I was about five minutes into re-watching “The Cincinnati Kid” when it struck me that I needed to read or re-read director Norman Jewison’s autobiography, or hunt down the recent biography of the Canadian director.
He’s not exactly an obscure filmmaker, with seven Oscar nominations and films like “Moonstruck” and “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming” in his extensive filmography.
But his fifth feature film, his first “serious” movie, has threads that turn up so often in his later work that one wonders, “What made him such a righteous dude?”
The Toronto native who made the groundbreaking “In the Heat of the Night,” “A Soldier’s Story” and the very impressive bio-pic “The Hurricane” was astutely in touch with America’s shifting attitudes on race. And he made sure his films were ahead of the curve in that regard.
Jewison, a child of the Great Depression, took over a 1930s…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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