“The Big Heat – From On Dangerous Ground: Film Noir Poems” by Woody Haut

 At the heart of the heat…/post-war hell….

Fritz Lang, 1953

Shocking, only if suburbia can
be paradise. Unexpected violence
and post war fissures. Leave it
to those German emigrés to expose
wounds, commodity fetishism and
middle class angst. At the heart
the heat: innocent home keeper,
vulnerable, tarnished. Contrast
with the hoodlum s moll. Bought
and sold, at the bidding of their
crime sponging superiors. Home
can’t be where the heart is,
blabbing about Freud and child
rearing. Yawn. No wonder their
world is blown apart, a case of
guilt by conventionality. Coffee
scarred Gloria in post war hell,
copped from Raw Deal five years
earlier, damaged goods but a ticket
out of drudgery. Her wound glowing
nuclear, waiting in the dark for
daddy to arrive. Sleazy hotel,
where the big heat clings, quiet
street props to Hoodlums Inc.,
without whom we would be little
more than rootless cosmopolitans.

“The Big Heat” is excerpted from On Dangerous Ground: Film Noir Poems by Woody Haut (Close to the Bone Publishing, August 2023).

Woody Haut is a London-based journalist and author of Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War; Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction; and Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood. He is also the author of the novels Days of Smoke, Cry for a Nickel, Die for a Dime, and Skin Flick.