They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

Love may be better the second time around, but movies usually aren't. There are exceptions, but this isn't one of them. Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) is back home and out of that hellhole in Mississippi, but the excitement of In the Heat of the Night is missing.

He is doing his thing as a detective; trying to solve a murder where the chief suspect is his preacher friend Logan Sharpe (Martin Landau). The problem is that Gordon Douglas is no Norman Jewison and his direction does not have any magic. The acting is good, but the movie just seems to plod along, switching between Tibbs' home problems (And, I have to mention, his child abuse regarding his son.) and the murder. The fast pace of Jewison's effort is sadly missing.

It's a fair murder mystery, but the pace makes it one to skip.

This Virgil Tibbs is closer to the California-based detective essayed by John Ball in his books. The mystery is worthwhile, and Poitier's performance is masterful. But the writing is pedestrian, the pacing too slow, and the resolution ultimately unsatisfactory. I can give this no better than a 6 out of 10.

Sidney Poitier's career includes repeating his screen characters only twice in his career. The first one is Mark Thackerey, the caring and compassionate teacher in To Sir With Love and To Sir With Love II. Don't you just love the lack of imagination with sequels that started with The Godfather?

His second character was homicide detective Virgil Tibbs from In The Heat Of The Night. Rod Steiger may have copped the Oscar as the Mississippi sheriff there, but it was Sidney Poitier who made two sequels with his character.

I'd like to say the two sequels were as good as The Godfather ones, but they don't come even close to matching In The Heat Of The Night in quality. This film uses as its title the famous line from In The Heat Of The Night, They Call Me MISTER Tibbs and its more influenced by Bullitt than In The Heat Of The Night.

And not that well either. It's a routine police action drama in which homicide detective Virgil Tibbs is called on to investigate the murder of a hooker. She's an upscale working girl, working out of a building owned by Anthony Zerbe who's a sleaze-bag hood and who's got many criminal activities going. He's not looking for cops prowling around his apartment building because they might uncover things that he'd prefer stay hidden.

Martin Landau is in the film as both a client of the woman and a crusading minister who is leading a campaign for a home rule option proposition on the ballot in San Francisco. If you remember In The Heat Of The Night had Virgil Tibbs as a Philadelphia homicide detective. But apparently no one was terribly interested in continuity.

There's a Bullitt like car chase involving Ed Asner, another suspect in the woman's homicide that's nicely staged. And Poitier's character is given a home life with wife Barbara McNair and two small children.

But all in all They Call Me MISTER Tibbs really plays more like an inflated version of a Police Story episode.

With its kipper ties, flared trousers and proficient - yet dated - music, They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! is perhaps the Poitier film that has aged least gracefully. While its prequel, In The Heat of the Night, was borne from the epitome of cool that was the sixties, here the seventies nurtured this film, which lends it a kitsch value, as well as the air of a t.v. movie. Though these elements - such as seeing the funky theme start up to the tune of Sidney clocking someone with a telephone, or Ed Asner (tv's Lou Grant) "drive" a car to a filmed backdrop - make it endearing and a must-see for a light-hearted Saturday night.

A world away from the usual Sidney vehicle we have here a trawl through San Francisco's red light districts, to which the family elements - though the most critically attacked - actually provide effective light. Also unusual is the amount of sexual tone Sidney is here allowed to display. Yet whereas in the former film Poitier was the big town Lieutenant working in small-town Mississippi, here he is on his own territory, thus shaving the film of one of its dimensions. Without Steiger to bounce off, what depth the script provides his character second time around comes from his wife and children, most notably his son. After slapping the boy into submission, Poitier hugs him, mourning the fact that "you're not perfect . and I can't forgive you." Not a perfectly-formed film by any means, this one does improve on repeated viewing, and the majority of ill feeling does seem to be down to disappointment. After all, how does one make a sequel to a movie that's hailed as a classic?

This sequel to "In the Heat of the Night" will suffer in inevitable comparisons to its infinitely better predecessor. Instead of looking like a theatrical movie edited for television, "Mister Tibbs" looks suspiciously like a TV movie edited for theatrical release, with grainy photography, cheesy opening titles, and sets that look like they're made of plywood. The murder sequence has a glaring continuity error: the camera shows two hands choking the girl, then a shot of a hand reaching for a statuette, then a shot of the girl being choked with two hands again, and finally the statuette coming down for the fatal blow. Solving the case should be easy: find the only guy with three hands! But the shoddy production values can't completely obscure this film's considerable merits: namely, Sidney Poitier's performance as the cool detective determined to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, even if it implicates a friend. Martin Landau is also convincing as the do-gooder preacher-activist suspected of brutally murdering his prostitute girlfriend. In addition to being haunted by the case, Tibbs is conflicted about his home life, but the issues of race and Tibbs' barely concealed sense of social outrage are absent here. So is the complex murder mystery that made "In the Heat of the Night" so compelling.