Monthly Archives: December 2017

  • The Big Heat

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fritz Lang (1953)

    The Big Heat is a lean, exciting melodrama – Fritz Lang’s balance of film noir types and tropes with plot and character is very satisfying.   The screenplay by Sidney Boehm is an adaptation of a story by William P McGivern (which first appeared in late 1952 as a Saturday Evening Post serial and was published as a novel the following year).   The only scenes that seem – while they’re happening – to go on a little too long are those describing the happy home life of the protagonist, homicide detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), with his wife Katie (Jocelyn Brando) and their young daughter Joyce (Linda Bennett).  Once the Bannions’ car is blown up and Katie killed in the explosion, we understand why Fritz Lang took time showing the domestic bliss that has now been destroyed.  By lingering on Katie cooking a steak for her husband, Lang ensures this stays in the viewer’s memory, that Bannion’s determination to avenge his wife’s murder is always edged with an awareness of his personal tragedy.

    The car bomb is Bannion’s punishment for standing up to Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby), the snake-like boss of a local crime syndicate that virtually runs the (fictional) city of Kenport.  The corruption extends to the police department, including Bannion’s immediate superior Ted Wilks (Willis Bouchey) and the force’s commissioner (Howard Wendell), as well as Tom Duncan, the officer whose suicide catalyses Bannion’s investigations and whose widow Bertha (Jeanette Nolan) is a key figure in the plot.  After Katie’s death and a showdown with Wilks, Bannion hands in his police badge but not his gun – as he points out in the resignation scene, the weapon is his own.   The hero becomes a vigilante yet we always have the sense that he’s in reluctant exile from organised law and order.  It makes emotional sense that, in the film’s closing scene, he returns to work in a cleaned-up police force.  The blurring, in the meantime, of the line that divides officers of the law from unofficial upholders of it is captured well in a sequence that leads into The Big Heat‘s  climax.  After her mother’s death, Joyce Bannion goes to live with her aunt and uncle.  When he learns the police guard has been taken off their house, Bannion hurries over there.  As he climbs the stairs, a man leaps from the shadows and they struggle together.  We assume the adversary is a member of Lagana’s outfit; he turns out to be a friend of Bannion’s brother-in-law, one of a small group of ex-soldiers helping to guard the place now the police have gone.

    Fritz Lang exploits Glenn Ford’s regular guy persona very effectively.   Ford occasionally looks to be working hard to convey Bannion’s bitterness but, for the most part, his grief and anger seem authentically felt.  Ford doesn’t express the canny but wounded soul of a noir tragic hero the way that Humphrey Bogart does but he’s very persuasive as an ordinary cop and family man, which is more important here.  When Bannion finally rejoins the police, he is back in one of the places where he belongs.  Although Lagana’s stranglehold on the city has been broken, this ending isn’t falsely upbeat, however, and not just because, as a call on his return to the office immediately reminds us, homicide is still occurring.  It’s also because Bannion won’t get back to the other place he belongs – the place where Katie used to be.  This idea comes across strongly because Glenn Ford is temperamentally as much at home in a relaxed domestic setting as he is walking mean streets.   The BFI programme note for the screening of The Big Heat I went to used an extract from a 1972 book by Colin McArthur called Underworld USA.  McArthur writes perceptively about Lang’s use of décor and lighting in the story’s different locations to convey the moral differences  between characters:

    ‘In contrast to the Duncan home [where the opening suicide takes place], Bannion’s is brightly lit; in contrast to the luxury of Lagana’s and [his right-hand man Vince] Stone’s places, Bannion’s home is plain.  … [Bannion’s] leaving home, where his humanity has been defined, is one of the turning points in his move towards violence and criminality.  He goes to live in the twilight world of anonymous apartments …’

    The storytelling is clever.  Lang repeatedly creates impact by not over-emphasising a crucial revelation or event:  the mob’s control of the police and influence on forthcoming city elections; Katie’s death; the subsequent elimination of the car bomber (Adam Williams).  Lang, Ford and Gloria Grahame worked together again on the following year’s Human Desire but The Big Heat is an altogether more successful collaboration.  Grahame is admirably varied as Debby Marsh, the girlfriend of Vince Stone (Lee Marvin).  She moves fast, both physically and emotionally speaking, in her early scenes.  There’s a risky quality in Debby’s vivacity, in the squiffy impudence that riles the man who keeps her.  After Stone, in a fit of violent temper, has ruined one side of her face, Debby is reduced at first to an immobility that’s in startling contrast to what has gone before.  The fragility and destruction of facial beauty in a Hollywood film is apt to reverberate beyond the story, especially when the face belongs to an actress of Gloria Grahame’s era and who played the types of role she usually played.  There’s humour, as well as poignancy, in Debby’s death scene, which the Langs (Fritz and his cinematographer namesake Charles) shoot in profile, on the undamaged side.   Elsewhere, Grahame repeatedly proves her ability to do more than look good, making the most of witty lines – as when Debby describes Bannion’s soulless hotel room as ‘early nothing’ or, in her key confrontation with Duncan’s widow, refers to the pair of them as ‘sisters under the mink’.

