Directed by: Don Siegel
Written by: Richard Wormser (story), Daniel Mainwaring (screenplay), Gerald Drayson Adams (screenplay)
Starring: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, William Bendix, Patric Knowles, Ramon Novarro, Don Alvarado, John Qualen
WARNING: Plot and/or ending details may follow!!! [Paragraph 2 only]
Given that The Big Steal (1949) was the only film to reunite Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer after Out of the Past (1947), one could be forgiven for expecting a dark, seedy film noir thriller. Indeed, even the title recalls some of the genre’s classic heist flicks, something along the lines of The Asphalt Jungle (1949) or The Killing (1956). But director Don Siegel was not interested in following Jacques Tourneur’s footsteps, and instead delivered a breezy, and often amusing, exotic drama in which the cross-Mexico chase almost takes a back-seat to the budding romance between its two main stars. Nevertheless, the film takes generous inspiration from film noir, particularly during an opening scene which sees Duke Halliday (Mitchum) “pull a fast one” on Capt. Blake (William Bendix), who is pursuing him for the suspected theft of military money. The exotic setting also recalls the future thrills of Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray’s Macao (1952), a picture that – probably not coincidentally – also starred both Mitchum and Bendix.
Perhaps the most prominent noir element of The Big Steal is the blurring of the boundaries between hero and villain. Duke Halliday is an American lieutenant wanted for the theft of military money, but, despite professing his innocence, has no apparent qualms about clouting his superior officer in the face. Halliday himself is in pursuit of Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles, whom you might remember from After the Thin Man (1939) or The Wolf Man (1941)), whose guilt will prove Halliday’s innocence. In Blake’s pursuit of Halliday, as you can see, the traditional theme of the innocent pursuing the guilty is disrupted, and an eleventh-hour plot-twist only does more to distort the fallacy. Jane Greer is far from her vicious femme fatale of Out of the Past, but nor is she relegated to the role of the vulnerable damsel; Joan Graham is shown to be smart, resourceful and independent, able to talk herself out of trouble and even hold her own in a high-speed car chase along a winding mountain road.
What I found most refreshing about The Big Steal was its relative forwardness about sex, an oddity given the strictness of the Production Code at the time. Greer’s character, at first apathetic to her leading man, rather quickly acquires the urge to sleep with him. Nothing explicity takes place during the film, of course, but there’s an electricity there, of the sort than Bogart and Bacall brought to the screen so effortlessly. In a moment of crisis, Mitchum wearily muses “It'll be getting dark soon. I hate the thought of spending the night with an empty revolver.” Greer’s response is unexpected and amusing in its forwardness: “there’s always me.” Even Mitchum seems somewhat surprised that his heroine has been seduced by the allure of gunfire and looming danger, replying, “tonight you gotta pick?” Though the film does occasionally try to sanitise the Mitchum/Greer romance through references to marriage and having ten children, we can understand why Mitchum looks so flustered at the suggestion. He certainly wasn’t thinking nine months ahead.
7/10
1) The Third Man (Carol Reed)
2) White Heat (Raoul Walsh)
3) Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer)
4) A Run for Your Money (Charles Frend)
5) Nora inu {Stray Dog} (Akira Kurosawa)
6) The Big Steal (Don Siegel)
7) She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford)
8) Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock)
9) Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick)
10) Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius)
There are three women in this story. Greta (Rita Johnson) is Ballentine's husband, an upright and charismatic businesswoman from a wealthy family, who knows both how her husband operates, and how she can control him with the promise of money. Verna Carlson (Susan Hayward), Ballentine's mistress, is a slick and crafty money-grabber. The couple, at least initially, have no delusions about their relationship: Verna is in it for his money, and he's in it for the sex (this theme, owing to the Production Code, is dealt with tastefully). Hayward plays the role to feisty perfection, and such was her cloaked malevolence that I half-expected her to crop up at the film's end, having somehow faked her own death, stolen Ballentine's money and skipped off to South America. Janice Bell (Jane Greer) is the polar converse of Hayward's femme fatale, perhaps the closest thing to love in Ballentine's life – their relationship, characterised by a mutual love of boating, apparently, seems genuinely platonic, a mutual understanding that our male hero promptly severs with his unquenchable thirst for wealth.
I was surprised, given its relative obscurity nowadays, at just how strong a film They Won't Believe Me turned out to be. The main and supporting characters are played flawlessly, their traits and motivations explored with more than sufficient depth to justify their later actions, though one still wonders if Verna's apparent sincerity prior to the road accident is, indeed, genuine. As he recounts his tale to the murder jury, Ballentine frequently makes fatalistic allusions towards the inescapably of Fate – here personified in a crippled palomino horse. By the time he's finished telling his incredible story, which may or may not be true {Hitchcock pulled this false-flashback trick several years later, though I won't reveal the details}, we're left with a very raw taste in our mouths. We can sympathise to an extent with Ballentine's extraordinary run of bad luck, but much of his behaviour, even if one excludes the accusation of murder, is so utterly contemptible that he doesn't deserve to live. Yet, from the moment Ballentine catches a bullet in the back, we already know what the jury's verdict had been.
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