User Reviews

Fritz Lang, a man who knew the business like no other, is seen at the top of his craft with this interesting film noir that pays off in unexpected ways. Mr. Lang was a man that believed in total control and who wanted to get the best out of everyone in all his films. "The Big Heat" is one of those rare films in which all the elements come together with surprising results.

Corruption in higher places is the basis of the story. A good police detective who cares enough to keep on probing into the suicide of one of his comrades, is what brings Dave Bannion, not only to the attention of the higher ups in the police department, but to Lagano and the mobsters that work for this evil man. Tragedy finds a way into Dave's home that makes him even more resolved into seeking justice and unmasking the mobsters found along the way that have a grip on the police department.

The casting of "The High Heat" is what makes this film different from the rest of the films of the genre. Glenn Ford made an excellent appearance in the film. He gives one of the best performances of his career. But of course, the film belongs to Gloria Grahame, the bad girl in most of the films of this genre. What a joy it's to watch her! Her Debby Marsh is one of the best roles she portrayed for the movies. Surprisingly, Ms. Grahame and Mr. Ford show a lot of chemistry in their scenes together.

The others in the film do good work under Mr. Lang's direction. A young Lee Marvin is perfectly creepy as Vince Stone, a man who gets what's coming to him at the end in a memorable sequence playing against Ms. Grahame. Jeannette Nolan makes a valuable contribution as the bad widow of the man that commits suicide. Alexander Scourby, as Lagana has some good moments. Joselyn Brando plays Dave's wife. Also, in a small part we see Carolyn Jones.

"The Big Heat" demonstrates why Fritz Lang was one of the best influences in the American cinema.

In The Big Heat, Fritz Lang by casting Glenn Ford against type, probably directed Ford to his greatest screen performance and one of the best noir films ever done.

Ford is a homicide cop in an unnamed big mid-western city which is in the grip of systemic corruption from organized crime. Remember The Big Heat came out only two years after the Estes Kefauver hearings and stories like these were topical. Another veteran police sergeant has committed suicide and Ford's called in. The widow, Jeanette Nolan, appears to be cooperating, but when the late cop's mistress contacts Ford and is later found murdered, this sets off a chain of events that brings tragedy to Ford personally, but also lead to the cleaning up of the town.

Normally the kind of part that Ford is cast in would go to someone like Kirk Douglas who would explode with all kinds of rage on the screen. What Lang did was cast Glenn Ford, known as one of the cinema's nicest men and squarest shooters. When the gangsters accidentally kill his wife, Jocelyn Brando, with a car bomb meant for him, Ford goes off on a rage and you know there is no force that will stop him without killing him. His performance is effective precisely because of Ford's nice guy image, the viewer identifies with him as Mr. Average Man. Think of Ford as Atticus Finch as cop instead of a lawyer and something happening to kill one of his kids. Gregory Peck as Atticus would react the same way.

The movie rises with what is arguably Ford's greatest screen role. But Glenn gets nice support from Gloria Grahame as the good time gun moll who also comes in for tragedy because she's a flirt and Lee Marvin the number one button man for syndicate head Alexander Scourby. Marvin had done several roles before The Big Heat, but it was in this film that he got his first real critical notice.

Carolyn Jones has a small part as a woman who Lee Marvin beats up and my favorite small role in the film is from Edith Evanson as a shy crippled woman who gives Ford his first real lead in tracking down his wife's killers. By the way Jeanette Nolan is one truly evil woman as the late sergeant's widow, one of her best screen roles.

The Big Heat is one of Fritz Lang's best at what he does best, delve into the dark side of his hero/protagonists.

Fantastic film noir features 2 potent scenes involving tossed coffee, and Gloria Grahame as a mob moll who is definitely a woman not be messed with. Tough cop Ford is not afraid of anyone as he goes on movie long crusade to bring down every villian in the story. Entertaining pulp is fast and cynical and will leave lasting impression long after it's over. Great characters dot the brutal landscape from beginning to end.

I watched Lang's THE BIG HEAT last night for the first time.

It was everything I expected, and more.

