♪ ♪ [dramatic orchestral]
The film's directed by Fritz Lang,
and one of the other influences in film noir
is, of course, German Expressionism
and the immigration to the United States,
whether it's Fred Zinnemann, or Fritz Lang, or Bertolt Brecht.
Thomas Mann was living here,
Lion Feuchtwanger was living here. There's a whole community
of German immigrants,
a German immigrant community in Hollywood.
And it was a very rich cultural period.
So Fritz Lang brings to it a complete, consummate,
formalist knowledge of German Expressionist cinema
and cinema seen in a very formal way, a very European way.
That's why these decisions to have these two women at the front of the film
kind of assaults you with their assertiveness
and the power of their individuality and personalities. That's not by accident.
Mr. Lagana.
I know it's late. Wake him up.
Tell him it's Tom Duncan's widow.
[Mann] That's there intentionally.
And that's a formalist approach to scenario and film making.
Vince!
It's him.
The women are fascinating in The Big Heat.
Mr. Lagana is an excellent life insurance agent.
What's the trouble?
Why, nothing, Officer.
This is Police Sergeant Bannion.
Sorry, Sergeant. We got a call there was trouble.
Sergeant Bannion...
Oh, I'm sorry.
It's ex-sergeant, isn't it?
He'll be leaving with you, Officer.
[Mann] Women who had experience, particularly in the United States,
of being in the workplace
and in the defense industries and on the aircraft lines.
So when Gloria Grahame says, "Hey, you'll do..."
You'll do.
[Mann] Or, "Get it yourself."
Or Katie...
shares his cigarette, takes his drink right at the beginning of the film,
it almost seems like Fritz Lang wanted to sort of notice
that real life in this country right now,
women are this way in relationship to men, that there's a new equivalence.
And so he sets it in the front of the film
so that your orientation is totally different.
80 within that frame, actually a much more interesting frame, you have the story
of endemic corruption in a police department,
and one cop who breaks all boundaries
and has an independent value system
and will go up into the face of authority.
Whereas everybody else, all his other co-workers
are, in one way or another, passively accepting.
You're under suspension.
You better check with Lagana first. He might not approve.
I'll have your badge and gun. Now.
You can have it.
Permanently.
One moment.
I asked for your gun, too.
That doesn't belong to the department. It's mine.
That kind of a hero always influenced me early on,
in some of my own earlier work.
And it's kind of a standard...
Later on in the '803, people would call these kind of guys existential heroes.
But it is the clarity and simplicity of his choices.
As his wife says to him, as Katie says to him,
"Go ahead and lead with your chin."
Just keep leading with your chin and don't you compromise.
That's what I wanted to hear you say.
"Don't worry about the safety. Don't conform."
You have your own internalized, authentic, hard-won morality,
"and you're going to confront the unnamed city's police department with it."
There's an interesting sideline to this, which is that
the ethnic stereotyping in the film
has Bannion, apparently Irish,
and the immigrant is the organized crime figure
who has this control over the city.
I grew up in Chicago, and the Chicago administration,
the police department was also very Irish.
But it was this wonderful populist
kind of corruption.
And it was typically Chicago where if you were a citizen of the city of Chicago
you had the same inalienable right as any other citizen
to bribe an Irish cop.
That was the...
So the institutions of the city were notoriously corrupt.
And the organized crime component was actually multi-ethnic.
That was the experience in Chicago.
It's easy to look at The Big Heat today
and, you know, we react to...
I thought Gloria Grahame is fantastic,
and Glenn Ford's fantastic,
but it must have been a hell of a shock
in 1952, when this picture came out,
to have women that forward.
Everybody's walking out on me tonight.
What are you after?
I don't know. You, I think.
Vince Stone chase you after me?
You saw him leave me in the bar like an old beer or something.
Come on. Let's find out. I mean, if it's you I'm after.
The kind of events that occur in this film
didn't occur in Hollywood movies before film noir.
They try to assassinate Glenn Ford.
They miss. They blow up his wife.
I remember the very first time I saw The Big Heat,
what a shocking surprise. Pictures didn't do that.
You knew enough to know those kind of things happened in life.
But pictures didn't do that.
[explosion]
The kind of grim reality that can happen in existence
is now suddenly in mainstream Hollywood cinema.
And that's also film noir.
It has various other characteristics, Chiaroscuro lighting particularly,
and very deep focus, seeing things that are going on in the foreground,
seeing things going on in the background.
The influence of Orson Welles and Citizen Kane.
So there are characteristics to film noir,
but it's way more than just a style of lighting or a visual form.
♪ ♪ [upbeat music]
Film noir generally, I believe,
proceeds from the experience of the Second World War
and the kind of shattering of illusions,
of transcendental absolutes,
of moral values, particularly in Western culture.
In other words, it's the same event that produced existentialism in France,
a general awareness that real reality
is hard, tough, has no absolutes, there are no transcendental moral values.
That it is...
That life, in fact, is a struggle.
And there is not much meaning
other than what you put to it, if you're going to live authentically.
If you live inauthentically, then you'd accept the status quo,
you'd accept the standard values,
and you would blindly walk a predetermined path.
And many of those themes are apparent
in the choices behind the story of The Big Heat.
♪ ♪ [suspenseful music]
[gunshot
Some of this, I think, precedes the Second World War
in terms of confronting death
as something to look in the face for what it is,
whether it's Hemingway writing Death in the Afternoon
or Keynes saying that the end of every story is death.
These are thoughts from the '30s.
And again, it's the human experience
encountering something like the Great Depression,
from whence comes the hard boiled novel.
So the hard boiled novel and that perspective on
fiction and real life on the streets.
In a strict definition of noir,
in fact, The Big Heat really isn't a noir film.
There is a hopelessness to a noir film.
The Big Heat's version of noir,
or Hollywood's version of noir in a way,
is a world in which there is plenitude.
It's the sets,
like the set design of Lee Marvin's apartment, the set decoration.
It's cynicism in an arena of abundance.
And America was abundant.
In 1950, the American economy was over 50% of the world's GNP.
The whole rest of the world barely equaled the power of the American economy.
There's characteristics of noir.
Its base is in some kind of individual's character
in confrontation with other forces.
Now, either he is removed from them
because he is fully conscious and independent
in which case there's a concomitant kind of loneliness
in the way the outcome usually works out.
Or he's somebody who fails to live.
And so then the perspective of the film is just a slice of life
into, "Here's the way reality is."
So the film, like Double Indemnity, is saying, "This is human motivation.
This is the way life is. This is the way the world works."
♪ ♪ [tense music]
Go on, shoot!
Fascinating. A tremendous...
Beautiful, beautiful work. It's all inspirational.
You can close your file on the Bertha Duncan killing.
Fritz Lang is bringing all this to us.
So it's film noir done by a great master.
Nothing can be better.