When Virgil (Sidney Poitier) reveals that he too is a police detective from Philadelphia, who was passing through town, the local police chief Bill (Rod Steiger) is gobsmacked. Bill takes Virgil’s help to solve the murder, hating nearly every minute of it and not holding back with his feelings either. Norman Jewison’s Oscar-decorated In The Heat of the Night (1967) is a film about a murder as well as one of the oldest crimes there is. While driving through a cotton plantation, Bill takes a dig at Virgil, suggesting that he could have been one of the Black labourers working on the plantation. The two actors make an excellent oddball pair, their characters setting aside their differences for a short while in order to solve the murder.