…tick…tick…tick…

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

...tick...tick...tick...
1970 movie poster
Directed by	Ralph Nelson
Produced by	James Lee Barrett Ralph Nelson
Written by	James Lee Barrett
Starring	Jim Brown George Kennedy Frederic March
Music by	Jerry Styner
Cinematography	Loyal Griggs
Editing by	Alex Beaton
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date(s)	January 9, 1970
Running time	100 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

...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.