Percolating Paranoia

Percolating Paranoia

Fritz Lang's The Big Heat

Fritz Lang brings the terrors of noir

into the bright kitchens of America.

Watch that coffee pot!

BY H

In Bright Lights 12 devoted to film noir, Gary Morris locates the malaise giving rise to the noir sensibility in the "mechanized, immoral, soul-destroying city."1 He defines the urban noir setting as attacking its characters' chances for "hope, happiness, peace, complacency, and romance" (Morris 16). Although the attack may be related to the loss of a pastoral setting as Morris suggests, many film noir narratives locate those happy possibilities in the seemingly stable institution of the family, and can be read as ironic, hopeless searches for a humanized, moral, soul-restoring home. According to Sylvia Harvey, "the loss of those satisfactions normally obtained through the possession of a wife and the presence of a family" is one of the recurrent themes of film noir.2 Of course, the archetypal array of characters in film noir are not family members, but the hard-boiled, trench-coated detective; the beautiful, duplicitous, and greedy femme fatale with a revolver shoved deep into the pocket of her fur coat; and a fascinating complement of criminals ranging from sleazy and violent hoodlums to their glib and urbane bosses. The film noir narrative, with its aura of paranoia accentuated by nontraditional lighting and mise en scene, usually plays out not in the brightly lit kitchen or living room of a comfortable home but at night in dimly lit back streets glistening with rain or shadowy stairwells filled with looming shadows. Through a careful reading of a noir text that presents both the typical film noir mise en scene and various familial images, a sense of film noir's complicated relationship to the family develops. The Big Heat (1953), directed by Fritz Lang, represents family life as a sham, as a relationship of convenience, as perverse, and finally as so fragile and threatened that even an icon of domesticity becomes a weapon.

In The Big Heat, violence and criminality contaminate a small city, controlling elections and the police, as well as threatening familial institutions. The cast of characters I have identified as archetypal of film noir narratives is present, but, in keeping with many such films of the '50s, they have moved out of the shadowy stairwells and back alleys to occupy well-furnished homes and luxurious estates. Much of the violence occurs offscreen -- in the diegesis of the film, occurring no doubt in the old haunts of film noir.3 Violence and criminality still exist, closer and more threatening than ever, but also more insidious. The low-key lighting, off-angle compositions, and night-for-night photography that distinguishes the visual style of noir films is used sparingly in The Big Heat, further blurring the boundary between the criminal elements and the rest of society.

Emphasizing the pressing danger to the family unit, the plot of the film takes the viewer into two false fronts of domesticity before introducing the ideal but threatened Bannion family.4 The opening sequence of the film introduces a husband (only briefly alive) and wife already corrupted. Setting the violent tone, the first shot of The Big Heat is a close-up of a revolver on a desk. As the camera slowly draws back, a hand grasps the gun, a shot is fired, and a man slumps over the desk. The frame continues to enlarge, revealing a woman coming down the stairs. After a cut to medium shot of the woman, her face half in shadow, and a huge grandfather clock reading three o'clock, the sequence goes on to show her coldly assessing the suicide of her husband and making a phone call. Mrs. Duncan, from the opening sequence a policeman's widow, exhibits the greed and ambition of the archetypal femme fatale, although her sexuality is de-emphasized. A later sequence, an interview between Mrs. Duncan and homicide detective Bannion, visually underscores her duplicity by beginning with a shot of her at a vanity table, reflected in a three-paned mirror as she makes herself up to play the grieving widow.

Mrs. Duncan's 3 a.m. phone call takes the camera right into the luxurious bedroom of the second false front of domesticity, the home of crime boss Mike Lagana. No mention is made of a wife, and although Lagana talks about his daughter's parties and dates with a football player, she remains in the story but not in the plot, and never appears onscreen. Lagana has adopted a facade of respectability that includes an opulent home complete with a portrait of his now dead mother dominating the living room, but his lack of real contact with his daughter stands in marked contrast to the Bannion family.

Having established Dave Bannion as the detective in charge of the Duncan suicide, the sequence introducing his family begins with a newspaper headline confirming Mrs. Duncan's story and then pulls back to reveal Bannion reading the paper in a cozy kitchen. As his blond wife, Katie, clad in a simple polka-dot dress and checked apron, serves their steak and potatoes, Bannion puts away the paper and opens a few beers and they discuss their daughter Joyce. Katie Bannion stands opposed to the femme fatale characters, and presents another female archetype often found in film noir: the woman as redeemer, offering the possibility of reintegration for the alienated man.5 Yet this woman as redeemer is usually represented as bland and undemanding, far removed from Katie's vivacity. Katie and Bannion's brief stints of verbal sexual sparring, fairly explicit in a time when censors insisted all bedrooms contain only separate beds, also rounds out their relationship. This familial sequence is shot in classical Hollywood style, with high-key lighting creating minimal, natural looking shadows in the homey kitchen/dining room. But outside the gingham-curtained window, an intensely black night looms and phone calls interrupt the domestic idyll.

When Katie answers an apparently obscene phone call made by one of Lagana's thugs to threaten Bannion off the Duncan case, Bannion knows his home and family have been threatened. He retaliates by barging into Lagana's house and roughing up his bodyguard. Lagana strikes back and in a car explosion intended to kill Bannion, Katie is murdered. The final sequence in the Bannion bungalow takes place after her death. As workers remove the last of the furniture, Bannion refuses the help and sympathy of a fellow policeman, who accuses Bannion of being on a "hate binge." As he stands alone in the empty room, filled with apparently natural light, the camera moves in for a close-up of Bannion's