The Big Heat

Fritz Lang - 1953
This is really a great, great film. Lang has found a plot of simplicity, a style that uses long and short takes, more mobile than his early work, yet still with those incredibly striking, noir-tinged images. His focus on a gesture, an action (see a Bordwell & Thompson blog post), is all in place here, though it would be fair to say he actually keeps pretty cool.
The plot is, arguably, Lang's least pessimistic work I know, in that there is a kind of weaving together that simply isn't there in his other work (I take the end of 'Metropolis' as a von Arbou implantation / joke).
We have the understandable, but crazy, search for vengeance. Lang is on one side a great critical realist, cutting through society and its conspiracies; complicity, the low-pay of the police force. He doesn't allow cliches to intrude except as self-conscious ones; O.K., Bannion's marraige is in a sense idyllic, but it also includes worries, arguments, and a slightly uneasy self-consciousness of their 'perfect situation'.
A spectacular moment of this film is the appearing of something I can remember next to never seeing in Lang; solidarity. Like magic, like... grace, people come to help Bannion. The old army pals, Gloria Grahame. This is a sublime moment of the cinema; one of Hollywood's finest.
I recently read, in my mind quite rightly, about Bunuel that, for all his pessimism, it comes from a position where he is furious, there is a right way and truth, and the pessimism is only about reality meeting that. This seems to me the case with Lang; again, not fatalism, but a complete pessimism about the current state of things. O.K., the conclusions still give us a world of misery, of domination (wages remain low...), but this film also has a touch of, not only the beauty that is attendant in all Lang's images, that stark striking of powerful beauty, but also that picture of commonality.