The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Actually, they call him Lieutenant Tibbs. Poitier is not the same character as he was in the superior "In The Heat Of The Night," released some two years earlier. He now lives in San Francisco with a lovely wife and two cute kiddies. Only the name and the profession remain the same.Otherwise, what lifts this above the routine television crime series of the period -- "Burke's Law", "Banacek," "The Name of the Game" -- is a bigger budget and a bankable star, plus the drawing power of the title itself, a memorable line drawn from "In The Heat Of The Night." The plot: A prostitute is murdered and the available clues point to an activist minister of undetermined faith (Landau). Poitier spends most of the film tracking down other possible suspects, reluctant to see the murder pinned on his childhood friend. It ends, not happily, but with all sins paid for.The director, Gordon Douglas, had a pedestrian career. He has some distracting habits here. Often, when two people are in conversation, he doesn't shoot over one conversant's shoulder, which would give us a better sense of what's up, but rather he has the speaker look directly into the camera, sometimes in close up. I don't know why any director would do that with any frequency. What it does is draw attention to the fact that we're watching a movie, and that makes a suspension of disbelief more difficult.And it may be Douglas -- or somebody -- who is responsible for one of Poitier's poorer performances here. He's like a clone of Steve McQueen's San Francisco detective in "Bullet". Poitier is taciturn, rarely smiles, and moves about with a Zen expression. The mannerisms are especially disappointing because Poitier is one of the finest dramatic actors of his generation.Little use is made of location shooting -- a foot chase through Chinatown, a pursuit across the Golden Gate bridge into a Marin County that doesn't exist. It seems to me that some of the exteriors were shot elsewhere, probably Los Angeles, because The City seems generic. There is a clumsily staged car chase ending in a wreck. What police thriller could exist without one? Poitier gets good support though from the likes of Anthony Zerbe and Jeff Corey. Barbara McNair, as Poitier's pretty wife, isn't much help, but his son, George Spell, turns in a nice naturalistic performance.But that leads us into a problem with the script. Poitier's family life has some trumped-up problems and too much time is spent with them. The script even reduces McNair's complaints to the traditional one -- Poitier spends too much time at work and not enough with his family. She shrieks this accusation at him from a staircase, a little unconvincingly. But it's all pointless. A long scene with Poitier and Spell is irrelevant to anything that happens before or after. It diverts us from the main story, which is the murder and its solution.It's not a stupid or insulting movie. It's not part of the Blaxploitation movement popular during the 60s. Nothing is made of the race issue. The only sociopolitical point made is that Landau is working for a people's government run from store fronts, not from City Hall. It sounds "liberal" and yet it's the embodiment of "decentralization." Zerbe is described by one of his sex slaves -- the toothsome Beverly Todd -- as "AC/DC" but that plays only a small part in the plot and is not judged one way or the other.Want to see an excellent movie in a similar setting? See "Bullet" if you haven't already. Want to see an abominable and dated movie about San Francisco detectives? Try "The Laughing Policeman."

Sidney Potier allows his infant son to blatantly disobey him. The boy, after being slapped by Sidney, continues to refuse to pick up some thing off the floor. At that point, Sidney gives up. The result is that his son remained undisciplined, with more serious confrontations to come in the future. (Sidney could have continued by denying the kid all of his home privileges -- such as confinement to his room, no radio, no television, no games, no contact with his friends outside of school no rides, no bicycling, no outside walking, etc. -- until the item on the floor was picked up. After all, who is suppose to run the household, him or the boy.)

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 movie is one of two follow-ups of the blockbuster movie of it's time "In The Heat Of The Night". Sidney poitier plays the serious black Lt. Virgil Tibbs again.The film doesn't deal with racial issues as it's predecessor does. The plot is quite nice and it includes some very good scenes, for instance a car chase and a shootout in a parking garage.A good crime movie.