Glenn Ford probably gave his best screen performance as Bannion, he was excellent throughout the picture. And Grahame's performance should have netted her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar...but sadly she wasn't even nominated. It contains many classic scenes and great moments, and is well-written, with surprisingly very few plot holes or weak/unnecessary twists.

I found Lang's film noir unusual in that it provides so many tough and tender moments. Those early scenes between Ford and Jocelyn Brando are beautifully played out-we finally get to see the cop away from the beat and the criminals, as a family man. These are lovely scenes...Brando cutting up that huge steak...the film has so many wonderful little bits of detail throughout...

It is violent and brutal yet so emotional....the scene where Bannion's wife is killed is both shocking and heart-breaking. And then, when asked how his little daughter is holding up, he puts it so achingly bluntly "She thinks her mother is on a trip".

Grahame's performance is a big highlight. Of course, everyone remembers the scene where Marvin (also perfectly cast, and very early in his career...his character reminds me of Dan Duryea)throws hot coffee on poor Debby- but I think her best scenes come with Ford. I just really loved her performance. Her last scene, where pays back Marvin for his brutal act by pouring coffee in his (along with blowing the lid on Lagana), is shot, and dies in Bannion's arms, is one of the most wonderfully acted scenes I think I've ever seen. The death scene with Ford had tears running down my cheeks, which is unusual for me when watching a noir...I think it's the best scene in the picture...

Grahame asks Ford tell her about his dead wife, what she was really like. It's such a perfectly written and acted scene- and we get the sense that Debby ("I like her...I like her a lot") wishes she had a man who loved her enough to say those lovely, simple, yet beautiful things about her . She wishes Ford could have loved her...or anyone really...and Bannion chokes up, realizing what he had and lost, and what Debby never had....

This noir packs a huge emotional punch (at least for me). One of the top noir picks of the 50's.

The Big Heat is a film with some of the most unlikeable characters, even the protagonist is hard to root for. The film begins with a cop's search for justice and truth but quickly spirals into a full-blown vengeance movie with an impressive body count. The Big Heat departs from the stereotypical film noir in that the protagonist himself could be considered the "femme-fatal," destroying the lives of literally every woman he comes in contact with in his search for justice (rather than the woman destroying the lives of those men she interacts with.) The film lacks any sentimentality, each character seeing their acts of violence as necessary and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Even the protagonist sheds no tears as his wife is murdered with a car bomb and his new female friend, who helps him take down the mob and catch his wife's killer, is first disfigured facially and then shot numerous times. In the end, I was left feeling unfulfilled by the film's violent and message, rather than any of the characters evolving they remained untouched; completely apathetic to anything but themselves.

During the 1950's a new wave of hoodlum pictures filled the screens: 'The Asphalt Jungle,' 'Rogue Cop,' 'Party Girl,' 'The Desperate Hours,' and 'The Big Heat', to name but five...

Most gangster-movie fans remember that a girl got hot coffee thrown in her face in some film, but how many remember the film, the girl, and the thrower?

Gloria Grahame is a green-eyed blonde, with unusual lips, tiny voice, and sulky appearance... She is a gangster's moll dressed in silk and satin... Her presence alone can incite men to criminal behavior... She is sensual, spiteful, uncontrolled, and lethal... Her freezing looks are as memorable as her steamy actions... She is both tough and vulnerable, a combination not rare but here at its most winning...

Lee Marvin (later to become famous as the toughest of all screen villains) is sadistic, cold-blooded mobster, a very bad person...

Glenn Ford is angry and icy, with quiet authority and sincerity... He made what is almost certainly his best film... He is fine as the honest homicide cop who resigned from the police force to discover who murdered his wife... He bust a crime-ring with manic determination, gradually becoming as cruel and ruthless as they are...

Ford is ordered repeatedly by his lieutenant to stop interfering, but,obsessed with vengeance, walks out of the police department and sets out to get Marvin and Scourby unrestrained by the delicacies of police technique and the influence brought to bear on his superior...

The film's tensions are strongly intensified by :

• Dorothy Green, the 'B-girl' who tells Bannion that she was Tom Duncan's girlfriend and that the policeman had no reason to kill himself...

• Jeannette Nolan, the grieving widow who is "on the take" for years, and isn't silenced...

