I wasn't that excited to see this but thought I should because I am a major fan of Fritz Lang. The movie is so generic and dull in its mediocrity that if I didn't know he directed it beforehand, I would have been surprised to find that it's the work of Lang. It's not at all in his usual energetic style and is hard to sit though, allthough I did make it to the end.
I generally don't like genre theory as an approach to analysing films, because it results in endless, pointless cineaste and theorist debates and super-specific subclassifications that often loose their usefullness. To contradict myself, however, I have to say that I was surprised that this film is often considered a noir as it is a more of a thriller with a few noir elements.
The movie stars the decidedly non-hard boiled Glenn Ford as Dave Bannion, a cop who is investigating the mafia, who (spoiler, skip to next paragraph) kill his wife (Jocleon Brando). Do you think he is going to take the law into his own hands to try bring the crooks to justice?
I never at anytime during this movie cared about any of character or the plot. Absolutley nothing in this movie worked for me and I was pretty much bored out of my mind. The reason why the rating isn't lower is that, like The White Sheik, the movie is too typical and unorginal to be truly awful. I don't reccomend this film at all, to anyone. That includes you. I mean it.
The Big Heat (1953)