BEFORE: We got some snow last night, which is not only rare for mid-April but also apparently my fault because I finally put the snow shovels away over the weekend. My wife warned me that as soon as I put the shovels away, we'd get hit one more time, and she was sort of right. Dammit.
Still 2 weeks to go before the Hitchcock chain, but the path there is getting clearer and clearer. You can sort of see how some noir crime films works as a lead-in, right? Then just a few more twists and turns and we'll be there before you know it. Linking from "The Newton Boys", Bo Hopkins was also in a film titled "Monte Walsh" with Lee Marvin (last seen in "Cat Ballou").
THE PLOT: Tough cop Dave Bannion takes on a politically powerful crime syndicate.
AFTER: It's tough to review a film like this today, because my first impulse is to compare it to a modern-day crime film, such as the ones I've been watching this past week, and if I do that, there's just no way it's going to hold up. Movies were just made differently back in the 1950's, everything was done on sets, and it was (apparently) much more expensive to shoot on location. That permeates nearly every shot of this film - it's not just the black and white film stock that makes every interior set look the same, it's the fact that they were probably all built by the same crew in the same place.
You just couldn't get away with this in a modern film - these days if you want a house to look like a house, you just go out and find a house you can rent. That's not to say that modern films don't shoot on sets, they may still do that - in some cases it might be cheaper to build a kitchen (or half a kitchen) instead of finding one that has room for a big camera and a crew of 10-15 people. But even then, it's got to look like a real kitchen, there can't be a hint of it looking like a set piece.
But when I see a film like "The Big Heat" from the 1950's, or, say, "The Maltese Falcon", eventually I notice that none of the characters ever seem to go outside. We never see them driving, or mowing the lawn, or standing out in the rain. Wherever they go, that camera's always already waiting for them on the inside, just as they walk into the house or apartment. Watch too many of these films in a row, like I have, and you can't NOT notice it.
Compared to a more modern film like, for example, "Dirty Harry", which was mostly shot on location in police squad rooms and the streets of San Francisco, and a crime film from the 1950's that was clearly shot on a Hollywood backlot suffers by comparison. Someone couldn't be bothered to find a REAL bar, a REAL police station? Is this movie magic or just plain laziness?
Let's take another example - without giving away any plot point, I can say that at one point in this film, a car explodes. It's a conscious choice (or perhaps a cost-cutting measure) to have that event take place off-screen. You hear it, you see a flash of light, but not the explosion itself. Compare that to a famous scene in "Casino" with a similar event - but in the more modern film, you see the person in the car, you see the ignition key being turned, you see the spark behind the dashboard that tells you that something bad's about to happen. You see the entire explosion itself, rendered in gorgeous slow-motion, and the impact (no pun intended) is remarkably greater. The audience feels like they're right there in the car, getting blowed up, while a similar occurence in this film just left me cold, mainly because of the distance created by not filming that event directly.
In defense of this film, however, you can just FEEL how influential a film like this was. We might not even have "The Untouchables" or "Gangster Squad" or even "Payback" if we didn't have "The Big Heat". There's just so much here that relates directly to modern crime films - there's the cop's endangered wife/family, I just saw that in "Gangster Squad". There's the sadistic/masochistic bad guy, I just saw someone like that in "Payback". The city where nearly every cop is corrupt except for one guy - God, that's like every film including "The Dark Knight Rises", isn't it? There's even the police captain telling our hero to hand in his badge and gun, which is just a staple of almost every cop movie.
I wish I could take the influence of a film into account when I set my score - but I have to try and judge the film by itself, based on one factor alone: enjoyment. That's why I'm doing this, that's why people watch movies, right? To enjoy them?
Also starring Glenn Ford (last seen in "The Man From the Alamo"), Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Jeannette Nolan, Alexander Scourby, Willis Bouchey, with a cameo from Carolyn Jones.
RATING: 4 out of 10 cigarette burns
No comments:
Post a Comment