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...tick...tick...tick... is an American movie made in 1970 directed by Ralph Nelson. Racially provocative for its time, it stars Jim Brown in the role of an African-American man elected as the sheriff of a rural county in the American South. It has become somewhat of a cult classic for its cutting-edge portrayal of racial relations and its tense narrative.
The movie was released seven years after Nelson's 1963 film Lilies of the Field, starring Sidney Poitier, which was made before the eruption of violence stemming from the American civil rights movement of the mid 1960s. It also portrayed the controversy of racial relations, but with a much gentler narrative.
The movie was also released the same year as Nelson's Soldier Blue which provided a fictionalized account of a massacre of Indians by U.S. cavalry troops in the 1860s.
The movie can be viewed as something of a counter-narrative to the 1968 movie In the Heat of the Night, which featured Poitier as a Philadelphia detective sent to help investigate a murder in a small town in Mississippi and aided, at first reluctantly, by the white chief of police played by Rod Steiger. Poitier's character comes to earn the respect of Steiger's, but he remains an outsider, able to navigate the complexities of being black in a small southern town because of the unfamiliarity of his style. In contrast, ...tick...tick...tick... places a local African-American fully in charge of the police, aided somewhat by the former white sheriff.
The lead was played by Jim Brown, who had only recently retired as a professional football player.
The movie has a somewhat low-budget feeling, and the its use of Brown in the lead role has led its being often mentioned in the context of the blaxploitation genre.
External link
- IMDB entry (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065360/) on ...tick...tick...tick...