Nostalgia and Film Noir: The Big Heat

If you can get past the long-dated conventions of 1950s American studio film noir productions - the stagey dialogue, particularly in the domestic scenes, the obtrusive orchestral score - Fritz Lang's 1953 noir drama "The Big Heat" is really pretty good entertainment: a good cop investigates the suicide of a bad cop, crosses a mob boss who runs the city - boss's gang bungles an assassination attempt and kills the cop's wife via car bomb, and the cop seeks revenge and redemption. Not a deep or meaningful film in any serious way, the heavies weigh a ton and the good guys are stiff as boards and the end is a little too pat with the weakling cops summoning up their courage and the mob moll dying in a scene worthy of apotheosis - but the story moves right along and includes a few good eccentric minor characters and an especially good very early appearance by Lee Marvin as a sadistic mobster. The films set forth a trope that many other crime films followed, at least for many years: the one good man taking on the forces of evil, all by himself. Over the years, this idea has become harder to accept, and recent films tend to be much more nuanced, with the good guys more deeply flawed and the mobsters more humane, or at least more complex and complete. But The Big Heat is a good throwback and kind of fun to watch - a fantasy, an old belief that the wrongs of the world can be righted. It's no coincidence that this was done in the post-War years - and Lang I believe was a refugee from Nazi Germany - when the cops fail to back up the hero, Sgt. Bannion (Glenn Ford? too old for the part, by the way) - Bannion summons his brother-in-law and his Army buddy friends: they took on Hitler, and they're confident they can take on the mob as well. A real nostalgic throwback to the days when we felt American values and qualities could rectify all that's wrong in world.