Training Day notably shakes up and undercuts the cliches of the sub-genre by making the saintly Black cop (who often helps the white cop see the light in these kinds of movies) into an unrepentant sinner. Won’t You Take 10 Seconds to Sign Up for Our Newsletter?
In the Heat of the Night went for straight-ahead social drama, not Lethal Weapon-style quips, but its fundamental idea was too good not to copy and endlessly tweak.
While the unlikely partners catch the bad guys, the films examine racial disparities in law enforcement, and in society at large. Those films, and others that tweaked the formula, were built around a clash of two very different cops who eventually win each other’s respect. The most obviously imitated might be In the Heat of the Night, the template for such future interracial “buddy-cop” franchises as 48 Hours and Lethal Weapon. Astonishingly, all were released in the same year, 1967. But he played the key character in each, stood out the most, and was the unifying figure of the three. Of course Sidney Poitier didn’t singlehandedly create any of these films. Their prominence in the obituary makes sense: Each of the three films launched its own subgenre, and countless imitators. Though Poitier, who died Friday at 94, won his Best Actor Oscar for the 1963 film Lillies in the Field, the first three films mentioned in the first line of his New York Times obituary are better-known: To Sir With Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
The same is true of watching Sidney Poitier movies. Reading the Bible, or Shakespeare, there’s sometimes a tendency to say, “This isn’t so great - I’ve heard this story a million times,” before realizing that you’re reading the often-imitated originator of the story.
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