Fritz Lang (1953)

The Big Heat is a lean, exciting melodrama – Fritz Lang’s balance of film noir types and tropes with plot and character is very satisfying.   The screenplay by Sidney Boehm is an adaptation of a story by William P McGivern (which first appeared in late 1952 as a Saturday Evening Post serial and was published as a novel the following year).   The only scenes that seem – while they’re happening – to go on a little too long are those describing the happy home life of the protagonist, homicide detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), with his wife Katie (Jocelyn Brando) and their young daughter Joyce (Linda Bennett).  Once the Bannions’ car is blown up and Katie killed in the explosion, we understand why Fritz Lang took time showing the domestic bliss that has now been destroyed.  By lingering on Katie cooking a steak for her husband, Lang ensures this stays in the viewer’s memory, that Bannion’s determination to avenge his wife’s murder is always edged with an awareness of his personal tragedy.

The car bomb is Bannion’s punishment for standing up to Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby), the snake-like boss of a local crime syndicate that virtually runs the (fictional) city of Kenport.  The corruption extends to the police department, including Bannion’s immediate superior Ted Wilks (Willis Bouchey) and the force’s commissioner (Howard Wendell), as well as Tom Duncan, the officer whose suicide catalyses Bannion’s investigations and whose widow Bertha (Jeanette Nolan) is a key figure in the plot.  After Katie’s death and a showdown with Wilks, Bannion hands in his police badge but not his gun – as he points out in the resignation scene, the weapon is his own.   The hero becomes a vigilante yet we always have the sense that he’s in reluctant exile from organised law and order.  It makes emotional sense that, in the film’s closing scene, he returns to work in a cleaned-up police force.  The blurring, in the meantime, of the line that divides officers of the law from unofficial upholders of it is captured well in a sequence that leads into The Big Heat‘s  climax.  After her mother’s death, Joyce Bannion goes to live with her aunt and uncle.  When he learns the police guard has been taken off their house, Bannion hurries over there.  As he climbs the stairs, a man leaps from the shadows and they struggle together.  We assume the adversary is a member of Lagana’s outfit; he turns out to be a friend of Bannion’s brother-in-law, one of a small group of ex-soldiers helping to guard the place now the police have gone.

Fritz Lang exploits Glenn Ford’s regular guy persona very effectively.   Ford occasionally looks to be working hard to convey Bannion’s bitterness but, for the most part, his grief and anger seem authentically felt.  Ford doesn’t express the canny but wounded soul of a noir tragic hero the way that Humphrey Bogart does but he’s very persuasive as an ordinary cop and family man, which is more important here.  When Bannion finally rejoins the police, he is back in one of the places where he belongs.  Although Lagana’s stranglehold on the city has been broken, this ending isn’t falsely upbeat, however, and not just because, as a call on his return to the office immediately reminds us, homicide is still occurring.  It’s also because Bannion won’t get back to the other place he belongs – the place where Katie used to be.  This idea comes across strongly because Glenn Ford is temperamentally as much at home in a relaxed domestic setting as he is walking mean streets.   The BFI programme note for the screening of The Big Heat I went to used an extract from a 1972 book by Colin McArthur called Underworld USA.  McArthur writes perceptively about Lang’s use of décor and lighting in the story’s different locations to convey the moral differences  between characters:

‘In contrast to the Duncan home [where the opening suicide takes place], Bannion’s is brightly lit; in contrast to the luxury of Lagana’s and [his right-hand man Vince] Stone’s places, Bannion’s home is plain.  … [Bannion’s] leaving home, where his humanity has been defined, is one of the turning points in his move towards violence and criminality.  He goes to live in the twilight world of anonymous apartments …’

The storytelling is clever.  Lang repeatedly creates impact by not over-emphasising a crucial revelation or event:  the mob’s control of the police and influence on forthcoming city elections; Katie’s death; the subsequent elimination of the car bomber (Adam Williams).  Lang, Ford and Gloria Grahame worked together again on the following year’s Human Desire but The Big Heat is an altogether more successful collaboration.  Grahame is admirably varied as Debby Marsh, the girlfriend of Vince Stone (Lee Marvin).  She moves fast, both physically and emotionally speaking, in her early scenes.  There’s a risky quality in Debby’s vivacity, in the squiffy impudence that riles the man who keeps her.  After Stone, in a fit of violent temper, has ruined one side of her face, Debby is reduced at first to an immobility that’s in startling contrast to what has gone before.  The fragility and destruction of facial beauty in a Hollywood film is apt to reverberate beyond the story, especially when the face belongs to an actress of Gloria Grahame’s era and who played the types of role she usually played.  There’s humour, as well as poignancy, in Debby’s death scene, which the Langs (Fritz and his cinematographer namesake Charles) shoot in profile, on the undamaged side.   Elsewhere, Grahame repeatedly proves her ability to do more than look good, making the most of witty lines – as when Debby describes Bannion’s soulless hotel room as ‘early nothing’ or, in her key confrontation with Duncan’s widow, refers to the pair of them as ‘sisters under the mink’.

Lee Marvin isn’t a pretty sight but he’s an extraordinary one.  His features – the mouth especially – have a brutal mobility.  It’s not surprising that even Mike Lagana tells Vince Stone that he sometimes finds him ‘alarming’:  Marvin makes Stone a very credible psychopath.  Although its title refers to a police crackdown on lawlessness, The Big Heat is notorious for another high-temperature reason – the scene in which Stone throws scalding coffee into Debby’s face.  What’s remarkable for a first-time viewer of the film is to discover that the notoriety of the scene derives from the act itself rather than the staging of it. Anticipating the moment with a knot in my stomach, I was surprised that Stone’s attack occurs off- camera.  We see the coffee bubbling away on a hot plate – then hear Debby’s shocked (and shocking) screams of pain.  The impact of the violence meted out to women is, as Colin McArthur also points out, cumulative.  Before disfiguring Debby, Stone has stubbed out a cigarette on the hand of a bar girl (Carolyn Jones).  Tom Duncan’s mistress (Dorothy Green) is murdered (this too off-screen).  Katie Bannion is killed by the car bomb.  Yet female characters are also the ones who, in different ways and for different motives, turn the tide:  the secretary (Edith Evanson) who gives helpful information to Bannion; Bertha Duncan, who is in possession of evidence that could expose Lagana et al; and Debby Marsh, who takes out her sister under the mink to ensure that evidence comes to light.

29 November 2017