Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of The Night (1967) introduced audiences to Virgil Tibbs, a Black detective from Philadelphia investigating a murder in rural Mississippi. Portrayed by Sidney Poitier, Tibbs fulfilled the promise of the Civil Rights era: a Black man whose talents and moral authority earned him a seat at the table. A fish out of water, Tibbs investigates, interrogates, and in one stunning scene, literally slaps back at white supremacy. The movie earned seven Oscar nominations and five statuettes, including Best Picture, but that year’s awards ceremonies were postponed after the assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The film also made $24 million at the box office, and since producer Walter Mirsch had Poitier under contract, he decided to relocate the character to San Francisco for a less celebrated sequel, They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970). In that outing, the murder of a sex worker leads him into the seamier side of Haight-Ashbury counterculture. Promoting him to lieutenant and shifting him to a liberal West Coast melting pot signaled that Tibbs was no longer a Black cop, but an everyman.
In the opening minutes of The Organization (1971), a masked, multi-ethnic crew skillfully and silently execute a China Basin warehouse robbery using a pole vault, a PG&E van, and a ladder truck. Moving between shadows with the speed and grace of Cirque de Soleil performers, they carry a kidnapped executive through a fifth-floor window and force him to open a safe containing $4 million in heroin. Sirens wailing, the last robber sets a time bomb, then sprints to the old Mission Revival Caltrain depot at Third and Townsend, boarding just as the train departs. When police discover their hostage murdered in his office, Tibbs is called in to investigate.
A syndicate of white-collar dope kingpins respond to the theft in a tiger-team meeting at their HQ on a high floor of 555 California, then known as the Bank of America building. Wearing worsted wool suits and using boardroom jargon as code on a conference call with their European counterparts, they hatch a plan for recovering the stolen product. The building opened in 1969, but wood paneling and thick curtains obscure its Modernist angles; a Chesterfield couch and brass telescope show that old-world power operates inside this new glass tower. Outside, we glimpse today’s Financial District taking shape: Embarcadero One is topped out, and girders for Two are still being welded.
This scene introduces a recurring spatial motif: In San Francisco, power exists above the city, literally and morally. The Great Migration led Black people to Bayview, Haight-Ashbury, and the Fillmore, but Lt. Tibbs and his wife Valerie (Barbara McNair) are raising two kids in a garden apartment on a breezy hillside with downtown views that’s closer to Armistead Maupin’s Barbary Lane than the reality of working class SF in the 1970s. After the syndicate murders a security guard who witnessed the robbery, Tibbs visits his widow (Sheree North) at their Fontana East condo, where the living room view of Angel Island proves the man was on the take. The message is clear: No working stiff could afford this pad.
The most dynamic scenes take place between Tibbs and the crew of drug thieves who turn out to be less criminals than vigilantes, each of whom has suffered a personal loss to heroin. Led by a baby-faced Raúl Juliá, they arrange a meet in an empty union hall above a North Beach strip club, show him the stolen drugs, and articulate the film’s moral engine: These activists were forced to take action because police allow drug dealers to operate with impunity. They claim to have left the executive alive and task Tibbs with finding his murderer.
Bohemian, blue-collar, and racially diverse, the group represents a San Francisco that was socially engaged and righteous. Drawing from lived experience, these six amateurs penetrated the Organization’s finances and logistics because their race, youth, and countercultural appearance rendered them invisible at the highest reaches of SF society. They aren’t asking Tibbs for help; they’re auditing him for moral hazard. He doesn’t understand the scale or nature of San Francisco’s corruption, and they need to see if he’s up to the task. Once again, Poitier’s best-known character is a fish out of water.
A key shot from the former parking lot at the Hall of Justice (now SF County Jail) dramatizes the forces arrayed against them. Beyond the I-80 freeway, the villains’ lair dominates the skyline, framed by towers named for corporations like Standard Oil, McKesson, and Wells Fargo — buildings that, in 1971, still read as symbols of civic order and prosperity, not plausible sites of organized crime.
Transposed to San Francisco by screenwriter James R. Webb (How The West Was Won; Cape Fear), Tibbs is a middle-class middle manager with a lifestyle that emphasizes normalcy over intimacy, as seen when he shuts down a serious argument with his wife by asking her to make him a sandwich, or deflects a conversation about sex with his Cub Scout son. In SF, Tibbs is not a disruptor, but a respectable professional who’s learned not to make trouble. “Today, I don’t think the racial element in ‘Heat’ would mean much,” producer Mirsch told SF journalist Gerald Nachman during a poolside Los Angeles Times interview at the Fisherman’s Wharf Travelodge in 1971.
Despite the highly stylized opening heist sequence, The Organization unfolds like a phlegmatic TV procedural. Director Don Medford toggles between medium shots for dialogue and close-ups for emotional reactions, but out on the street, the city is always in motion. In nighttime North Beach, Tibbs wades through a parting sea of hustlers and pimps straight out of Central Casting like Moses in a trench coat. BART service wouldn’t start until the following year, but One Post Plaza is already a sunny civic commons thronged with office workers, hippies, and chanting Hare Krishnas that probably announced “San Francisco” to audiences.
When violence descends, it does so at street level. The Organization corners a vigilante at his Potrero Hill home, chasing him across fennel-choked hillsides until they take him out in a hit-and-run. Tibbs’s car crashes on railroad tracks along the Embarcadero after his main witness is murdered in a drive-by. And when the detective literally runs the syndicate to ground, he leads his quarry into the bowels of the city, trapping them in a still under construction tunnel below Montgomery Station. As Tibbs chases power downward, The Organization begins in the sky and concludes underground.
In the denouement, police make their final arrests in the heart of the Cathedral Hill redevelopment zone, an historically Black neighborhood now occupied by wealthy elites. As the remaining suspects are perp-walked out of The Sequoias (1400 Geary Blvd.), a sniper perched in the Laguna Eichler condos across the way kills them both. Justice is performed, but accountability fails. The Organization, we realize, will persist.
As the credits roll, Tibbs walks east on California St. in Nob Hill with a thousand-yard stare as his partner (Gerald S. O'Loughlin) drives slowly a few paces behind. Eventually, he gets in, and they descend into the Financial District.
In 1971, mainstream moviegoers would have scoffed at the notion that San Francisco’s rising office towers were occupied by criminal enterprises, but the decades since have made the idea banal: Corporations with naming rights to the city’s skyline have paid tens of billions to cover liabilities for currency manipulation, environmental degradation, and the opioid epidemic. The Organization didn’t predict San Francisco’s future so much as recognize its shape as a place where power rises faster than accountability, and where chasing it down is the most you can do.