• Jocelyn Brando, the cozy martyred young wife who is brutally blown up in a car by a violent explosion intended for her husband... (An interesting foreshadowing of 'The Godfather.')

• Alexander Scourby (an interesting foreshadowing of "The Godfather"), the suave chief villain and loving family man who at the same time ran a criminal empire with business efficiency...

• Willis Bouchey, a corrupted Lieutenant who orders Bannion to lay off the case...

• Howard Wendell, the Police Commissioner whom Bannion advises to find out who planted the dynamite in his car...

• Robert Burton, the detective who promises to help his companion, but off the record...

• Peter Whitney, the retreat's bartender who assumes a "don't ask" policy...

• Adams Williams, the mob who threats the obsessive detective to stay out of the case...

• Dan Seymour, the very cool and uncooperative 'scared rabbit.'

• Edith Evanson, the crippled secretary who offers the information Atkins withheld...

• John Crawford, Bannion's brother-in-law who makes a call at exactly 9:30 P.M. and "ask for Larry."

Considered at the time to reach a new low in violence, this excellent film noir crime classic also struck a new note of realism in crime films (gambling, conspiracy, extortion, murder...) and produced one of Glenn Ford's most typical performances...

Intense characters, led by Glenn Ford's portrayal of "Det. Sgt. Dave Bannion," make this one of the better film noirs of the period, at least one of the ones I enjoyed the most.

Ford is a believably 100 percent honest and tough cop who is unrelenting in getting his wife's killer. (His wife is killed early on in a car bomb.) Ford takes the law into his own hands, which really contradicts what he stands for, and is not least bit apologetic for his actions, either. Make no mistake: this is a pure "revenge" film.

Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin, Jocelyn Brando, Alexader Scourby, Jeanette Noland and Carolyn Jones complete the cast of "name" actors of the period. No surprise that Marvin plays the lead villain. Grahame almost steals the show as Marvin's girl who gets scalded when the latter throws hot coffee in her face - one of the more shocking scenes in film noir history. She then, understandably, switches allegiances.

It was kind of fun to see Marvin at such a young age. This was my first look at Scourby. Pro football fans know his distinctive voice well, as he became the voice of the NFL Films for many years.

One of the attractions of this story is the pace: it is fast-moving, and it's not too dated either, despite being over 40 years old. This is highly recommended for crime buffs of any era.

This film is a precursor to "Serpico" starring Al Pacino many years later. It's the story of an honest cop surrounded by corrupt and cowardly police officials who are in the take of a powerful city mafia. It's like Chicago during the times of Al Capone. The script is well written and has a good pace. The scenes are neither too short or too prolonged, just the right amount to move the story along. The actors played their parts well: Lee Marvin as a sadistic degenerate thug is very convincing as is Gloria Grahame playing his not so empty headed girlfriend, who has more depth and humanity than meets the eye. Jocelyn Brando (Marlon Brando's sister) played a small but very convincing role as Detective Bannion's loving and supporting wife, who encourages him to be the honest cop that he is. Their best scene together is right before she gets blown off in the car. It's a very tender, sentimental family scene when their daughter interrupts their kissing because she cannot go to bed. This is actually the pivotal scene of the film because Katie's violent death becomes Bannion's main motive in getting her killers. Jocelyn Brando plays the role of the perfect woman: dedicated wife, mother and the moral support behind her husband and Glenn Ford plays the role defending this order of things. In the end, he triumphs over those who seek to destroy this order: Lee Marvin and his thugs. The film makes a strong case for this theory with the hope that the natural order of things has been restored.

The Big Heat is a prime contender for the cruelest and most brutal of all film noirs, which is saying quite a lot. At the same time, a big part of why that may be so is that The Big Heat is in many ways hardly a film noir at all. All of the great canonical film noirs, including Otto Preminger's Laura, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and Ace in the Hole, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, and Alexander Mackendrick's The Sweet Smell of Success, tend to be populated by characters with little trace of goodness left in them; they are all doomed, fated to their inevitably bitter ends from the outset. What makes The Big Heat so powerful and disturbing—and, ultimately, so unlike most film noirs—is that it has, at its heart, many genuinely good people.

