Furious Opposites: "The Big Heat"
When I was younger, I was routinely accused of thinking too much. I was the kind of person, that is, who would (and did) go to a Fourth of July fireworks celebration in a deeply patriotic rural Colorado town and note that the lyrics of "Born in the USA," which invariably undergirds such events, were perhaps a bit less pro-America than the assembled listeners took them to be.
"Oh Tyler," I would be assured with a smile, "you think too much."
At the time, these comments annoyed me, frankly, because I thought the crowd was listening to the song wrong. This idea now strikes me as ridiculous. Because what can it possibly mean to listen to a song wrong?
If I, as someone with no more musical training than playing in a five-song high school rock band called "Flamboyant Ambidextrous Rex" were to be told by some musicological snit that I was listening to Bach's "Goldberg Variations" wrong because I wasn't sufficiently attuned to the architecture of the music – the way the musical themes are inverted and reworked and whatever – I would simply laugh at them. Sure, I'd say, but I love it because it's moving. Just as I like to imagine (all evidence to the contrary) that people loved Ambidextrous Rex's six-minute nine-note magnum opus, "Satan's Little Helpers."
The point is, we all have different reasons we listen to music, or watch movies. Which is not to say that there are not interesting things to be said about these things. I find it fascinating, for example, that Springsteen's anthem manages to sound so much more patriotic and martial than does virtually every one of the numerous and insipid imitations of it that actually are attempting to stir unthinking devotion to the American state.
Snits like me might talk about actually reading the lyrics, that is, but the fireworks-enjoyers have the force of the music on their side. The song contains both deep anger and deep attachment. Perhaps this is the secret of its longevity.
One of the implications of this variety of approaches is that discussions about art are pretty context specific. We're not just discussing movies when we discuss movies, we're also discussing everything from the cultural framework in which they appear to our emotional attachment to them – or maybe something else altogether – and it helps to be clear about these things.
Not only do I watch and think about movies because I love them, I'm also involved in writing and making them and like to understand the tradition I'm working in (and to steal as much as I can from my betters – "be inspired by their work," in the parlance of Hollywood). At the same time, in a perhaps more snooty vein, I think one can learn a great deal about everything from history and culture to human existence from movies (as long as one keeps one's wits as a viewer). Gone With The Wind may not teach us a lot about the Civil War, but it does teach us an extraordinary amount about certain elements of American culture at the time it was made; similarly, we are given insight into many, many elements of human life through Salo, but there are an enormous number of caveats and complexities brought up by its topic (sadism, in a simplified understatement).
Which brings me to The Big Heat, because it's generally regarded as a film noir.
What is film noir? The short answer is that it's a loosely defined group of films that are dark in emotional tone and which began appearing in this country sometime about the middle of the last century. The long answer is that enough ink has been spilled (as they used to say) about the genre ("It's not a genre!" someone howls from the back row) to drown Joe McCarthy, Andrew Sarris and Abe Lincoln, and if you stumble into any online gathering of movie fans and mention the term, you'll be bombarded with down-the-nose disquisitions until your sturdiest internet bombast umbrella gives out in exhaustion. (Let me be clear: I am not accusing anyone of thinking too much, only of having strong opinions, interests, and knowledge-bases.)
So, to set things in context, one of the things that interests me about noirs as a group is that they generate a good deal of force. A certain set of feelings attend them, which are very powerful. And I think something that filmmakers and critics can glean from these films is that part of this force comes from the way they deal in opposites.
The Big Heat, directed by Fritz Lang in 1953, opens as a steely crime tale, but one that still feels pretty straightforward. A cop commits suicide in the first scene, leaving a note behind confessing that he’s been part of the citywide corruption of the police force at the hands of crime boss Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby). But no one gets to see the letter, because the cop's wife Bertha (Jeanette Nolan) uses it to blackmail Lagana instead of releasing it publicly.
Investigating the suicide is our hero, a straight-arrow officer named Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford). When he discovers that the dead cop had a girlfriend (played by Dorothy Green), he begins to suspect that there's more going on than meets the eye; when the girlfriend is brutally murdered he begins to suspect that Lagana, who controls all the crime operations in the city, is involved.
