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I'm pretty anti-list, I guess, as I feel art is so subjective that making a list of 100 best anything is a fool's errand. I'm here because I love great movies A LOT. That being said, I'd much rather THIS movie be on any Great list than Bonnie and Clyde or Easy Rider, two very important "new Hollywood" movies I just don't particularly care for. I mean, I love Army of Darkness, it's one of my favorite movies, but the only way THAT movie gets a mention in this conversation is when Amy threw some shade at it when interviewing Embeth Davidtz on the Schindler's List episode, as if it was some garbage bullshit Davidtz had to do before making a "real" movie. Anyway, greatness is subjective... but Schindler's List is really great by any metric, and so is Davidtz. Anyway, as for the "of its time vs. timeless" argument, I love art that IS of its time. Everything from German "New Objectivity" in the 1920s to Star Trek are examples of art or artistic movements that could have only originated in the very specific time and place they did, and from the artists who created them. Of course, some of that stuff still resonates and comes back in vogue, depending on the current political and social climate or whatever wave of nostalgia is in vogue. And I don't hold anything against timelessness in art either. I think something like Beauty and the Beast is timeless, while In the Heat of the Night is very 1960s, both in the way it depicts race relations and that it's a police procedural that clearly came before the flood of CSI and Law and Order shows, which I think changed the way audiences viewed all police procedurals. It's just kind of assumed now that the public knows about post-mortem examinations and how they work, while that might not have been the case in 1967. So methods of storytelling has changed, society has changed, filmmaking has changed, but we are still profoundly affected by these same issues and are still fascinated by this format of storytelling, so I think it's going to resonate. Art can tell us how far we've come, how far we still have to go, and maybe even how we've regressed. Also, I just really like this movie. And since this IS a Norman Jewison film, I feel it is entirely appropriate to say that Sidney Poitier is Ted Neeley Handsome!* *See the Musical Mondays group in the HDTGM forums for the origin of this reference

Here was my issue: According to Letterboxd, I watched this movie for the first time last year. and aside from a vague outline and the famous line, I had forgotten almost everything about it. Granted, I've seen a ton of movies since then, but still, I generally have a good memory for these types of things. If I've seen it (or read it) I can almost always give you - if not beat for beat - a pretty good description of the plot. For this, nothing. "There's a murder in a Southern town and Poitier gets roped into it after being falsely accused" is probably the best I could do. I couldn't have told you who got murdered, why, or who did it. That's not to say that I think the movie isn't fantastic. The performances are top notch and it grabs you as you're watching it, but I don't know...how many times should I have to watch it for it to become memorable? Shouldn't the "best" movies stick with you? Anyway, I dropped my initial Letterboxd star rating from 5 to 4 1/2 stars. Not a lot, but it bothered me I couldn't remember anything about it. That being said, I still think it belongs on the list. I even think it deserves to be pretty high, but "low" high, if you know what I mean

Looking back over my personal ranking (I add each film after a rewatch but before i listen to the podcast) it's clear to myself why some films are at the top, and why some are at the bottom. That middle part gets really messy, and this film found its way into the middle. Interestingly, I couldn't find any place for it except next to Bonnie and Clyde. In The Heat gets the edge, however, from my personal reaction to the movie, and it was a very emotional viewing experience. That's all I want to say about that. Without that emotional resonance, however, I doubt I would have placed the film so high. While watching it, I wondered if it could have been the True Detective of its day. Well, the first season I mean. That also speaks to how cinematic our television series are these days. Having no Simpsons' reference? I took to TVtropes.org which usually has a section that lists any homages, etc. There weren't any, although they do name a whole trope They Call Me Mister Tibbs. They also had some interesting trivia that didn't come up in the podcast, although without any references cited I'm not sure how to vet the information. for example, the site claims Endicott was supposed to be a sympathetic character in the novel, but was changed for the sceenplay, and similarly in the novel Tibbs was a polite and non-confrontational character. Another tidbit was that Steiger didn't want to have to chew gum all the time, but grew to like the way it helped him act. Anyway, the TvTropes page is here https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/InTheHeatOfTheNight It also pointed out something I didn't notice at the time, the "Feet-first Introduction," where the audience doesn't see Tibbs fully until ten minutes into the film. I wonder if this is important thematically or just a dramatic choice by the director. And maybe it happened off screen, but I sure hope Tibbs called his mother.

