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I can always go through life sideways
I am having an idiosyncratic reaction to Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953). I don't think I liked it very much. I had expected to—I started my acquaintance of Fritz Lang with Metropolis (1927) and he has rarely let me down since. I make an exception for Western Union (1941), but that film is such a mess on all levels aside from Randolph Scott that I don't feel much about it except slightly like taking a shower. I didn't want steam-cleaning after The Big Heat. It's not incoherent or unintelligent. It does everything it means to and it does it well, in swift, lean, hardboiled style that I suspect of setting a trend for generations. I just don't like the trend all that much, either.
In brief, The Big Heat is a brilliantly executed example of the genus Women in refrigerators, species honest cop's wife is murdered because crooks run his city and the law has its hands tied when it's not on the take, so he turns in his badge, does not turn in his gun, and goes on an extrajudicial revenge spree. Previously a straight-arrow family man possessed of such squeaky-clean morality it could give a boy scout toothache, Glenn Ford's Dave Bannion turns himself into a monster to fight monsters and leaves an unsurprising trail of bodies in his wake; it got my attention, though, that most of the bodies are women's. There are four female characters with significant screen time in this movie and they all end up dead. It is true that they are not merely props; whether information or bullets, all have something to contribute to the course of the plot. Their bodies are still the script's yardstick of violence—it measures the nastiness of its men in the damage they inflict on women. From cigarette burns to car bombs, that's how we know the villains are villains, deserving of whatever judgment our hero and the last embers of the law can drag them down to. In this sense the film is much less subversive than most of the noir I'm used to seeing, which trusts an audience to know a triggerman for a no-goodnik even when he doesn't grind out his stogie on a date's hand; it is probably excessive of me to hold it responsible for Frank Miller, but I did expect weirder from Mr. Blue Gardenia. I knew the film's reputation as a famously brutal, iconic noir. I just thought the brutality would be more on the emotional-ethical order, like Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950) with its bottom-feeding cast of spivs and touts and suckers, all equal-opportunity screwed; that's a movie that can make you feel gut-punched with nothing more than a few fast words. Women always getting the worst of it doesn't shock me with the cruelty of the world. It just makes a movie kind of tiring to watch.
I understand its reputation otherwise. Sydney Boehm worked as a reporter before turning to screenwriting and he has a gift for the mechanisms of crime in cities, the grounding mundanity of bribes and cover-ups and botched contracts; if The Big Heat's fictional, studio-built Kenport never achieves the location-shot liftoff of Side Street (1949)'s New York City or Mystery Street (1950)'s Boston, it still feels real enough to support late-night fry-ups in middle-class kitchens as well as cheap hotels and expensive clubs and mansions upholstered with Prohibition money so successfully insulated from its lawless origins that it has become, like the steel and rail and oil money of the robber barons, too rich not to be respectable. The runtime is ninety minutes and hasn't got a second of fat on it, not even in the cinematography by Charles Lang which without anything as dramatic as an expressionist bloom makes its world look precision-grained with tension, all rooms too small except when they're too empty, everyone's faces crisp enough to draw blood. The cast may be archetypes of vigilante fantasy, but they're more than just cardboard targets; they have textures. Even the essential noir element is present, not so much in the violence of the plot or the corruption of the setting, but the vengeful question of the abyss that looks back. I just can't stop thinking of this movie as the taproot text for entire genres I don't watch. It feels closer to the popular reception of noir than most of the noirs I've seen. How did it and its women become such a dominant strain—dead good wives or living bad widows, gruesomely murdered B-girls, grotesquely scarred molls?
This last is the one part of The Big Heat that grips and unnerves and electrifies me and it is all to the credit of Gloria Grahame. Her Debby Marsh almost belongs to a different movie, rawer and messier, actually nasty instead of employing misogyny for cheap shots: when she's the good-time girl of Lee Marvin's Vince Stone, her keyed-up, shallowly rattling quips as she pours his drinks and takes his calls tell us everything we need to know about his habits without needing to see the bruises; later, when she still wears mink but no longer looks in mirrors, her face half-masked in surgical gauze after a boiling coffee facial from her sadistic boyfriend, she makes a far more sympathetic avenger than Bannion himself. He brute-forces justice, raising more trouble than he puts down. She slips in quietly and settles scores with gestures of lethal contempt—as her ex crouches half-blinded with his hands over his own coffee-burnt face, Debby leans in close enough to kiss him, close enough that he can't flinch away from the smeared, scalded skin she exposes to him like a slap, and begins to describe, in that breathy little voice that never was taken seriously, his intimately familiar future: "Look at it. It isn't pretty, is it? You'll walk through side streets and alleys so that people won't stare at you. Oh, but you're lucky. It won't be for long . . . The lid's off the garbage can—and I did it." This is horror comics as high art and Grahame owns it in all its Hel-faced vicious glory, a woman using her own damage against the man who dealt it to her. I have seen that much less often in the decades since 1953 than I have seen the fridge avenger. Glenn Ford isn't doing a bad job as Bannion, but he rather pales in comparison.
