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," "
5 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).
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