Fritz Lang, the brilliant German director who had already cemented his place in cinematic history with monumental films like Metropolis, Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, and M, creates in The Big Heat a film whose strength lies in defying expectations of plot, genre, and characterization. Its opening, for instance, is not a far cry from the usual hard-boiled detective formula. Police Sergeant Bannion (Glenn Ford) is assigned to investigate the suicide of a high-ranking fellow officer, which leads him to uncover a trail of corruption and licentiousness and, in turn, puts him into deep trouble with the local mob syndicate, headed by Mike Legana (Alex Scourby) and the psychopathic Vince Stone (a young Lee Marvin).

Lang manages to transcend these cut-and-dry foundations, however, by affording his protagonist a greater depth than one usually finds in a hard-boiled detective hero. The typical hard-boiled detective is unshakeable, wisecracking and ethically-ambiguous, but generally one-note: coolness is all they have going for them. Glenn Ford's character, by contrast, is a family man and, ultimately, a tragic figure. Whereas the characters in other film noirs are often so uniformly reprehensible that any misfortunes that befall them seem almost warranted, the juxtaposition between Bannion's tough policeman persona and his fatherly sensitivity and protectiveness—first with his daughter and later with Stone's abused girlfriend Debbie (Gloria Grahame)—makes the character's plights and perils all the more involving. You see, Bannion is not just a smart-talking male power fantasy, but a decent, honest man who is merely driven to brutality by tragic circumstances.

Perhaps the reason that The Big Heat seems so sadistically violent, then, is that the audience is given genuine reason to sympathize with those who are subjected to it. Again, this is where Lang's genius really comes into play. Anyone who has seen enough Hollywood movies would naturally expect that after Bannion carries his unconscious wife (played by Marlon Brando's older sister, Jocelyn Brando) off-screen after she has been wounded in a car-bombing intended for him, there would be a scene in which we see her safely recovering in a hospital bed and Bannion angrily promising her that he will find out who was responsible for the attack. But no: in the next scene, we find out that she dies. On top of that, Lang mercilessly obliterates the quaint, idyllic domesticity of the Bannion household in earlier scenes with a scene in which Bannion bitterly packs up and moves out of the old family home, now cold and empty. It's truly heartbreaking, and it makes Bannion's subsequent trials all the more compelling and, dare I say, poignant. The same goes for the infamous scene in which Lee Marvin scalds Gloria Grahame's face with a pot of boiling coffee. The scene is especially cringe-inducing and sadistic because the audience realizes that she is not just some vain, self-obsessed gangster moll (which, in a more conventional film noir, would make the cruel attack seem like poetic justice), but merely an unlucky, good-natured girl who got caught up with the wrong kind of guys.

The rest of The Big Heat then works like the best of revenge tragedies, in which even more cruelty and violent retribution is enacted as form of catharsis. The one thing that struck me the most about the action in this film is just how much more forceful and yet satisfying it seemed. Just like any hard-boiled hero, Bannion goes around and punches the lights out of a lot of henchmen throughout the film. Under Lang's direction, though, the punching in The Big Heat doesn't have the stagey and almost slapstick-like physics of other cinematic punches, with the bad guys awkwardly stumbling backwards or flipping over tables. Instead, when Bannion punches somebody, they practically fly across the room, knocking everything down in their path. That Lang often quick-cuts or whips the camera around in tandem with the physical blows gives an even greater illusion of weight to the action. Furthermore, not only does Bannion punch a lot of people, but he strangles quite a few people too, including one of the female antagonists. It is here that I must give due credit to Glenn Ford for his performance here: he is not just good; he's scary good. Again, the fact that Ford is capable of showing Bannion as both a loving family man and a ruthless enforcer makes things all the more chilling.

It's almost unbelievable that a film as relentless, audacious, and absorbing as Lang's The Big Heat could have been made in the context of the Hollywood studio system under the notoriously restrictive Production Code. Then again, like many of the best films from this era, maybe it's precisely *because* of the constraints of the period that the film is so effective: denied the ability to portray realistic violence or sexual content—the kind that is all but commonplace in today's films—, a filmmaker like Lang would have had to rely on the subtle power of suggestion and of well-honed characterization to generate emotional impact. That Lang was still able to make it all work so astoundingly well is surely a testament to both his and the film's undeniable greatness.

