New Print!

Those who saw The Big Heat in our summer Fritz Lang festival in this pristine new print experienced the director at the top of his form-what is probably his most perfectly realized American film, shown in the crisp, searing, eloquent black-and-white the artist intended. Many people were turned away from that sold-out screening and we are pleased to present the film again tonight.

In the German Langs-in Dr. Mabuse, The Spies, M-one can't tell the cops from the robbers, and Lang was no less cynical in his Hollywood noirs. In The Big Heat, Glenn Ford gives a fine performance of inward obsession as a police detective who engages in a crusade against organized crime and police corruption after his wife is killed by a car bomb. But the moral and magnetic center of the film is Gloria Grahame, who intelligently develops the two sides of the bad girl. Few films of the fifties or any period are more ruthless and uncompromising in their observation of violence in American society. Yet, as in Lang classics such as M, this violence is portrayed through suggestion, achieving a powerful impact. "In this way," Lang has said, "I force the audience to become a collaborator of mine."