In 1954 the hydrogen bomb or H-bomb – 2,250 times as powerful as the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima – was exploded at Bikini atoll in the Pacific; Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy was condemned by the United States Senate, at the time only the fourth person in its history to be so censured; and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “separate facilities [for Negroes] are inherently unequal,” outlawing segregation in public schools.

If the “outstanding feature of the crime film” in 1950s America “was its focalization of the audience through the perspective of the cop,” Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953) can be said to dramatize the period's racial and atomic structures of feeling even as it indexes one of the dominant subgenres of the ‘50s crime film: the syndicate film. The syndicate film, in turn, can be said to represent the “criminal-cop moment of the McCarthyite crime film” in which the nationwide “combine” exposed by the Kefauver Committee is the domestic other of the “red menace,” itself understood as the Big Other. From this dual perspective, the “rogue cop” film can be said to promote the individual against the totalizing forces of Cold War society which is epitomized, in the political and criminal spheres, by pervasive corruption. The prototype here is The Racket, John Cromwell's 1951 remake of Lewis Milestone's 1928 picture where Captain McQuigg (Robert Mitchum) is the “rogue cop” double of “rogue gangster” Nick Scanlon (Robert Ryan) and where McQuigg, like Scanlon, is an anachronism in a “post-war corporate world” in which “oldstyle civic duty” is opposed to the slave-wage, alienated labor of the cop on the street.

A slightly different dynamic, one infused by personal vengeance, obtains in The Big Heat. In his reading of Lang's film, Tom Gunning observes that “in some of the strongest films of the 50s” the rogue cop “affirms an ideal justice untrammeled by official corruption or incompetence, but he also risks becoming indistinguishable from the gangster he fights.” The narrative must therefore “resolve the cop's quest not only by defeating the gangster but with a renunciation of violence.”