The Big Steal (1949) is not a film noir. Do not be fooled by the larcenous title, the RKO B-values, the sardonic lines scripted by Daniel Mainwaring or the tough-fisted action directed by Don Siegel or even the reteaming of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, last seen making noir history with the fatale-tastic Out of the Past (1947). Despite these persuasive credentials, the picture is instead a romantic, even screwball comedy that just happens to involve a stolen $300,000, a stolen $2000, and a three-card honey of a chase scene across southeastern Mexico. It is adorable and it makes a surprisingly cogent case that more screwball comedies could stand to contain shootouts.
Seriously, in its own cheerfully low-budget way, this movie reminds me of nothing so much as one of Mary Stewart's novels of romantic suspense, where a heroine can check into a hotel in Avignon or drive a rental car to Delphi or visit the circus in Vienna and fall simultaneously into love and danger. Here the fateful destination is sunny Veracruz, where Greer's Joan Graham has tracked her debonair weasel of an absconded fiancé (Patric Knowles), whom she greets with a slap and follows up with "Now you can give me back my two thousand dollars." Instead he slips out while she's showering, leaving her to face the music of Mitchum's Duke Halliday, hot on the trail of the Army payroll he's been framed for stealing. They met briefly in customs, two Americans off the same steamer of the Pan Gulf Line. Now he's flashing a gun under false pretenses, she's dripping in her ex-weasel's bathrobe: each believes the other is a confederate of their quarry and mistrusts accordingly, but no sooner have they been reluctantly obliged to cover for one another with the local law than the real U.S. Army officer sent to recover the payroll (William Bendix) hits town just as Jim Fiske with ~$302,000 skips it and the next thing you know everyone is road-tripping from Veracruz to Tehuacán, dodging flocks of goats, disgruntled road crews, and assorted authorities in a bullet-spangled race that never spins out into farce or foregone conclusions even as it becomes obvious that the real question is not whether Duke and Joan will catch up with Fiske and exonerate themselves with the U.S. Army and the PJF but whether they'll kiss before or after. We the audience have the advantage of knowing they're both innocent, of course—they're risking disappointment, but not double-cross. They have to figure it out for themselves, whether this curious pull of trust toward a cool stranger is insight or just limerence.
I recognize that for a noir this might be faint praise, but again, The Big Steal doesn't have to worry about its bona fides. It is not, in most romances, a shocking twist that the leads end up together; the pleasure is in watching how they get there. It's a real pleasure that this particular courtship of the road is so egalitarian. Not once does the progression of the romance require subordinating the heroine to the hero; it eschews even the casual microaggressions that so often infect otherwise cute het relationships. At their first meeting on the docks, Joan watches Duke try to shove his way through the crowd with the world's most impatiently American ("Scram, por favor!") Spanglish and rebukes him, "It's men like you who make people like them contemptuous of tourists." Another movie might be setting her up as the prim white knight; in fact she works for an import-export company in Miami and speaks fluent, courteous Spanish, which will bail the two of them out of any number of tight spots on the road—Duke will have to learn to trust her translations as much as her intentions. He makes an offhand crack about women drivers when he pops into the front seat of her Buick Special, then explicitly takes it back after she steers them at windshield-jouncing, white-knuckle speed down the dust-blown straightaways and the cliffside hairpin turns of the highway down which Bendix's Captain Blake is pursuing them, her rear view mirror smashed useless from a lucky shot. Her eyes are cool with concentration; she doesn't hit one rural obstacle and she pulls over in a screech of tires when Duke shouts for her to, so that he can shoo a pen of goats into an impromptu roadblock behind them. That's their first real moment of collaboration, not the awkward half-truths of "mutual interest" in the police inspector's office: a realization of mutual competence. It's not a fragile bond, either, though it's sustained by sarcasm as often as kindness. When Joan's overpowered by her ex-lover after holding him at gunpoint, Duke doesn't scold her for feminine weakness; they both know he handed over the Army's $300,000 because the same weasel got the drop on him. They're not superheroes, just clever and stubborn and constitutionally incapable of not cracking wise even in frightening circumstances. "You Army men might be accustomed to group showers," Joan snaps as she exits the bathroom to find an armed stranger ransacking her skedaddled ex-fiancé's digs; "I like mine alone." Duke on the losing end of a shootout in the hills signals his decision to make a risky grab for an unspent rifle by sighing, "I hate the thought of spending the night with an empty revolver." Even before the script's plumbed the depths of his treachery, we know Fiske's no good because when Joan confronted him about her $2000, he tried first to sweet-talk and then to neg her into dropping the subject, paternally patronizing both times. By contrast, nothing about Duke Halliday suggests that he feels threatened by his traveling companion's pedal-to-the-metal savvy and nothing about the film suggests that we should find him remarkable for it. I'm fond of this matter-of-fact style of representation generally and here it even feels thematically apropos; it's as blasé as Mitchum's eyes and nearly as beautiful.
