Of course The Big Steal is a noir. With a title like that what else could it be? And yet it’s also an undeclared screwball comedy. The IMDb might say crime, film noir and romance, but screwball is the real dynamic, and that’s how Don Siegel directs it and stars Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer play it.
It’s a cat and mouser, with Mitchum as Halliday, an army lieutenant trying to clear his name by tracking down the man who really ran off with a huge amount of the military’s money. Along for the journey, in an uneasy alliance, is the man’s fiancée, Joan Graham (Greer), who has has been conned by him too and feels she deserves $3,000’s worth of answers.
The whole thing takes place in Mexico, where thief Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles) has a head start on Halliday and Graham, who are in turn being followed by army investigator Captain Vincent Blake (whose identity Lieutenant Halliday has borrowed, just to screwball things up a bit more).
As they bicker and drive, drive and bicker, about her handling of the car and his sexism – he calls her “Chiquita” – the two are obviously going to fall in love. Because this is the It Happened One Night set-up and we’d feel cheated if they didn’t.
The film was made just after Mitchum’s infamous marijuana bust. The cameras were ready to roll but Mitchum was in jail. Studio boss Howard Hughes withdrew Jane Russell from the film, worried about reputational damage. Lizabeth Scott was just one of a string of female stars who wasn’t keen either. Eventually Hughes was forced to ask Greer, whose career he’d been trying to kill since she dumped him, to step in.
She turns out to be perfect casting. A great foil to Mitchum, she spits the dialogue at Mitchum, which he bats back in his tousled, laconic way. The Mitchum/Greer pairing is so good it’s almost up there with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, stars of It Happened One Night, whose hate-each-other-till-they-love-each-other conjuring Siegel and his actors clearly have in their sights.
This is a film full of relationships at cross purposes – Halliday and Graham, Blake and Halliday, the Spanish cops and every American they meet, Fiske and Graham, Fiske and Halliday, Blake and everyone else. It’s also a film that upends racial expectations. The cops are presented as Mexican buffoons at first, but by the end it turns out there’s more to Inspector Ortega (Ramón Novarro) and Lt Ruiz (Don Alvarado) than meets the eye. In the process Americans get a downgrade, particularly the ones lording it about in Mexico and not making even the tiniest effort to speak Spanish.
It’s just very good casting all round though. John Qualen as weaselly fence Julius Seton. The ever-brilliant William Bendix as Captain Blake. Novarro, a former “Latin lover” aka the “New Valentino”, as Ortega.
The entire thing is beautifully written, played and directed, with Siegel keeping things airy while also keeping one foot on the ground – the fights, for example, look like real fights, scrappy, quick and painful.
The visuals match the sparklingly sharp dialogue. How good the clothes look. How snappy Harry J Wild’s cinematography is.
Peg it as noir if you insist, but Mexico is not the transgressive arena so often depicted in noir. In fact Siegel appears to be determined to set things up only to subvert them, and since things not being quite as they seem is the entire plot of the film, that makes double sense.
For that sort of Mexico and a real film noir see Mitchum and Greer in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past from two years earlier. That was bleak and fateful and everyone in it seemed doomed. This, by contrast is bubbling, vivacious and funny. Does that sound like noir to you?
The Big Steal – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