It's after Bannion confronts Lagana about this that the film first shocks the viewer (or this viewer, at least), becoming something very different than what we were led to expect it would be. When Bannion's wife Katie (Jocelyn Brando) leaves the house to pick up a babysitter for their young daughter, she's killed by a bomb in their car which was meant for Bannion. On top of this, when Bannion starts an investigation into who planted the bomb, he's stymied by the police commissioner (Howard Wendell) who is clearly (to both Bannion and us) in Lagana's pocket. The commissioner forces Bannion to turn in his badge rather than allow him to continue to investigate.
This is also when Lagana's psychopathic second in command Vince Stone (Lee Marvin) begins to put his imprint on the film. He and Bannion have a confrontation in a bar after Stone burns a woman with a cigarette as punishment for not rolling the bar dice the way he wants; in the aftermath of this Stone's girlfriend Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame) approaches Bannion, impressed by the way he intimidated Stone. Although the encounter is an innocent one, when Stone finds out about it he throws a pot of boiling coffee in Debby's face, permanently scarring her.
Furious and despairing, Debby returns to talk to Bannion, this time telling him that it was another of Lagana's henchmen who planted the bomb in his car. Bannion braces this henchmen and gets the truth from him, but does not kill him, instead leaving him to be murdered by Lagana and Stone.
Meanwhile, Debby kills Bertha, ensuring the release to the press of the original suicide note implicating Lagana's syndicate in the corruption of the city. She then returns to Stone's apartment where she surprises him by throwing boiling coffee on his face in return for what he did to her. Stone shoots her and is then arrested by Bannion. The crime syndicate, including the police commissioner, falls, and the final scene is of Bannion going back to work as a regular cop.
The oppositions in the film are at play in many ways. A primary one is the discrepancy between the first third of the movie and the rest of it.
Bannion and his wife Katie have a picture-book marriage, splitting steaks, sipping from each other's drinks, and lamenting the fact that whoever writes those child-rearing books has never run into a kid like their daughter. In the same way, the corruption in the city seems like the kind of thing routinely encountered in crime stories – something that the good guy can deal with while maintaining the sanctity of his personal life – and the violence takes place not only off-screen but out-of-scene. We find out about the murder of the girlfriend of the cop who committed suicide, for example, only after the fact, in a scene in which Bannion talks to the coroner.
With the car bomb, all of this changes direction. The violence that has to this point been rendered distant suddenly bursts viscerally onto the screen.
We see Bannion pull the body of his wife out of the still-burning car; we watch Vince burn the arm of the girl in the bar and then, later, see the boiling pot of coffee in the seconds before Vince throws it in Debby's face. It's hard to put into words the force of Lang's direction here. This is contained not just in the events that occur, but in the aggressive way they’re presented, the fact that Bannion is telling a bedtime story to his daughter when we see the flash of the explosion that kills his wife out the window, and the naked sadism of Lee Marvin's magnificent performance as Vince Stone. And it's a force generated in part by the contrast between the emotional assault of this violence and the more reassuring opening to the film.
This contrast is mirrored in the experience of the characters. Bannion's bucolic home life is destroyed. The institution that has given his life meaning – the police force – is revealed to be corrupt. Beyond this, the commissioner's refusal to help him seek justice means that Bannion's very sense of who counts as good and who counts as bad is inverted. It's Debby, the gangster's moll, who becomes his closest ally, rather than his fellow officers.
In all of these ways, the familiar world in which we find ourselves at the start is flipped upside down, disclosing a seediness and moral tragedy underlying that familiarity. This gives the proceedings a feeling of a revelation, for both Bannion and the viewer. Beneath the facade of happy domesticity lies something darker (one is tempted to make the comparison to the opening of Blue Velvet, where Lynch makes this opposition explicit); of signal importance here is the fact that once we’ve seen this darkness, we're forced to wonder if it might not also lie beneath our own cheerful facades as well.
This vision of a shadowy substratum supporting the shining light of American society is endemic to many of the noirs, and reflects a somewhat forgotten truth about 1950s America: the triumph in the Second World War and the Leave it To Beaver social projections coming out of a good deal of Hollywood (the show began airing in 1957) ran alongside a number of more corrosive realities.
