Gloria Grahame as Debbie Marsh, and Glenn Ford as Dave Bannion in The Big Heat, Fritz Lang, dir, Columbia Pictures, 1953. Screenshot.

The ethos of cinema

Comparing the moral stance of a popular movie to the national culture from which it arose is hard enough. Films are shaped by genre conventions that precede them as much as by their own historical settings. How much more fraught then, to place side by side a film made 72 years ago and the current political scene in the U.S? But when I recently saw again, in a British movie house, Fritz’s Lang’s noir classic The Big Heat (1953), I couldn’t help but compare its perspective on political corruption with our own. In the one, exposure leads to reform, to the “big heat” of justice; in the age of Trump, public discussion of corruption generates only low heat, not enough so far, even to light a match.

Revenge tragedy with final redemption

Though I’ve probably seen it ten times, The Big Heat remains hard to summarize. The film begins with a first-person suicide: a gun is taken from a desk drawer; the camera pulls back to see a man’s head from behind, then pans up toward the wall as a shot is fired. The victim who slumps on the desk is a cop named Tom Duncan, in despair over his complicity with local mobsters. A suicide note incriminating city officials and businessmen, is quickly discovered by his unloving wife, who secrets it away, enabling her to extort payments from the implicated political boss and mobster, Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby).

Alexander Scourby as Mike Lagana and Chris Alcaide as George Rose in The Big Heat, 1953 (screenshot).

[To make him more sinister, Lang suggests he is gay. When we first meet him, he’s been awakened in the middle of the night by a ringing phone. Dressed in silk pajamas, he leans over to take the call, then sits up when his handsome bodyguard, dressed in a terry robe, enters the room to bring Mike coffee and light his cigarette. A little later, Lagana reveals his attachment to his recently deceased mother, whose portrait hangs above the mantle of his living room. Fritz Lang was a product of libertine, Weimar Germany, but by the 1950s, he evidently embraced his host country’s gender repressiveness. In the late 1940s, there began a nationwide purge of gay and trans men and women in government, education, and business. Called by some elected officials “moral perverts,” they were widely denounced and subjected to firing. In 1952, a year before the film’s release, the American Psychiatric Association published its first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in which homosexuality was classified as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower’s issued Executive Order #10450, “Security Requirements for Government Employment,” banning the hiring or retention of anyone guilty of “immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct…[or] sexual perversion.” Six months after that order was released, The Big Heat, with its depraved queer villain, hit the screens.]

The chief investigator of Duncan’s death, Sargent Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), quickly realizes it’s not a simple case of suicide, and when the dead cop’s “barfly” girlfriend, Lucy Chapman (Dorothy Green) confirms his suspicions, she’s abducted and killed, her abused body found by the side of a road. Bannion now presses his investigation, despite being warned........

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