Funny, unfunny, atmospheric and idiosyncratic, this social thriller still thrills-although perhaps not in all the discomfiting ways it did when Sidney Poitier's northern detective Virgil Tibbs and Rod Steiger's southern redneck police chief Gillespie first had at each other in the sixties. In the middle of a sleepless Mississippi night, patrolman Warren Oates finds a stiff of no little importance: it is (or was) the wealthy industrialist whose new factory was going to put the small town of Sparta on the map. His widow (Lee Grant) puts it on the line to the local police chief: no culprit, no factory. But coming up with a suspect is more than this bulldog, adept at keeping blacks in their place and little else, can handle. Enter Tibbs, a Philadelphia homicide expert who proceeds to undermine Gillespie, dizzyingly, putting him in his place with a brilliant plan of attack. The tensions are self evident, but the take on them is not. Pauline Kael has this unusual assessment: "Fast and enjoyable...(Poitier is) like a black Sherlock Holmes in a Tom-and-Jerry cartoon of reversals."