The Big Heat is one of the big movies of film noir – see The Big Sleep, The Big Clock, The Big Combo from the classic era, or The Big Easy, The Big Blue and The Big Lebowski from later on.
Weak joke aside, it’s big in the other sense too, being important, pivotal, epochal even. Here you get director Fritz Lang at the top of his game and a screenplay that works like a ratchet, almost every scene advancing the story a notch while flinty characters are pushed hither and yon by a cruel and ironic fate.
It’s the film that famously starts with the image of a gun on a desk. A man’s hand picks it up. A half second later a gunshot. The man is dead. The man was a cop, it turns out, and an honest one according to his wife, who doesn’t seem overly cut up about her husband’s death.
Enter straight-arrow Sergeant Bannion (Glenn Ford) to plunge into the mystery of why this apparently blameless man would shoot himself. And to plunge into a dark underworld hugely contrasted by Bannion’s own homelife in suburbia with his pretty blonde wife (Jocelyn Brando, sister of Marlon), where he’s the sort of husband who smiles tenderly at his wife while washing the dishes.
Until, one day, the underworld and suburbia intersect, in a way that’s not advantageous to Bannion (swerves spoiler), and Bannion returns to his task with renewed vigour, pursuing bad men like loquacious gangster Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) and vicious hoodlum Vince Stone (Lee Marvin) and his girl, Debby (Gloria Grahame), while getting zero co-operation from the cops higher up, who all seem to have been bought off.
There’s a Chandler-esque “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean” aspect to it all, and if Sydney Boehm’s screenplay is asking a question it is whether Bannion can remain the white knight once he’s met tragedy head on, or whether he’s going to be consumed by it and go on a “hate binge”, as his (possibly compromised) boss Lieutenant Wilks (Willis Bouchey) puts it.
Lang’s camera uses movement where other directors would favour an edit, and he puts people together in groupings that maximise storytelling brio at the expense of realism – people just don’t talk to each other in those sorts of positions that but it doesn’t matter. This movie really moves and is a great example of Lang’s mastery of storytelling.
Ford’s performance is screwed right down as usual, possibly too far, with the characters round him providing the flavour. Scourby underplays Lagana considering he’s written as a coded homosexual – a fancy dresser who loves his mother. Marvin’s Stone is a properly nasty piece of work, a woman-beater who memorably does something terrible to girlfriend Debby, played at maximum ditzy flirtatiousness by Grahame in a role that was meant to have gone to Marilyn Monroe (Grahame is obviously aping her).
Grahame gets most of the best lines, but then Debby also gets a faceful of scalding hot coffee, so a bit of swings and roundabouts, and in the end truth and justice prevails, but at a terrible cost to most of the characters we’ve met along the way.
Lang does it all in short, tight scenes, and the whole film has come and gone in 89 minutes, a surprise if you’re used to watching earlier Lang movies like the interminable Dr Mabuse the Gambler. The novel it’s based on was written by William P McGivern, a former crime reporter, so he’s well versed in putting the most important thing at the top of the page – the gun, the dead cop, the widow and the investigating officer are what this film starts with and pretty much ends with too. Taut, economical, dynamic, it’s definitely one of the great noir movies.
The Big Heat – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