The Big Steal was shot on location in Mexico, occasionally without its leading man; the production was famously but not fatally held up by Mitchum's well-publicized drug bust and jail time, during which Siegel filmed around him as much as possible. (It yielded a wonderful continuity error in the chase scenes: thanks to the normal progression of the seasons, the countryside looks lusher and greener whenever Mitchum's in shot. It reflects well on him.) It's not as bold as something like Border Incident (1949), but the Mexican characters are pleasingly not just scenery; Ramón Novarro's Inspector General Ortega looks at first like a genial local lightweight when his University of California-educated lieutenant (Don Alvarado) keeps discreetly having to correct his idioms, but he turns out to have his own reasons for letting this American clown car run right under his nose and its implications are as good as an entire other film about the illicit antiquities trade. The scene in which Joan persuades the foreman of a construction crew (Pascual García Peña) to stall their pursuit by spinning a yarn about her elopement with the "grande y hermoso" Duke is perhaps sentimental, but she's right that the foreman's a nice guy and the deception gives the ghost marriage a chance to shine. The fadeout is a teasing argument between Joan and Duke about the virtues of Mexican vs. American courting customs, in which the U.S. does not have the last word. It's a little refreshing.
I don't think I have much more to say about this movie, but I don't think I need to: it's a delightful expenditure of 71 minutes and strongly suggests that my previous indifference to Jane Greer was the fault of confining her to a role of inscrutable duplicity. Mitchum, of course, would go on to care even less to perhaps even more delightful effect in Macao (1952), another romance that really isn't a noir. You could show them together, obviously. Or you could just watch The Big Steal. I was looking forward to the movie I thought it would be, but I think I like even better the one I actually got. This detour brought to you by my breezy backers at Patreon.
Seriously, in its own cheerfully low-budget way, this movie reminds me of nothing so much as one of Mary Stewart's novels of romantic suspense, where a heroine can check into a hotel in Avignon or drive a rental car to Delphi or visit the circus in Vienna and fall simultaneously into love and danger. Here the fateful destination is sunny Veracruz, where Greer's Joan Graham has tracked her debonair weasel of an absconded fiancé (Patric Knowles), whom she greets with a slap and follows up with "Now you can give me back my two thousand dollars." Instead he slips out while she's showering, leaving her to face the music of Mitchum's Duke Halliday, hot on the trail of the Army payroll he's been framed for stealing. They met briefly in customs, two Americans off the same steamer of the Pan Gulf Line. Now he's flashing a gun under false pretenses, she's dripping in her ex-weasel's bathrobe: each believes the other is a confederate of their quarry and mistrusts accordingly, but no sooner have they been reluctantly obliged to cover for one another with the local law than the real U.S. Army officer sent to recover the payroll (William Bendix) hits town just as Jim Fiske with ~$302,000 skips it and the next thing you know everyone is road-tripping from Veracruz to Tehuacán, dodging flocks of goats, disgruntled road crews, and assorted authorities in a bullet-spangled race that never spins out into farce or foregone conclusions even as it becomes obvious that the real question is not whether Duke and Joan will catch up with Fiske and exonerate themselves with the U.S. Army and the PJF but whether they'll kiss before or after. We the audience have the advantage of knowing they're both innocent, of course—they're risking disappointment, but not double-cross. They have to figure it out for themselves, whether this curious pull of trust toward a cool stranger is insight or just limerence.
