The Organization (1971)

The third and final film in which Sidney Poitier plays Virgil Tibbs, the character her immortalized in the 1967 Oscar winner In the Heat of the Night. Like the second film in the series They Call Me Mr. Tibbs, The Organization is somewhat inexpiabley set in San Fransisco, even though a point is made in The Heat of the Night that Tibbs is from Philadelphia. The reason the last two Tibbs films were set in San Fransisco was probably based on a desire to do location filming there, something both films do but I think this one does more, San Fransisco is very much a character in this movie.

The films title The Organization can be read as referring to two groups, one of course being the mafia, and the other being a small group of ethnically diverse concerned citizens, many of them once engaged in the drug world, that has united to fight the mob. At the beginning of the film the vigilante group pulls of a daring heist of four million dollars worth of heroine from a safe in a furniture business that is an "Organization" front. The vigilantes, lead by a young Raul Julia, want to use the heroin as a bargaining chip to flush out bigger members of The Origination, but they know they will need some help, so they seek out Tibbs, I guess because he has a reputation as an honest cop (there is also a small sub plot in the movie about allegations of working with the mob by a recently suicided narcotics cop). Anyway after some hesitancy Tibbs agrees to work with the group as long as he calls the shots so as to keep them safe and his hands clean, unfortunately some of the groups members don't always follow Tibb's rules, and some of them end up dead.

In the end this is all pretty standard blacksplotation era fair, this movie, like it immediate predecessor lacks a plot of sufficient depth to measure up to the 1967 original. Disappointing. *1/2