It is possible that Lang and Boehm themselves had their doubts. So many women bite the dust in our hero's wake (the survivors: one pre-kindergarten daughter, one walk-on sister-in-law, and one spinster secretary), it would not be a stretch to read the film as an indictment of the kind of white-knighting Bannion thinks he's practicing, where his heroic sallies always have collateral damage, which in turn fuels the righteousness of his anger. He's called on it by a character who should know, but can't make it up to her before her death scene. His brisk, parting line in the picture—"Keep the coffee hot, Hugo!"—is so superbly tactless that it must be meaningful. Even so, even if he is being judged by his creators and found as wanting in his failures of forethought and compassion as the men who order the murders of women or carry them out, it's still by those weights and measures I mentioned earlier: still a lot of collateral dead women to sit through. I had thought for some reason that was a problem I was immune to. Maybe it exists in proportion to my disappointment with the material. Lang's earlier noir Western Rancho Notorious (1952) opened with a rape-murder and vengeance on its mind, but then it burrowed into its chosen mythos and ate its heart out. There's nothing so stealthy or cruel in The Big Heat except Grahame. For every beat of merely observed reality, like the most endearing traits of Bannion's wife (Jocelyn Brando, who does deserve the name-check) being her most imperfect ones, there's another pointing forward to the conservative vigilante thrillers of which this year's remake of Death Wish (2018) and its female counterpart Peppermint (2018) are just the latest examples. It's asking all the right questions to destabilize its world, which is the work of every good noir—but the answers it's supplying just build the familiar rules back up again.
I am not saying Fritz Lang is canceled. I suspect the motivational dead wife was not such a well-polished TV trope when he got hold of it and in any case you pry Frau im Mond (1929), You and Me (1938), or, yes, M (1931) from my fingers at your own risk. But![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch said consolingly afterward, "I'm sorry you got bobcat in your noir!" and that about sums it up. If you consider its plot one of the Aristotelian evergreens, you will have a fine time with this movie. Otherwise you may find yourself at the credits with your face scratched up. This expensive fun brought to you by my lucky backers at Patreon.
In brief, The Big Heat is a brilliantly executed example of the genus Women in refrigerators, species honest cop's wife is murdered because crooks run his city and the law has its hands tied when it's not on the take, so he turns in his badge, does not turn in his gun, and goes on an extrajudicial revenge spree. Previously a straight-arrow family man possessed of such squeaky-clean morality it could give a boy scout toothache, Glenn Ford's Dave Bannion turns himself into a monster to fight monsters and leaves an unsurprising trail of bodies in his wake; it got my attention, though, that most of the bodies are women's. There are four female characters with significant screen time in this movie and they all end up dead. It is true that they are not merely props; whether information or bullets, all have something to contribute to the course of the plot. Their bodies are still the script's yardstick of violence—it measures the nastiness of its men in the damage they inflict on women. From cigarette burns to car bombs, that's how we know the villains are villains, deserving of whatever judgment our hero and the last embers of the law can drag them down to. In this sense the film is much less subversive than most of the noir I'm used to seeing, which trusts an audience to know a triggerman for a no-goodnik even when he doesn't grind out his stogie on a date's hand; it is probably excessive of me to hold it responsible for Frank Miller, but I did expect weirder from Mr. Blue Gardenia. I knew the film's reputation as a famously brutal, iconic noir. I just thought the brutality would be more on the emotional-ethical order, like Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950) with its bottom-feeding cast of spivs and touts and suckers, all equal-opportunity screwed; that's a movie that can make you feel gut-punched with nothing more than a few fast words. Women always getting the worst of it doesn't shock me with the cruelty of the world. It just makes a movie kind of tiring to watch.
