However, Poitier’s most groundbreaking achievement as an actor came with the 1967 mystery drama In the Heat of the Night, in which Poitier plays Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia police detective who ...

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The film opens late on a hot summer night in the little town of Sparta, Mississippi. While making his usual rounds, police patrolman, Sam Wood, discovers a dead body lying in an empty street.

African-American Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs is arrested on suspicion of murder by Bill Gillespie, the racist police chief of tiny Sparta, Mississippi. After Tibbs proves not only ...