...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 something 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 1967 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 use of Brown in the lead role has led its being often mentioned in the context of the blaxploitation genre.
The movie was filmed in and around the town of Colusa, California, whose central courthouse square was modeled on similar squares found in the American South. The same courthouse was also used for exterior shots in the 1962 classic To Kill a Mockingbird.
...tick...tick...tick... was penultimate film appearance of screen legend Fredric March.
This is the story of a black man (Jim Brown) who has been elected sheriff in a U.S. southern county, due to the vote of blacks. He receives a huge amount of hostility from the non-tolerant white establishment, making his job very hard. The white former sheriff (George Kennedy) has his own struggle, as he balances his devotion to the law with his family and community relations. Things come to a head when the black sheriff puts a white man, the son of a wealthy land-owner of a neighboring county, in jail, and his daddy comes after him. Everyone around has to decide where their values really lie. Written by Luis Carvacho
