The 1960s in America marked a period of cultural upheaval and turmoil as racial tensions reached a century-high peak, and the civil rights movement spread across the country promoting justice and equality, especially for members of the black community against whom the southern United States had maintained a strong prejudice for the last century. Two particularly influential films released during the decade highlighted the negative aspects of the social climate that had become ingrained in the South as a society. In 1962 came To Kill a Mockingbird, directed by Robert Mulligan, followed by Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night seven years later. Both were adaptations of recent written literary works, and both embodied similar themes of combating racial prejudice. In the following paragraphs, I wish to examine both films and their respective abilities to captivate and draw in audience members as participants rather than observers.

To Kill a Mockingbird was adapted into screenplay form by Horton Foote from the so-named 1960 novel by Harper Lee. The story takes place during the Great Depression and follows Atticus Finch, a widowed lawyer and especially his two curious young children, ten-year-old son Jem and six-year-old daughter Jean Louise–a tomboy who is most often referred to by her nickname Scout. The family resides in a small and impoverished Southern town, which is predictably racist. This becomes apparent when Atticus is commissioned to represent a black man falsely accused of raping Mayella Ewell, daughter of the highly racist local Bob Ewell.

Similarly adapted from a novel of the same name by John Ball, In the Heat of the Night is also set in a poor Southern town, whose economy at long last receives a chance at thriving when Philip Colbert, a wealthy businessman from Chicago moves to the area intending to construct a large factory, destined to provide many new jobs. However, when police officer Sam Wood discovers Colbert’s dead body on the street while patrolling late one night, a murder investigation ensues. Instructed by police chief Bill Gillespie to search the small town for potential suspects, Wood finds at the train station Virgil Tibbs, an elegantly-dressed black man, whom he subsequently brings back to the station purely upon racially-motivated presumptions. There, Tibbs informs Gillespie that he is actually a police officer himself, visiting from Philadelphia, where he is their leading homicide detective.

Forced to set aside racial prejudice after Colbert’s widow threatens to cease her late husband’s operations in the town, Gillespie–realizing that Tibbs’ knowledge on the subject vastly outweighs his own and that of the small town’s department–employs his expertise to assist in solving the murder.

Though both films certainly have specific themes that grip the audience throughout, it is important to note that Mockingbird and Heat posses widely differing storytelling approaches. Both films have their respective action sequences; Ewell’s attack on Atticus’ children and Tibbs’ car chase and subsequent fight scene come to mind. However, Mockingbird lacks the overall elements of excitement and action prevalent in Heat. The court scene in the former did stand out to me as gripping, given the racial tensions present in the courtroom and the high stakes for the presumably innocent man on trial. However, such stakes do not extend throughout the film, for we are more so being told two-dimensional stories than participating in one–whereas Heat leads us right along with the characters on a murder mystery throughout which we, too, want to know who murdered Colbert. Indeed, I specifically remember a moment in the film during one of the jail cell scenes during which I realized as a viewer that I had unconsciously become invested as a participant rather than a mere observer.🔹