The Big Heat

Fritz Lang's "The Big Heat" (1953) headlines the fourth collaboration between Sony and Martin Scorsese's nonprofit film preservation organization, the Film Foundation, but this masterpiece of film noir has been on DVD before. Not so the other four Columbia crime dramas in the set, all making their respective DVD debut. Like "The Big Heat," "Five Against the House" (1955) is a shadowy studio film, but it leaves the urban corruption for the crowded energy of a Reno casino and an impulsive heist scheme led by an unstable Brian Keith.

The remaining three films showcase a very different strain of '50s film noir. "The Sniper" (1952), produced by Stanley Kramer and directed on location in San Francisco by Edward Dmytryk, has a much edgier atmosphere and modern feel, in part because of the seeming randomness of the killing. The low-budget location shooting gives it an immediacy, and Dmytryk punctuates the violence with vivid explosions of brutal force without showing a drop of blood. Don Siegel's "The Lineup" (1958), also shot on location in San Francisco, stars Eli Wallach as a killer on the trail of smuggled heroin shipments, and Siegel's matter-of-fact violence gives the film a startling dynamic. "Murder by Contract" (1958), by contrast, is almost laconic in its story of a self-made assassin-for-hire (Vince Edwards). Director Irving Lerner matches the deliberation of his killer with his meticulous direction: Every murder is so carefully set up that we never need to see the follow through. There are introductions to four of the films (three of them by Scorsese) and commentary on two of them. Film noir historian Eddie Muller is more focused on "The Sniper" but is more lively trying to keep James Ellroy in check on "The Lineup" (Ellroy's colorful language is not censored in this track).