I recognize that for a noir this might be faint praise, but again, The Big Steal doesn't have to worry about its bona fides. It is not, in most romances, a shocking twist that the leads end up together; the pleasure is in watching how they get there. It's a real pleasure that this particular courtship of the road is so egalitarian. Not once does the progression of the romance require subordinating the heroine to the hero; it eschews even the casual microaggressions that so often infect otherwise cute het relationships. At their first meeting on the docks, Joan watches Duke try to shove his way through the crowd with the world's most impatiently American ("Scram, por favor!") Spanglish and rebukes him, "It's men like you who make people like them contemptuous of tourists." Another movie might be setting her up as the prim white knight; in fact she works for an import-export company in Miami and speaks fluent, courteous Spanish, which will bail the two of them out of any number of tight spots on the road—Duke will have to learn to trust her translations as much as her intentions. He makes an offhand crack about women drivers when he pops into the front seat of her Buick Special, then explicitly takes it back after she steers them at windshield-jouncing, white-knuckle speed down the dust-blown straightaways and the cliffside hairpin turns of the highway down which Bendix's Captain Blake is pursuing them, her rear view mirror smashed useless from a lucky shot. Her eyes are cool with concentration; she doesn't hit one rural obstacle and she pulls over in a screech of tires when Duke shouts for her to, so that he can shoo a pen of goats into an impromptu roadblock behind them. That's their first real moment of collaboration, not the awkward half-truths of "mutual interest" in the police inspector's office: a realization of mutual competence. It's not a fragile bond, either, though it's sustained by sarcasm as often as kindness. When Joan's overpowered by her ex-lover after holding him at gunpoint, Duke doesn't scold her for feminine weakness; they both know he handed over the Army's $300,000 because the same weasel got the drop on him. They're not superheroes, just clever and stubborn and constitutionally incapable of not cracking wise even in frightening circumstances. "You Army men might be accustomed to group showers," Joan snaps as she exits the bathroom to find an armed stranger ransacking her skedaddled ex-fiancé's digs; "I like mine alone." Duke on the losing end of a shootout in the hills signals his decision to make a risky grab for an unspent rifle by sighing, "I hate the thought of spending the night with an empty revolver." Even before the script's plumbed the depths of his treachery, we know Fiske's no good because when Joan confronted him about her $2000, he tried first to sweet-talk and then to neg her into dropping the subject, paternally patronizing both times. By contrast, nothing about Duke Halliday suggests that he feels threatened by his traveling companion's pedal-to-the-metal savvy and nothing about the film suggests that we should find him remarkable for it. I'm fond of this matter-of-fact style of representation generally and here it even feels thematically apropos; it's as blasé as Mitchum's eyes and nearly as beautiful.
The Big Steal was shot on location in Mexico, occasionally without its leading man; the production was famously but not fatally held up by Mitchum's well-publicized drug bust and jail time, during which Siegel filmed around him as much as possible. (It yielded a wonderful continuity error in the chase scenes: thanks to the normal progression of the seasons, the countryside looks lusher and greener whenever Mitchum's in shot. It reflects well on him.) It's not as bold as something like Border Incident (1949), but the Mexican characters are pleasingly not just scenery; Ramón Novarro's Inspector General Ortega looks at first like a genial local lightweight when his University of California-educated lieutenant (Don Alvarado) keeps discreetly having to correct his idioms, but he turns out to have his own reasons for letting this American clown car run right under his nose and its implications are as good as an entire other film about the illicit antiquities trade. The scene in which Joan persuades the foreman of a construction crew (Pascual García Peña) to stall their pursuit by spinning a yarn about her elopement with the "grande y hermoso" Duke is perhaps sentimental, but she's right that the foreman's a nice guy and the deception gives the ghost marriage a chance to shine. The fadeout is a teasing argument between Joan and Duke about the virtues of Mexican vs. American courting customs, in which the U.S. does not have the last word. It's a little refreshing.
I don't think I have much more to say about this movie, but I don't think I need to: it's a delightful expenditure of 71 minutes and strongly suggests that my previous indifference to Jane Greer was the fault of confining her to a role of inscrutable duplicity. Mitchum, of course, would go on to care even less to perhaps even more delightful effect in Macao (1952), another romance that really isn't a noir. You could show them together, obviously. Or you could just watch The Big Steal. I was looking forward to the movie I thought it would be, but I think I like even better the one I actually got. This detour brought to you by my breezy backers at Patreon.
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