I understand its reputation otherwise. Sydney Boehm worked as a reporter before turning to screenwriting and he has a gift for the mechanisms of crime in cities, the grounding mundanity of bribes and cover-ups and botched contracts; if The Big Heat's fictional, studio-built Kenport never achieves the location-shot liftoff of Side Street (1949)'s New York City or Mystery Street (1950)'s Boston, it still feels real enough to support late-night fry-ups in middle-class kitchens as well as cheap hotels and expensive clubs and mansions upholstered with Prohibition money so successfully insulated from its lawless origins that it has become, like the steel and rail and oil money of the robber barons, too rich not to be respectable. The runtime is ninety minutes and hasn't got a second of fat on it, not even in the cinematography by Charles Lang which without anything as dramatic as an expressionist bloom makes its world look precision-grained with tension, all rooms too small except when they're too empty, everyone's faces crisp enough to draw blood. The cast may be archetypes of vigilante fantasy, but they're more than just cardboard targets; they have textures. Even the essential noir element is present, not so much in the violence of the plot or the corruption of the setting, but the vengeful question of the abyss that looks back. I just can't stop thinking of this movie as the taproot text for entire genres I don't watch. It feels closer to the popular reception of noir than most of the noirs I've seen. How did it and its women become such a dominant strain—dead good wives or living bad widows, gruesomely murdered B-girls, grotesquely scarred molls?
This last is the one part of The Big Heat that grips and unnerves and electrifies me and it is all to the credit of Gloria Grahame. Her Debby Marsh almost belongs to a different movie, rawer and messier, actually nasty instead of employing misogyny for cheap shots: when she's the good-time girl of Lee Marvin's Vince Stone, her keyed-up, shallowly rattling quips as she pours his drinks and takes his calls tell us everything we need to know about his habits without needing to see the bruises; later, when she still wears mink but no longer looks in mirrors, her face half-masked in surgical gauze after a boiling coffee facial from her sadistic boyfriend, she makes a far more sympathetic avenger than Bannion himself. He brute-forces justice, raising more trouble than he puts down. She slips in quietly and settles scores with gestures of lethal contempt—as her ex crouches half-blinded with his hands over his own coffee-burnt face, Debby leans in close enough to kiss him, close enough that he can't flinch away from the smeared, scalded skin she exposes to him like a slap, and begins to describe, in that breathy little voice that never was taken seriously, his intimately familiar future: "Look at it. It isn't pretty, is it? You'll walk through side streets and alleys so that people won't stare at you. Oh, but you're lucky. It won't be for long . . . The lid's off the garbage can—and I did it." This is horror comics as high art and Grahame owns it in all its Hel-faced vicious glory, a woman using her own damage against the man who dealt it to her. I have seen that much less often in the decades since 1953 than I have seen the fridge avenger. Glenn Ford isn't doing a bad job as Bannion, but he rather pales in comparison.
It is possible that Lang and Boehm themselves had their doubts. So many women bite the dust in our hero's wake (the survivors: one pre-kindergarten daughter, one walk-on sister-in-law, and one spinster secretary), it would not be a stretch to read the film as an indictment of the kind of white-knighting Bannion thinks he's practicing, where his heroic sallies always have collateral damage, which in turn fuels the righteousness of his anger. He's called on it by a character who should know, but can't make it up to her before her death scene. His brisk, parting line in the picture—"Keep the coffee hot, Hugo!"—is so superbly tactless that it must be meaningful. Even so, even if he is being judged by his creators and found as wanting in his failures of forethought and compassion as the men who order the murders of women or carry them out, it's still by those weights and measures I mentioned earlier: still a lot of collateral dead women to sit through. I had thought for some reason that was a problem I was immune to. Maybe it exists in proportion to my disappointment with the material. Lang's earlier noir Western Rancho Notorious (1952) opened with a rape-murder and vengeance on its mind, but then it burrowed into its chosen mythos and ate its heart out. There's nothing so stealthy or cruel in The Big Heat except Grahame. For every beat of merely observed reality, like the most endearing traits of Bannion's wife (Jocelyn Brando, who does deserve the name-check) being her most imperfect ones, there's another pointing forward to the conservative vigilante thrillers of which this year's remake of Death Wish (2018) and its female counterpart Peppermint (2018) are just the latest examples. It's asking all the right questions to destabilize its world, which is the work of every good noir—but the answers it's supplying just build the familiar rules back up again.
I am not saying Fritz Lang is canceled. I suspect the motivational dead wife was not such a well-polished TV trope when he got hold of it and in any case you pry Frau im Mond (1929), You and Me (1938), or, yes, M (1931) from my fingers at your own risk. But
spatch said consolingly afterward, "I'm sorry you got bobcat in your noir!" and that about sums it up. If you consider its plot one of the Aristotelian evergreens, you will have a fine time with this movie. Otherwise you may find yourself at the credits with your face scratched up. This expensive fun brought to you by my lucky backers at Patreon.
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Thank you!
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What I wasn't sure about before you watched it was whether the film that Lang actually made was worth watching, because the one I've seen criticism of sure isn't, but critical consensus and the actual films of noir seem to be related only by virtue of them both existing. It's too bad that the real film also turns out to contain bobcat.
