watched lang’s “the big heat” last night and was struck by a couple of things:
(spoiler warnings apply for those who haven’t seen it)
1) michael’s right about the gloria grahame/annette bening thing
2) this is such a tautly shot/narrated film–the camera literally leads the viewer through it; lang’s use of slow zoom-ins and outs and pans works almost like a manual for the beginning filmmaker. i think mike mentioned earlier a connection between kubrick and lang–can see it in this film as well.
3) i am not as knowledgeable about noir’s generic narrative elements as some of you doubtless are but this film’s juxtaposition of corrupt public life with the possibility of an autonomous private life (which is then destroyed utterly by the public) seems to make it darker than most.
4) the treatment of gloria grahame’s character seems unnecessarily brutal. i don’t mean that lee marvin (who is great in this film) should not throw coffee at her but that the subtextual purpose it seems to serve is to remove her from the zone of sexual desirability for the recently widowed glenn ford. once she is scarred and bandaged he can open up to her and even deliver a soliloquy on his dead wife’s charms as grahame herself dies. the “bad” women are all punished and killed. you will remind me here that the “good” woman is too, but the “good” woman is herself somewhat moll’ish–she smokes, drinks, makes sexually suggestive remarks.
anyway. i invite your thoughts on this film, on other noirs, and on the genre in general.
I haven’t seen this film in a number of years (taught it to a group of high school students in the early-nineties) but I remember the high contrast black & white cinematography and the striking angular compositions (as well as the bleak world view). I guess this is available on DVD and I should probably pick up a copy as it is one of my favorite noirs (along with Double Indemnity).
“The Big Heat” is one of my favorites. Another to move up the queue: “Out of the Past.” That doesn’t have the same social edge (“Heat” is very reminiscent of Hammett, whose noir was always barely- or un-veiled bleak social analysis), but it does have amazing performances by Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum.
I’m currently working my way–very slowly–through the box set of Noirs that came out last year; I need to re-see “Murder, My Sweet,” and I’ve never seen “The Set-Up.”
But enough fanboy chatter. The social angle–the revelation of the way social systems produce, even (over)determine one’s options and force the kind of violence and crime noir revels in (or reveals?)… that’s what I find most interesting about the genre. I wanted to add in/ask another question, building on its potential social critique: how does race play out in film noir? (Or–is there much beyond les blancs in film noir?)
I have in mind three very different films as working examples:
“Odds Against Tomorrow” came out right at the tail-end of the genre’s heyday, starred Robert Ryan and Harry Belafonte–as, respectively, a racist white and a black musician forced into a job together (with Ed Begley). I was fascinated how smoothly the film used the conventions of determinism, of inevitable outcomes, as analogues to problems of class and race. It isn’t a superb ‘thriller,’ but it’s a fascinating glimpse at how the genre might have developed. It’s particularly good at complicating how racism might be a by-product of (or complementary factor for) economic forces, a point effectively and subtly worked out in Ryan’s performance. Man, he’s good.
But then the ‘sixties hit, and the genre kind of disappears. (Interesting that the genre’s decline coincides with more public attention to civil rights, in terms of race and of gender.) Early in the next decade, Ossie Davis adapts a Chester Himes novel (“Cotton Comes to Harlem”)–and Himes produced a series of blackly-comic noir books throughout the ‘fifties and ‘sixties–which is really interesting for its tonal disruptions; instead of the grim humorlessness of Ford and Marvin and much noir, you get occasionally cartoonish exaggerations coupled with subtle social satire, and the ‘noir’-ish elements perhaps disappear into a more brightly-lit comic take on the original novel. Still–it’s an interesting comparison, and I think in many ways ‘generic,’ and worth examining.
But one of my favorites is Carl Franklin’s “Devil in a Blue Dress,” part of the neo-noir revival maybe, but (for both novel and film) an excellent updating and replication of the noir tradition explicitly reimagined as a tool for revealing racial history. The film’s a marvel all the way around, but Don Cheadle walks away with it.
Oh:
It might be interesting to tie into some of the current international variations on this genre: “Infernal Affairs”–is that noir? Or “Company,” which I finally watched and, yes, Arnab was right, as it’s quite good.