If TCM wants to be on top of things, they should match up with Unspooled. Like put all the Mr. Tibbs movies up there this week, maybe another Jewison movie or two, and they'd monopolize my viewing for sure. Throw Searchers and a handful of John Wayne classics up next week, etc. I always wish I had more time to explore the movies adjacent to the AFI/Unspooled (by director or content), but we only get a week before the next movie and that would be so handy. Also when are Paul & Amy going to host some programming on there? And Paul & June & Jason too. There's some untapped potential for TCM! Call me TCM

I decided to make a separate thread for this, since it's rare that we get an episode on a film that coincides with the time that it plays on TCM, but a large number of the AFI Top 100 films play on TCM (and are usually subsequently available for 7 or 8 days on WatchTCM online, found here: http://www.tcm.com/watchtcm/films/?ecid=subnavmoviesondemand ). As we approach TCM's Oscar celebration in February, there should be more available than usual. Not every single film that plays on TCM goes up online for the next week, but it seems to be the case often enough that it's always worth checking. I know these still are unlikely to coincide with the episodes, but in case people are interested in watching them earlier/later, or if you have a DVR and want to record them and save them for later, here's the schedule of AFI films that I could find: Currently on WatchTCM: #55 North By Northwest - expires January 2nd #38 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - expires January 5th #88 Bringing Up Baby - expires January 8th Playing on TCM soon: #29 Double Indemnity - December 30 #19 On The Waterfront - January 2 #47 A Streetcar Named Desire - January 2 #100 Ben-Hur - January 3 #81 Spartacus - January 4 #78 Modern Times - January 6 #44 The Philadelphia Story - January 15 & 18 #15 2001: A Space Odyssey - January 28 #5 Singin' In the Rain - January 31 #82 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans - February 1 #93 The French Connection - February 2 #52 Taxi Driver - February 2 #55 North By Northwest - February 2 #26 Mr. Smith Goes To Washington - February 4 #28 All About Eve - February 7 #42 Bonnie and Clyde - February 9 #98 Yankee Doodle Dandy - February 9 #75 In the Heat of the Night - February 9 #37 The Best Years of Our Lives - February 11 #5 Singin' In the Rain - February 12 #3 Casablanca - February 12 #19 On The Waterfront - February 13 #7 Lawrence of Arabia - February 13 #36 The Bridge On the River Kwai - February 14 #44 The Philadelphia Story - February 14 #47 A Streetcar Named Desire - February 18 #64 Network - February 18 #100 Ben-Hur - February 18 #27 High Noon - February 18 #25 To Kill a Mockingbird - February 20 #87 12 Angry Men - February 20 #67 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - February 23 #38 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - February 24 #46 It Happened One Night - February 25 #1 Citizen Kane - February 25 #73 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - February 27 #31 The Maltese Falcon - February 27 #15 2001: A Space Odyssey - March 2 #69 Tootsie - March 2 #17 The Graduate - March 3 #95 The Last Picture Show - March 3

The Soup Nazi, he'd be there.

I'm just listening to this now, and I'm sure someone has already brought this up on Twitter or something, but I think the movie Amy and Paul are thinking about is To Sir With Love. Which is about "social and racial issues in an inner city school." I haven't seen it since college, but I remember it being pretty good.

She-Devil and Death Becomes Her are both very HDTGM-able.

That was the original list, done in 1998. There was an updated version in 2007, which is what Paul and Amy are using. https://www.afi.com/100years/movies10.aspx Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was dropped from the new list, and In the Heat of the Night added. So in each case there are three films from 1967. For film years, I think 1976 is the winner. Four Best Picture nominees made the list: Taxi Driver, Rocky (the winner), Network, and All the President's Men.

Paul talked about how this was a perfect "bridge movie" for the Academy Awards, smack in the middle of The Music Man and the subversive Bonnie and Clyde. First of all, it wasn't The Music Man, it was Dr. Doolittle (the Music Man was 5 years earlier). But Paul and Amy gave major short shrift to how epic that year's Oscars race was. You guys HAVE to read what must be one of the best books written about Hollywood: "Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood" by Mark Harris. (for what it's worth, Quentin Tarantino calls it "one of the best books I've read in my life", as quoted on Amazon) When I read it I didn't know which film had won for Best Picture, and it was riveting to see how the race played out, and what those five films said about Hollywood and America at the time. Looking back, 1967 was the pivotal moment when Hollywood started to shed the old-fashioned Biblical epics and movie musicals and moving toward socially relevant, auteurist fare. So in 1967 you had two revolutionary films, still considered classics, that captured the Vietnam-era American malaise: Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate two films starring Sidney Poitier that tackled contemporary issues of race and prejudice, albeit in different ways: In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and a film that "old Hollywood" shoved down that Academy's throat, just because they wasted so much money on it and wanted to at least reap some critical self-acclaim even if no one paid to see it in theaters: Dr. Doolittle From what I remember of the book - in addition to incredible stories about Stanley Kramer, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, etc. - was that it was wide open season for Best Picture in 1967. It could have gone to any of those films (except for Dr. Doolittle). It turned out to be a perfect triangulation between the ballsy, forward-looking The Graduate or Bonnie and Clyde and - not the musical, but the more audience-friendly depiction of idyllic race relations, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? And so In the Heat of the Night won. I don't know which AFI list this is, or how it differs from the list Unspooled is using...but here you've got 3 of the Oscar nominated movies from '67 on the Top 100 list and In the Heat of the Night, the Best Picture winner, ISN'T INCLUDED. https://www.afi.com/100years/movies.aspx I don't know if Guess Who's Coming? is on Paul and Amy's list. I'm assuming The Graduate is. But with 3 or 4 Oscar-nominated films, 1967 might be the winningest year for movies on the list, at least tied with 1939.