McCarthyism was running hot, there was a shooting war in Korea and there were already whispers of a war in Vietnam (the Americans were supporting the French military there as early as 1950). The social revolution that would be initiated by rock and roll music was in the air, the so-called Beat authors were writing works critical of mainstream America, and there was a vibrant jazz scene based in African American culture that tended to reject the dominant, conservative, white society. (For reference, Charlie Parker died in 1955.) The Harlem Renaissance was still going strong, the Civil Rights movement was well underway, and women had been agitating for equal rights in an organized way for at least a century, since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.
That is to say, a film like The Big Heat is not just generating emotional force out of the void, but directly out of a culture that was far more ruptured than intentionally bland reminiscences of the era make it out to be.
This helps uncover another interesting source of opposition in the film. The Big Heat does not simply pit two visions of America against one another – Bannion's white picket domesticity of the opening versus the grasping violence of the second half (which could, incidentally, also very easily be coded in class terms: Bannion as a blue collar worker, and Langana as a capitalist representation of what we might call the urban-industrial complex) – it also pits opposing visions of women.
This functions in two ways. The first is a direct response to the classic noir trope of the "spider woman," which places responsibility for moral corrosion at the foot of a scheming female character, as in things like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, or Sunset Boulevard.
It's true that in The Big Heat, a great deal of the violence is directed at the female characters. But it's also true that it is purely male scheming that drives the film – Lagana's syndicate and Stone's psychopathic plans – and that, as the wonderfully intelligent person I recently re-watched the film with pointed out, it's actually Bannion's mistakes that cause much of the harm. His failure to anticipate that he might be Lagana's target gets his wife killed, his disbelief about the story of the cop's girlfriend results in her death, his meeting with Debby causes her to be scarred, and the fact that he tells Debby about Bertha's blackmail scheme is what gets Bertha killed by Debby.
There is a reading of the film available, in other words, under which it is male scheming and incompetence that results in female death, as opposed to female scheming resulting in male death.
The female characters are also worth thinking about in a second way, which is that they are remarkably heterogeneous.
The relationship between Bannion and his wife is certainly not contemporary in its roles, but it does feel like a partnership of equals. Bertha, the blackmailer, is thoroughly corrupt and hard as nails, while Debby is honest about the fact that she's been poor and she's been rich (as Stone's girlfriend), and being rich is better. She is, in that sense, a realist; in another sense, the one in which she thinks she can get away with playing footsie with a psychopath like Stone, she's an innocent. Finally, the girlfriend at the beginning is very clearly coded as a prostitute, and it's made explicit through comments by both the coroner and a bartender that the men in the film see her as disposable because of this. (Bannion's reaction to her murder and mutilation by Stone, as reported by the coroner, urges the audience to question their fidelity to this idea of her disposability.)
In a way similar to the contrasts brought out by the violence in the film, these depictions of the women and their roles touch on forgotten undercurrents of American society in the fifties.
We tend to think that women's roles at that time were settled, forgetting the "women's films" that only a handful of years before had dominated the screen during the war, many of which feel far more "feminist" than much of the cinema of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Gertrude Stein had already spent her famous years in France, Martha Gellhorn had established herself as one of the greatest war reporters in the country, and what would come to be called the "women's liberation" movement was on the horizon – Gloria Steinem, for example, was in college at Smith when The Big Heat came out.
Which is to say that here as well, in its female characters, there is force generated by the feeling of terrible and ineradicable opposition. How do we account for the loving but not submissive housewife, and also for the vulnerable prostitute? How can one of the dangerous women in the film be an unrepentant criminal, while the other is an innocent who goes mad when the one thing she has going for her in a hard-luck life – her beauty – is ruined by the whim of a man? It's the same with the film's vision of American culture, of course: is our country a place in which morality triumphs, or one in which the good guys will always be low-paid squares while the cheats and abusers rise to the top?
The answer - and here is one of the deepest insights of the film noir tradition - lies in the nature of these particular oppositions. None of them are mutually exclusive. Instead, they rely on one another as surely as the two sides of a stone arch. The force of these movies, that is, comes in large part from their ability to present the reality that these opposites in American life exist only in relation to one another, only in tension, and only, sadly, terribly, because they emerge from the same foundation.
Enjoy this piece? If you’d like to read more of my work, my dystopic noir novel “The Committers” is now available in paperback and e-book here. Read the first chapter for free here.
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