emerges out of a fracture in the self-image of the supposed authority figure. In the film, this is also worked out symbolically as a necklace which the perpetrator makes the prostitute wear, and which she provocatively tears off of herself. That necklace had belonged to the perpetrator's mother, adding another layer of psychology to the events.

Rating: 51