Yea, Batman Begins is without question a better movie than Batman and Robin. But on a rainy day if I were given the choice to watch one or the other i'd more than likely go with Batman and Robin.

Yes, this kind of movie does tend to get awards attention just for its subject matter. And when it's clumsily handled within the movie those selections tend to age poorly. I got some of that sense with In the Heat of the Night (though to be clear, I think it's better than the above cited examples).

The are people now who don't make the cops in this movie look cartoonishly racist. I also think the idea that there are people of color who feel they have to be damn near perfect at all times isn't far fetched (I'm white. So, I can't speak from experience on this but I can go with what I've heard from friends). While Green Book isn't going to win best picture, I won't be surprised at all if it's nominated for best picture. We aren't that far removed from Driving Miss Daisy winning or The Help being nominated. And let's be honest, Zootopia won best animated feature, in part, because of its "important message" despite being a poorly handled metaphor at best (plus, is Disney and they win animated feature).

Yeah, I wouldn't put Zootopia on the list either. This is a tricky argument, because my "of its time" argument shouldn't be confused with a "racism and/or police abuse no longer exist" argument. Of course they do. In that sense, the subject matter of the film is certainly still relevant. What seems dated to me is more in how it's presented, like "Guys, can you believe this? Look at the racism!" Most of the non-Steiger cops play almost as cartoons to me. And there's also the Tibbs character, who is forced to stand in as the perfect black guy who is good at everything, just to get the white characters to move even a little bit in his direction (though I did appreciate the detail of him originally focusing on the wrong guy). As Amy noted, that movie today is Green Book -- well-praised enough for the performances and might get some nominations, but not very likely to win Best Picture.

I would argue the opposite: this is still wildly relevant today. People still look at people of color and women in their jobs as they did Mr. Tibbs - a range of disdain to low expectations. Very little has changed. I mean, he got arrested solely for reading while black, which still to this day happens constantly (and have triggered the Black Lives Matter movement). What I like about the movie is what they said in the episode: it's not full of monologuing or preaching or whatnot. I found the police case to be realistic in that regard too -- instead of showing a racially charged murder to condemn racism, the movie focuses on a regular murder and shows the racism all around that. It's in the autopsy, in the coworkers and boss, in the victim's wife, in the interrogation suspects. If Tibbs showed up down there and solved a KKK murder case or something, that starts to push into melodrama. Instead, it reflects reality, showing us how deeply racism is embedded in the everyday routine. That's also why I believe it gets a balance in not just being about racism. It is about a murder case. The comments on society just come along with that.

It's a better police procedural that's ostensibly about racism than Zootopia. I get your criticism and agree to an extent. But I loved this movie when I saw it. I wouldn't necessarily say it's just a product of its time since it's themes are still pretty relevant today (and aged significantly better than Poitier's other movie this year about racism Guess Who's Coming To Dinner). I don't have any more to add since I haven't seen this in well over a decade and specifics are pretty much lost.

I guess I'm the only "no" vote here (not my usual position!), so I'll just say that I agree with Amy -- it's a movie with some great lead performances and is an easy enough watch, but the movie doesn't feel "timeless" to me. It feels like something that is absolutely a product of its time and is mostly only interesting as a snapshot of that time. Some of the issues they discussed about Jewison's direction are (IMO) things that tend to show up throughout his career, especially in "social problem" movies like this: being generally over-emphatic with the emotional beats and concentrating so much on the message of the movie that he loses the function of the plot a little bit. The structure of the movie is a police procedural and murder mystery, but they clearly want the film to be "about" racism . . . yet the resolution of the mystery has nothing to do with racism. These little things bugged me, though Poitier and Steiger were so good together that the movie kind of works anyway. If I just look at the other Best Picture nominees from 1967, I'd say both Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate have held more relevance throughout the years than In the Heat of the Night. I'd be okay taking it off the list. I guess I could be convinced to keep it on because there's nothing else to showcase Poitier, who is a major figure in American film history.

