In a small town called Spater in the southern United States, at midnight one summer, a police car stopped in front of the train station, and the police found a black man sitting on a bench in the waiting room, so they went up and questioned.
Police : What are you doing here?
Black : I'm waiting for the train.
Police : Where do you get so much money on you?
Black : It's my own money.
Police : You killed Mr. Colbert and stole his money! Come with me.
Colbert is an entrepreneur who wants to invest in a factory in the town, but he was murdered tonight, and his $900 was missing.
The black man was taken to the police station, and after some cross-examination, he learned that he was a criminal police officer in Philadelphia, this time returning home to visit his mother. Because the small-town police solved the case relatively amateurily, he was left to help solve the case.
If this film is only viewed as a detective film, it is a very ordinary movie, and his significance should be put in the context of the times.
In the United States in the 1960s, when racial discrimination was more rampant, the film was shot in 1967, originally set in Mississippi, and later changed to Spatte, Illinois for political reasons.
This black policeman named Virgil, from the beginning of becoming a suspect, to the various problems encountered in the process of handling the case, all stemmed from his black identity, as a black man not only discriminated against everywhere, but even his life would be threatened.
From not being able to share the same car with blacks to the current black life is expensive, the anti-racism movement in the United States seems to be overkill today, which may be the father and son of racists in those years.
Hollywood's ideology is more left-leaning, and films that expose and criticize social issues are often made, such as "Gentleman's Agreement", which exposes anti-Semitism, and this film, which criticizes racial discrimination. But the current white left, Virgin flood, as if no homosexuals can not make movies, in the end heterosexuality is not normal, this kind of operation regardless of social reality and traditional morality, but has become the biggest social problem.
The male lead of the film is Sidney Potier, the first black actor to win an Oscar.
