The Big Heat (1953): Poster Parade for a Classic Glenn Ford Film Noir

 

 

 

By Nicholas Stix

 

The 1953 Fritz Lang movie The Big Heat has been called the first "angry cop" movie. Starring Glenn Ford, supported by professional good-bad girl Gloria Grahame and Lee Marvin playing one of the gallery of great heavies that made his reputation, the picture tells the tale of Mike Bannion, a straight cop in a corrupt department under the thumb of a crime syndicate. When the syndicate kills Bannion's wife in an attempt on his life, he wages a one-man war on it.

 

Because the movie was based on a pulp fiction novel, the posters promoting it were crude and even a little lewd by the standards of the day, though they are quaintly, campily, comically harmless by today's crude, lewd "standards."

 

 

 

 

The original paperback sold for 25 cents, and

worth every penny. Can today's paperbacks say

as much?

 

 

 

I had always assumed that Hollywood's postwar film noir craze, which began with Out of the Past (1946), starring Robert Mitchum, was based on popular sentiment and box office success. Not so, says Scott Eyman, in his poignant, stunning biography, Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer. According to Eyman, film noir arose purely as a fancy of lefty studio "intellectuals" like screenwriter-executive Dore Schary (who was also obsessed with political message movies opposing intolerance such as Crossfire, which battled anti-Semitism), first at RKO, and then when Metro corporate overlord Nick Schenck brought him in to undermine and then replace MGM founder Louis B. Mayer, whom Schenck detested and had long sought to destroy. (Contrary to popular belief, Mayer was never MGM's owner; Loew's was.) Eyman maintains that the films noir were, as a genre, a merely break-even proposition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This poster is so obscenely suggestive by 1953 standards

that I wonder if it hasn't been photoshopped, or if it was

made many years after the film's theatrical release, say, for

the video market.

 

 

 

 

Italian version

 

 

 

 

Spanish version

 

 

 

 

 

Forty or so years later, after it became respectable to write doctoral dissertations on film noir, Turner Classic Movies commissioned by far the most stylish and evocative Big Heat poster of them all.

Trailer for The Big Heat (1953)



[Thanks to Steve-O, at Film Noir of the Week.]