The big heat 1953 - Intense and powerful film noir classic

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IMDB Rating: 8,0

Director: Fritz Lang
Main Cast: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Alexander Scourby, Lee Marvin, Jeanette Nolan

"One of the later examples of American film noir, The Big Heat is also one of the genre's most underrated films. Director Fritz Lang utilized many of the elements typical to his other films: unseen yet gruesome violence, relentless pacing, and a hardboiled view of justice and revenge. The sad, realist film has an oppressive feeling of malignity. Glenn Ford is a perfect everyman cop, out for revenge against criminals as well as other cops. In this way, The Big Heat marks a significant transition between the crime movies of two different eras. Prior to the early 1970s, police dramas tended to pit police in very clear opposition to the men in the black hats, with the notable exceptions of On Dangerous Ground or The Big Combo. After the culture shock of the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, films like Dirty Harry, The French Connection and Serpico began an obsession with the ambivalent emotions that make a policeman and his department tick. In many ways, The Big Heat was a precursor for these films, both in theme and tone." - www.allmovie.com

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In a lonely place 1950 - One of the darkest portraits of Hollywood

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Nicholas Ray
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy

"A haunting work of stark confessionalism disguised as a taut noir thriller, In a Lonely Place - Nicholas Ray's bleak, desperate tale of fear and self-loathing in Hollywood - remains one of the filmmaker's greatest and most deeply resonant features.
It stars Humphrey Bogart as Dixon Steele, a fading screenwriter suffering from creative burnout; hired to adapt a best-selling novel, instead of reading the book itself he asks the hat-check girl (Martha Stewart) at his favorite nightclub to simply tell him the plot. The morning after, the girl is found brutally murdered, and Steele is the police's prime suspect; however, the would-be starlet across the way, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), provides him with a solid alibi, and they soon begin a romance in spite of Gray's lingering concerns that the troubled, violent Steele might just be a killer after all.
During production, Ray's real-life marriage to co-star Grahame began to crumble, and his own vulnerability and disillusionment clearly inform the picture; the brooding, bitter Steele - a role ideally suited to Bogart's wounded romanticism - is plainly a doppelganger for Ray himself (the site of his first Hollywood apartment is even employed as the set for Steele's home), and the film's unflinching examination of the character's disintegration makes for uniquely compelling viewing." - www.allmovie.com

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