Cheap The Big Heat (DVD) (Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame) (Fritz Lang) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Big Heat

Very Different Noir, Brutal and Uncompromising!
Basically a tough and compelling police melodrama. Lang adds tension and some scenes have become little gems, but he doesn't capture the atmosphere and essence of 'Noir'. The plot about corruption and greed is very tame by today's standards and time has taken away much of the impact. This will always be remembered as the film where Lee Marvin threw boiling coffee on Gloria Graheme's face. Glenn Ford gives his best performance as the tough-as-nails Bannion. Lee Marvin is also superb as the sadistic Vince. But Gloria Graheme is the one who gives the most memorable performance as Vince's moll who gets horribly disfigured and ultimately saves the day but with tragic conclusions. The final shoot-out sequence is memorable and Graheme's last speech is touching. Works better as a police drama than a definitive 'noir'. From a scale of 1-10 I give this film a 7!

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If you like detective mysteries ,you'll love "The Big Heat"
Columbia Pictures under the Direction of Fritz Lang produced a great Good Cop with a Hero Image Against the Rotten Corrupt World of a 1953 City. Thats Hollywood stile film making.

Glenn Ford portrays the only honest hardnose City Police Detective who sacrifices everything to maintain his morale integrity.

He investigates what seems to be a routine policemans suicide but uncovers a complex corruption ring which includes, gangsters, politicians and his own police precinct. Quickly finds himself on the outside with everyone trying to squash his investigation, life threatened he begins to battle the odds alone.

This 1953 Black & White Standard Format (Full Screen) is beautifully digitally transferred. The picture & sound quality is awesome. A great story, an outstanding cast with Glenn Ford as the hero Detective, Lee Marvin as a Gangster Stooge and a delightful Gloria Grahame as his girlfriend.

This is a must see movie for Sam Spade & Phillip Marlowe admirers.

Special features include only an original theatrical trailer.

Enjoy.

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"I could go through life sideways."
The Big Heat is similar to some of Fritz Lang's German films, like M and the Doctor Mabuse series. It links crime and politics (or, more accurately, criminals and a politicians), and shows the future as concentration camp, where even those who imagine themselves on the outside of the barbed wire are trapped inside.

But is Lang retelling the story of what happened in Germany, or is he warning his adopted country what could happen if people didn't challenge authority (here the police department, including the commissioner) that had been corrupted by a criminal leader? Maybe both.

The Big Heat is violent even compared to today's films and more believable than most. However one thing that jars today is the effeminacy of the crime boss, Mike Lagana, used as shorthand to show his corruption.

We first see Lagana in bed in silk pajamas with his bodyguard (in his robe) standing over Lagana, handing him the phone, lighting his cigarette. When Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), the homicide detective who won't follow orders and leave Lagana alone, barges into Lagana's mansion to confront him about a cop's suicide, Lagana is under a huge portrait of his dead mother ("We lived together in this house"). Even from beyond the grave you can feel the mother's unhealthy influence on her son. Lagana mentions his daughter but never his wife.

For the most part you can tell the criminals from the decent people because the criminals dress better. Gloria Grahame's Debby Marsh, girlfriend of the vicious killer Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), tells the blackmailing wife of a policeman who was on the take, "We're sisters under the mink."

Debby and the cop's wife are just one pair of doubles in the movie. There's also Debby and Katie, Dave Bannion's wife. (Katie playfully suggests Dave tell his friends she's an heiress. Later, trying to explain why she's with Vince, Debby asks Bannion, "You think I was born an heiress?") Another set of doubles is Lagana's gang and the group of veterans Bannion's brother-in-law gets to protect Bannion's little girl. One vet (described as a poet by one of his friends) shows Bannion his gun and says anyone who comes through the door for the girl is dead. The poet transformed by war (definitely a non-WASP) says he's seen things you can only see from a tank, and starts to say he was one of the first into - - What? Auschwitz? Vince and the hoods playing poker in his penthouse enjoy violence for its own sake. The vets will only use violence if necessary to protect the innocent. But the vets are playing poker too, and seem to relish the prospect of taking revenge on Bannion's enemies, who haven't done anything to them. Between good and evil there are differences but also similarities.

Bannion goes to Victory auto repair, looking for a "mechanic," an explosives expert. The owner says he can't help ("I got a wife and kids, too") but a crippled woman who works as a secretary tells Bannion what he needs to know. Bannion stands outside the auto yard, talking through the fence. Inside the compound the limping woman is just another of the unfit, the "life undeserving of life" tortured and exterminated in other camps, and in camps that exist today.

When Bannion tells the crooked cop's wife, "The city's being strangled by a gang of thieves," she smiles and says, "The coming years are going to be just fine." Just the way things looked in the thirties if you weren't one of those inside the camps.

"Thief" is the strongest epithet Bannion uses. Not "killer" or "murderer." The criminals and the politicians who go along with them are stealing his city. Though people don't like hearing what Bannion has to say, they're lucky he won't quit fighting the murderers among us.