The Big Heat ***** (1953, Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin, Jocelyn Brando) – Classic Movie Review 738

Director Fritz Lang’s 1953 humdinger of a film-noir classic crime thriller The Big Heat sees the director and his actors shooting with all guns blazing.

Glenn Ford stars as tough, maverick cop called Detective Sergeant Dave Bannion, who takes on a politically powerful crime syndicate holding power over the police force when he looks into the suicide of a colleague and finds a code of silence among his fellow officers. Soon he’s on the trail of the murderers of his wife Katie (Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s older sister) who kill her accidentally in a bomb attack planned for him.

Lee Marvin relishes his iconic, star making role as Vince Stone, a sadistic killer who mistreats his girlfriend, gangster’s moll Debby Marsh (memorably played by Gloria Grahame), leading her to spill the beans to Bannion and help him (‘Somebody’s going to pay because he forgot the kill me.’)

Director Lang (Metropolis, M) explores this unpredictably violent scene with great imagination and a masterly eye, creating an evil, stagnant atmosphere and a mood of extraordinary, unsettling menace. It’s appalling when the wife is killed but, most especially, the scene where Marvin chucks boiling hot coffee in Grahame’s face is still shocking.

Gloria Grahame plays (still bandaged) gangster’s moll Debby Marsh.

It is also appalling when Grahame lets blackmailing corrupt cop’s wife Bertha Duncan (Jeanette Nolan) have it. Both actresses are wearing mink in this scene, prompting Grahame to say: ‘We’re both sisters under the mink, Bertha!’ before pumping her full of lead. Hard-boiled, or what?

Sydney Boehm’s bitterly hard-boiled screenplay (based on William P McGivern’s Saturday Evening Post serial) is a masterpiece of construction, character development, scene-building, plot exposition and credible dialogue, all pulled excitingly together in an incredibly taut 90 minutes. It all unfolds in a fictional film noir city of the imagination named Kenport.

When Marvin first meets Ford, the background music is Put the Blame on Mame, from Ford’s 1946 film Gilda.

The Big Heat won the 1954 Edgar Allan Poe award for Best Motion Picture.

Grahame and Ford team up again the following year, 1953, with Fritz Lang for the follow-up, Human Desire.

Grahame (real name Gloria Hallward) had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful in 1952. In the Fifties, she played half a dozen memorable shady ladies in famous film-noir classics. She died of cancer on October 5 1981 at age 57. Her story is told in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017).

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 738

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