My Mom grew up in Sparta, Illinois, where this film was made (to substitute for Sparta, Mississippi). It was an hour south of St. Louis, but still on the north side of the Mason-Dixon line. When this movie came on TV in the late 60's/early 70's, we were living in St. Paul. Mom would have us watch the movie and show us the racist things that we didn't see growing up in Minnesota. Some were blatant and some were more subtle. You brushed on one of the more subtle items at the end of the movie, where Rod Steiger carries Sidney Poiter's suitcase to the train. This was a big deal to my Mom. At that time in the South, she told us, it would have been VERY unusual for a white man to carry a black man's bag. There are little things like this in the movie that we don't really get the impact of now that audiences in the late 60's would have picked up on. Good podcast - keep them coming.

He was more known doing blockbusters at that point than doing what people would consider serious movies. So, if you're talking about cultural importance, that aspect is probably more important. Back to, if I read Night before Schindler's List came out, I had to double-check dates. I'm not positive if that was the case. The timing was very close. It depends if I read Night in 8th grade or 10th grade (8th and 10th grade both covered the Holocaust - weirdly I think in English classes). Ninth grade history did cover the Holocaust as part of World War II. Schindler's List came out in the second half of my freshman year of high school. I'm pretty sure 9th grade history was when I was shown American footage of soldiers liberating Jews in concentration camps. Seeing living people emaciated beyond what I thought was physically possible to be alive - that left a stronger impression on me than anything I would end up seeing in Schindler's List. Though to clarify, 15 year old me did like Schindler's List. It was just as I got older a little older that I came to dislike it. My memory is stronger in its belief that I read Night before seeing Schindler's List. I suspect I did not see it in theaters. We did watch it 10th grade and they showed it in prime time TV unedited and without commercials (I think we at least read Night before that though). I will also point out (though for what point, I don't know), in the This American Life episode, the students said they didn't know anything about the Holocaust when they went into the movie theater, but they did say, "I think we talked about it a bit in 8th grade, and the teacher gave us a brief lesson about an hour before going into it." I'm trying to organize my thoughts on the most concise way to express why I don't like the film these days, and i don't have time tonight, and I'm not entirely sure when I'm going to get time soon. Visiting family next week and I'm going to try to cram some movie watching in before I go. I'm sure we'll eventually get a streak of movies where I don't have a lot to contribute about them, and that's when I'll get some lengthy posts in on Schindler's List.... and A Clockwork Orange as well... Yeah, set expectations appropriately low on this happening. One small interesting thing I came across, while looking for links on the topic of other movies that portray the Holocaust, I found this quote: https://www.nydailynews.com/archives/gossip/benigni-life-isn-beautiful-spielberg-article-1.822494 Stumbled across it, while I was looking to find old articles confirming Spielberg did not like Life is Beautiful as I remember hearing at the time. It doesn't refute that a Holocaust movie shouldn't have entertainment qualities to it, but since everyone it seems, has been praising the movie for being entertaining, seeing that attributed statement makes me think he wasn't going for that (though I also think he failed in refraining from doing so, and his natural instincts took over). Related to Paul being surprised that people didn't like Schindler's List for being entertaining, Spielberg's negative reaction to Life is Beautiful seemed to be seemed to their dislike of Schindler's List. And on that note, (I'd have to dig up the links I found), Son of Saul, which I have not seen, came out a few years ago, and Lanzmann (director of the documentary Shoah, and I believe I read, he didn't like Schindler's List either, but I'd need to double check that. Art Spiegelman, who wrote the graphic novel, Maus, really hated Schindler's List, based on how he read in that roundtable I linked to) and J. Hoberman (the critic who did that critical Village Voice review of Schindler's List), were both fine with it. Though, as Hoberman noted in his review, for some, the fictional narrative format is still inappropriate for the Holocaust. Though, for me thus far, Paul raised the question of, "what do they want then? It sounds like they ultimately just want a documentary." You know, what did I watch instead? A nine and a half hour documentary (though reading the round table, it really did put Marcel Ophul's documentaries on my radar, which they hadn't been before). For the sake of that conversation topic, catching up with Son of Saul might have been the more appropriate comparison.