    Lee Marvin isn’t a pretty sight but he’s an extraordinary one.  His features – the mouth especially – have a brutal mobility.  It’s not surprising that even Mike Lagana tells Vince Stone that he sometimes finds him ‘alarming’:  Marvin makes Stone a very credible psychopath.  Although its title refers to a police crackdown on lawlessness, The Big Heat is notorious for another high-temperature reason – the scene in which Stone throws scalding coffee into Debby’s face.  What’s remarkable for a first-time viewer of the film is to discover that the notoriety of the scene derives from the act itself rather than the staging of it. Anticipating the moment with a knot in my stomach, I was surprised that Stone’s attack occurs off- camera.  We see the coffee bubbling away on a hot plate – then hear Debby’s shocked (and shocking) screams of pain.  The impact of the violence meted out to women is, as Colin McArthur also points out, cumulative.  Before disfiguring Debby, Stone has stubbed out a cigarette on the hand of a bar girl (Carolyn Jones).  Tom Duncan’s mistress (Dorothy Green) is murdered (this too off-screen).  Katie Bannion is killed by the car bomb.  Yet female characters are also the ones who, in different ways and for different motives, turn the tide:  the secretary (Edith Evanson) who gives helpful information to Bannion; Bertha Duncan, who is in possession of evidence that could expose Lagana et al; and Debby Marsh, who takes out her sister under the mink to ensure that evidence comes to light.

    29 November 2017

  • Battle of the Sexes

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (2017)

    You’d think the story of the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs would be effortlessly entertaining yet Battle of the Sexes is surprisingly hard work.  It lacks the breezy momentum of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s Little Miss Sunshine (2006) – I’ve not seen the pair’s intervening Ruby Sparks (2012) – and, at two hours, is plenty long enough.  Throughout the sluggish first half of the film, it’s a relief to know what it’s leading up to, even though the eventual on-court battle at the Houston Astrodome is clichéd and a bit anti-climactic.  Dayton and Faris work their way through Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay in a respectful, unimaginative way, as if they were handling a substantial drama.  The dual meaning of their title – referring not only to King (Emma Stone)’s match with Riggs (Steve Carell) but also to the heroine’s psychosexual turmoil – implies that Battle of the Sexes might be just that but its themes don’t translate into exciting cinema.   Larry King (Austin Stowell) and Billie Jean (née Moffitt) were teenage sweethearts.  After several years of marriage, she still loves her husband but the feelings she develops for hairdresser Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough) prove to Billie Jean that she’s lesbian.  This sexual orientation battle turns out. however, to be no contest.  I’ve never been an admirer of Simon Beaufoy’s writing but, without travestying the facts of the matter, he’d have been hard put to make it otherwise.

    Austin Stowell’s male-model-like Larry is pleasant, sensitive and more or less accepting of his wife’s sexuality.  This characterisation is entirely understandable:  as legends at the end of the film confirm, Billie Jean and Larry have remained on good terms; she and her life partner, Ilana Kloss, are godparents to Larry’s children, from his second marriage.  The Kings’ relationship is not, in other words, the stuff of dramatic conflict.  There’s minimal interaction, and virtually no tension, between Larry and Marilyn in the film – little tension between Marilyn and Billie Jean either, except when Marilyn realises she takes second place to sporting competition.  Another difficulty for Dayton, Faris and Beaufoy is that the King-Riggs encounter, though its outcome matters to both competitors and to the tennis status quo, is in part a showbiz distraction from the equality for women players cause that Billie Jean King championed so effectively.   As she accurately puts it to Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman), Executive Director of the recently formed Association of Tennis Professionals and thereby organiser-in-chief of the men’s tennis circuit, ‘Bobby’s a clown’.  And while it’s commendable that the film-makers stick to the historical timeline, this stops them from presenting the King-Riggs ‘Battle of the Sexes’ as a catalyst for change:  television voiceover for the match mentions that women had already received equal prize money at the 1973 US Open, which ended less than two weeks before the Houston Astrodome showdown.  (The achievement of King and others in making that happen is even more remarkable in retrospect:  Wimbledon, the last of the other three Grand Slams to follow suit, didn’t do so until 2007.)

    A succession of TV news excerpts conveys the US-centrism of sports coverage in American broadcast media.  The film itself conveys a similar impression – perhaps less intentionally – when, for example, it comes as a bombshell to Bobby Riggs that Margaret Court is about to be named the world number one in women’s tennis.  (By the end of the Grand Slam season of 1972, when the film’s action begins, Court had won twenty-one of her twenty-four Grand Slam singles titles.)  Although it’s suggested that Riggs wanted, from the start, to play King, the combination of her refusal to do so and Court’s official status led to the first ‘Battle of the Sexes’ in May 1973.  In a match that came to be known as the ‘Mother’s Day Massacre‘, Riggs beat Court 6-2 6-1.  (Dayton and Faris give significant screen time to this match.)  The result made it morally impossible for King to resist accepting Riggs’s subsequent challenge.  One of the most interesting snippets of news film archive included in Battle of the Sexes is a contemporary interview with Chris Evert, who had recently played her first Wimbledon singles final and lost to Billie Jean, and who thinks Riggs will beat King.

