They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

San Francisco detective Virgil Tibbs is assigned to investigate the murder of a prostitute, a case that leads him to a street preacher and political candidate named Logan Sharpe. The two men are old friends, and Tibbs believes in Sharpe's innocence, but the evidence against him keeps mounting. At the same time, Tibbs faces troubles in his own household. When the department considers the matter closed, he continues looking into it on his own, and a friend of the victim points him toward the killer.

Sidney Poitier returns as Virgil Tibbs, the role he first played in In the Heat of the Night, joined here by Martin Landau as Logan Sharpe, Barbara McNair as his wife Valerie, Anthony Zerbe, Ed Asner and Jeff Corey. Gordon Douglas directed from a screenplay by Alan Trustman and James R. Webb, with Herbert Hirschman producing for United Artists and The Mirisch Company. It runs 108 minutes and mixes crime, mystery and action. In Douglas's filmography it is the fifteenth of sixteen features he directed, arriving between The Detective and Skullduggery.

On IMDb the film holds a 6 out of 10 from roughly 4,900 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 5.9 from a much smaller electorate of about 106. A critics' rating of 6.3 from six reviews places it slightly above the IMDb audience figure and clearly ahead of the TMDB score, though the small number of votes on the latter limits how much that gap can be read into.