One-Jewel Movement

"So this is what it's come to in Ca-loosa County," rumbles the mayor (Fredric March) of a small Southern town. His dismay is understandable. For one thing, those "organizers from up North" have come down, rallied the blacks and got them to elect a black sheriff named Jimmy Price (Jim Brown). This acts as something of an irritant to former Sheriff John Little (George Kennedy), who bears up pretty well under the shame of it all, considering that the kids on the school bus make fun of his daughter and he has nothing to do all day but mow the lawn.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Price is having problems of his own. The town rednecks --an ill-assorted bunch that makes the population of Tobacco Road look like the Princeton Triangle Club--keep glowering at him from their pickup trucks. A former deputy (Don Stroud) is out to kill Price for sure, and the son of the county's millionaire political boss is in jail for manslaughter. Nothing will do, of course, except for the black sheriff and the white ex-sheriff to get together to combat the forces of racism and oppression.

Any relationship between the plot of this clumsily simple-minded melodrama called . . . tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . and the slick simple-mindedness of In the Heat of the Night is a lot more than coincidental. Director Ralph Nelson (TIME, Feb. 2) is obviously a man whose political conscience is easily stirred, probably by reading the box-office receipts in Variety. Everything about his film is tacky, derivative, finally exploitative--except for a funny and wise performance by Fredric March. As crafty Mayor Jeff Parks, March transforms a dime-store piece like . . . tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . into a one-jewel movement.

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