    It’s disappointing that a sporting event as distinctive as the Battle of the Sexes is given such uninspired, in some ways sloppy, treatment.  Billie Jean insists she’ll play Riggs only on condition that she has the authority to approve or veto every element of the match package; there’s no suggestion that any objection is raised to this demand.  How come that on the eve of the match, she learns for the first time that Jack Kramer is to be part of the TV commentary team and threatens to withdraw unless he’s removed?   It’s historically accurate that King entered the arena à la Cleopatra – borne on a featherbed litter by four bare-chested men in slave outfits.  It’s therefore unnecessarily feeble of the film to make it seem that she’s told about this arrangement just as she’s preparing to go on court and mutely accepts it.  The match itself is good only in parts.  Rosie Casals (Natalie Morales), with whom King won so many doubles titles, is part of the commentary team;  shots of the TV anchor with an affectionate arm round Casals, whether she likes it or not, are an unstressed but telling illustration of the balance of power between men and women in 1970s television.  Emma Stone skilfully impersonates Billie Jean’s court movement between rallies (whoever hits the tennis shots is a fine physical mimic too).  She and Steve Carell both do well in expressing the physical and emotional toll the match takes on the players.  But the score updates are very sporadic (there’s oddly more detail on these in the Riggs-Court contest).   And this is, in many respects, a standard-issue climactic screen competition.

    Marilyn, who’s been estranged from Billie Jean, makes an unexpected reappearance backstage shortly before the start of the match – but in time to do Billie Jean’s hair.  Bobby’s son Larry (Lewis Pullman) who, rather inexplicably, has been his father’s right-hand man in preparations for the contest, absents himself at the last minute.  Anybody who’s been anybody in the story either turns up at the Astrodome or is shown watching television.  Some of these clichés are confusing, others aren’t even worked through.  It’s virtually implied that the return of Marilyn and the defection of Larry Riggs, respectively raising Billie Jean’s spirits and lowering Bobby’s, may have affected the outcome of the match.  Bobby’s wife Priscilla (Elizabeth Shue), who has thrown him out because of his incorrigible gambling, is courtside for a reason – to pave the way for a later reconciliation with her husband as he slumps disconsolately in the locker room after the match.  But it’s not made clear what other spectators think of the outcome – the homophobic witch Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee), say, watching TV in a hotel room and witnessing her arch rival’s straight sets victory – 6-4 6-3 6-3.  (That the match was best of five sets still seems relevant today.  I support the persisting argument that, to justify the equality of prize money, women’s singles matches in Grand Slams should, like men’s, be best of five sets rather than three.)

    Billie Jean King’s manner during her playing career, on court and in interviews, suggested not just that she didn’t care what anyone thought of her or her feminism but that she almost enjoyed getting people’s backs up.  Emma Stone has none of the original’s abrasiveness; she gives Billie Jean a public persona that’s too ready to please.  If Stone were harsher in her exchanges with the chauvinist tennis establishment, the softer moments with Larry and Marilyn, which she plays well, would have greater impact.  Almost needless to say, Stone is also too pretty:  when a TV commentator remarks, with patronising insincerity that Billie Jean, without her glasses, could screen test for Hollywood, he’s only too right.  One of Emma Stone’s best moments comes when Billie Jean sits alone in her dressing room after her Houston triumph:  the image is clichéd but Stone’s strongly-felt weeping suggests an interesting confusion of reasons for the tears.  Steve Carell makes a decent job of Bobby Riggs; he gets over the emotional fragility that underlies, and seems to fuel, Riggs’s chauvinist braggadocio.  This is obvious enough from an early stage, however.  There’s nowhere for Carell to take the character – especially as the film is very sketchy about the attitude towards Bobby of Jack Kramer et al.  There’s barely a hint that they were worried his hustler opportunism might backfire – not much sense either that the powers-that-be of men’s tennis are complacent enough to assume that Riggs is bound to demolish King.  Bill Pullman’s Kramer is edgy and uncomfortable in his first encounter with Billie Jean, smoother but harder to read in what follows.  Fair enough:  the role is uncertainly written.  Sarah Silverman does a busy turn as Gladys Heldman, manager of the Virginia Slims tour in the 1970s.  Alan Cumming is Ted(dy) Tinling, the doyen of tennis fashion design.  Having warned Billie Jean about her affair with Marilyn, Tinling later looks forward to the day when ‘we shall be free to be who we are and to love who we love’.  He’s a surprising mouthpiece for these cautious pieties.  Ted Tinling was openly gay years before it was safe to be so.

    28 November 2017

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