Sorry to keep dominating this discussion, but this movie gave me a lot to think about! On this most recent viewing, I found that Schindler's List worked less as a document of history and more as a statement about how to resist such horrors in the future, should we ever be confronted with them again (and frankly, I think we're closer right now than we have been in a while, at least in the West). This was a nice piece that elucidated those ideas: https://www.flickfilosopher.com/2018/12/movies-for-the-resistance-schindlers-list.html IMO, this is also why it's valuable that Spielberg wanted to make his film about a man of action and a man who was fighting for others, not for himself. Such an approach helps make the message more universal.

I dunno, it's not as beautiful as the usual Spielberg effort, but there are still some great shots in there. And IMO, it's still terrific visual storytelling, the kind of movie where you can turn the dialogue off and still generally understand what's happening.

For me, I didn't watch it and it's been well over a decade since I saw it. So, I don't have much to say except in very broad strokes. Plus, it really is the probably definitive narrative film on the holocaust both in reputation and merit. There are other good ones (I remember really liking The Shop On Main Street), but outside of The Pianist, I don't think there are others that come close in the general consensus. As others have said, I'm curious (and shocked) how this came to be the introduction to the holocaust for Americans. The statistic from Amy seems unbelievable. Roosevelt even ordered footage be filmed to prove it happened. So, how were we unaware? I was going enough that, in 1993, we probably wouldn't have discussed the holocaust in school in gory detail. I know we watched some documentary in church youth group around this time but maybe we wouldn't have without Schindler's List being released. But I feel like I certainly would have been aware of the holocaust without this movie.

So my argument is that you kind of need both. In school or in a museum you can learn about the numbers of deaths and concentration camps and refugees. But that kind of fact-based learning will still likely feel abstract and not completely "real." Humans are emotional, tribal creatures. I think for a lot of people it doesn't truly hit home until you can connect it to a personal story like this movie does. You see that in politics all the time: the candidate who wins isn't the one who had all the thorough facts and figures behind them, it's the one who connected personally. The message is much more powerful if you feel personally connected to it.

I don't think that is a realistic "task" of this film. A film can't convince you of a historical event if it doesn't fully describe what that event is. The film can add detail, realism, empathy, and insight to our understanding of the event. But I'm not sure that Schindler's List conveys the essential, stipulated facts about the Holocaust to the novice or skeptic. Without any context, one might think that the Holocaust was a series of random violent acts and perhaps a concentration camp here or there. Only when I visited these camp sites did I fully realize how this was a state-sponsored death industry, as efficient as steel or automotive factories. By the same token, "Twelve Years a Slave" is not the ultimate "slavery story" that can be appreciated without knowing about America's history of endemic racism and institutionalized human trafficking. "Schindler's List" might be treated as the ultimate telling of the Holocaust because of the movie's ambitious scope and pedigree, but it is still just one story. This theme of context (the context in which we watch a movie) is brought up in this excellent story from This American Life about "Schindler's List". I highly, highly recommend it. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/644/random-acts-of-history/act-one-5

Basically agree with everything here. I was also surprised at how swiftly this film moved, not having seen it in at least a decade. It just flies right along, despite the 3+ hour run time and brutal subject matter. I've heard criticisms like Hoberman and Mamet's before, and I tend to agree with Paul: I think these criticisms generally lose sight of the needs of dramatic storytelling, versus historical record. An audience watching drama responds to things like relatable characters, emotional highs and lows, a driving narrative, etc. You can subvert these things sometimes, but if it's totally devoid of that stuff they're going to check out. So yes, Spielberg chose to focus his story on a non-Jew who was flawed but did a heroic thing in the end. I think this works well for his approach, for a couple of reasons: 1. Spielberg is, above all things, a brilliant director of action. I think this extends to his characters too: he works best with lead characters who are always moving and doing things. Schindler is that, and is Spielberg's way in to exploring the Holocaust. If his central character is Jewish then that character will have to be static and constantly victimized. I don't think Spielberg works well in that mode. (Seems like the only way to get really active Jewish protagonists in a Holocaust movie is to generate a fantasy world, as Tarantino did with Inglorious Basterds.) 2. The audience for this film is not just Jewish people. If Amy's statistic about Holocaust denial is to be believed, then it seems another important task for this film is to get people who might have doubted the existence of the Holocaust to believe it. Schindler is a non-Jew who is led down the path to full understanding of how terrible his government's treatment of Jews really was. The movie is leading its modern audience down the same path. This is part of what makes it effective as drama. I've got more thoughts (boy, this movie was way more emotionally effective than I expected it to be on this rewatch), but will need to return later.