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Agreed. That's much more like Hitchcock. Lang doesn't seem to have had the thing about transgression that so many horror directors (of which he was not always, but definitely sometimes, one) seem to share; he could be audacious, but that's not the same as playing chicken with your audience.
I think he intended it to be beyond-the-pale shocking, horrible, impossible to handle, and instead he got audience misogyny cackling behind their hands about how she must have deserved it.
So in the process of writing this post I ended up not keeping a line about how the coffee-scalding plays like a stomach-turning escalation of the famous grapefruit-in-the-kisser scene in The Public Enemy (1931) and I should clearly have left it in, because that scene also became a cause célèbre of socially acceptable misogyny; it affected Mae Clarke's entire subsequent career. I had not realized the phenomenon was just reproduced in the next generation with The Big Heat. I suppose that answers the question about the popular reception, and that's depressing.
but critical consensus and the actual films of noir seem to be related only by virtue of them both existing.
I try very hard to describe accurately the films I have seen. It is my goal never to be Foster Hirsch.
It's too bad that the real film also turns out to contain bobcat.
I really think it ran into the tools-of-the-master's-house problem. It is subversive in its criticism of Bannion's damn-the-consequences crusading, but the demonstration of his moral event horizon still requires dead women. Men must work and women must be destroyed, etc. It would have actually broken the paradigm if Grahame's character had survived.
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Sovay, I say this based on what you said in the coffee-in-the-face paragraph. The too-many-bodies just sounds like too many bodies, and it's just depressing reality that in general the public doesn't seem to care about too many bodies, especially female ones.
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I found it heartening to hear from
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Then we watched all six hours of his Niebelungenlied, an amazing experience.
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to my university last year
and my only thought was holy crap, necromancy is effective these days, what a conversation!
....I swear I have a public-facing job and don't fumble too much at human interaction in it. I wanted to thank you specifically for accidentally levity in a day in which I put my hair up so I could go and eat the bear up (metaphorically).
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I just wouldn't put it past Fritz Lang to turn up in university classrooms even now.
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Wow.
Nine
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Fritz Lang can't be cancelled, I agree, because Metropolis is, as has been discussed, the reason I'm anxious AND feminist AND socialist AND gay.
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Thank you. It really was a problem I had not previously encountered in my experience of noir—I'm used to swing-and-miss movies or movies with one saving grace, but not movies at the visible top of their game doing something I just don't enjoy watching. I am sure I would feel somewhat less sharply about it if its tropes had not become so wall-to-wall wearyingly familiar (though I stand by my feeling that it bobbles its ratio of subversion to reification and that's on the film itself, not its unironic Fight Club inheritors), but they are also just tropes I don't like.
I would have cheerfully watched an entire movie about Gloria Grahame, so there's that.
Fritz Lang can't be cancelled, I agree, because Metropolis is, as has been discussed, the reason I'm anxious AND feminist AND socialist AND gay.
I get all of that except the anxiety.
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It was the first time I had ever seen the pictures from a book get bigger and move and have music (there was still reading, and auf Deutsch at that). It was a strange and interesting choice on the part of my caregiver, I expect.
"If you had come earlier, you wouldn't have scared me..." is right!
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Legit!
milestones
While, as in this case, a given film may disappoint, it is always interesting to read your careful observations and reflections. And now there's another film to add to my watch list, even if it's Frau im Mond rather than The Big Heat.
By the by, I just thought I'd follow up on buying reprint rights for some film reviews for my zine. Noir and other pulpy pre-code classics can appear derivatively in science fiction, and it'd be nice give a proper introduction to people who have only glimpsed photocopies of photocopies.
I'd given you my card at Pandamonium, but given the energy that you brought to the reading on no sleep whatsoever, I wouldn't be surprised if it had slipped into a bag and out of mind.
Re: milestones
Thank you!
While, as in this case, a given film may disappoint, it is always interesting to read your careful observations and reflections. And now there's another film to add to my watch list, even if it's Frau im Mond rather than The Big Heat.
I'm glad to hear it. I have no reservations about pointing people toward that movie.
I'd given you my card at Pandamonium, but given the energy that you brought to the reading on no sleep whatsoever, I wouldn't be surprised if it had slipped into a bag and out of mind.
I still have it! I just haven't followed up because I've been exhausted. I appreciate the reminder that the offer is still open.
Re: milestones
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She is amazing. This incredibly pulp-fiction poster makes it look like she's the main avenger:
and I suspect I would have enjoyed that much, much more.
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I am clearly going to need to find some lady vengeance noir.