When I first saw this it struck me as another revenge movie of the sort that Fritz Lang seemed attracted to around the time this was made. Just that the cop in this case, Glen Ford, was more hard-boiled than usual.

Now, some years later, it seems a bit more than that. It's still a hard-boiled movie, the story of a cop who is so determined to clean up the organization that runs the town of Kenport that he goes overboard, a little like "Dirty Harry." "The Big Heat" is more conventional, more ambitious, and less an outgrowth of its Zeitgeist than "Dirty Harry." In the latter, Clint Eastwood knocks off urban villains that are heartless and nameless. They're just bodies to be mowed down. Eastwood's only motives are to protect the innocent, whom he appears to hold in contempt, by killing the heavies, whom he despises. He has no other motive. The gunshots are explosive, the dialog cynical, the locations colorful, and the cops are hobbled by the Constitution of the United States. It all reflects the backlash against urban crime that was making all the headlines in 1971. It moved the Manichaean Western to the streets.

But "The Big Heat" is more personal. Glen Ford at least has a strong motive for his relentless pursuit of evildoers. When he pushes too hard against the top gangster Lagana, Alexander Scourby, Ford's wife is accidentally blown up while starting the family car.

Unlike Eastwood, Ford has a family -- a wife, Jocelyn Brando (Marlon's sister), and a lovely kiddie whom he lulls to sleep by telling the story of the three little kittens who lost their mittens. These scenes, backed up by a soapy musical score, are trite beyond belief, but there is a payoff at the climax when he distracts a dying gun moll by telling her, at her request, the story of his own family.

That gun moll is Gloria Grahame in what's arguably her best role. Grahame was never beautiful in a standard Hollywood way, nor was she a bravura actress, but the writer, Sydney Boehm, has given her a splendid part with some sparkling dialog and Grahame does just fine with the character of the good-natured, self-centered whore. "Listen, I've been rich and I've been poor and, BELIEVE me, rich is better." She hops around like a trained circus dog. She looks as sexy as she was supposed to be and is charmingly candid.

Her face is horribly scarred by a pot of boiling coffee that the sadistic Lee Marvin tosses at her because of some minor slight. Marvin was in his thug period -- that horse face with its protruding, plump lower lip, the ugly sneer, the brutal gesture. He's great.

He's the only heavy that isn't in some way humanized -- again, unlike "Dirty Harry." All the others are either fearful of being murdered, for good reason, or in some cases, as in Scourby's, they have families. Scourby beams at his daughter's coming out party. He keeps a portrait of his recently deceased mother prominently hung in his study. He's utterly ruthless in ordering assassinations.

The plot has the aggressive detective embittered by the murder of his wife. He trusts no one and insults everybody, even those who try to comfort and help him. Only gradually does he develop as a character. His conversion back to some simulacrum of humanity is initiated by a lame old woman who, at her own peril, feeds him some information that guides him in his quest.

It has all the usual icons of noir. There is the marginalized moll, the smooth villain, the snarling enforcer, the snub-nosed .38 revolver, the detective with flaws, the night-time streets, the penthouse apartment, the threatened middle-class home, the ex-GIs, the corrupt chief of police.

It's a good job. Maybe I shouldn't qualify these remarks but I'd just finished watching "Laura" and couldn't help noticing the differences in the quality of the cinematography. "Laura", another detective story, was shot by Joseph LaShelle and the photography is magnificent, whereas Charles Lang's photography here is relatively flat or stark. In "Laura", for instance, no simple wall is either light or dark but rather subtly textured with shades of gray. It makes Lang's photography look like an episode of "The Honeymooners" or "I Love Lucy." (It's not that bad; I'm exaggerating to make a point.) Photography isn't often something you think of when watching a film unless it's exceptional. I always thought I could act a little -- and have -- or, with some coaching, even direct a movie. But I can't imagine lighting a film in the expressive way Joseph LaShelle did without years of experience behind me.