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The Big Heat, 1953
One night, a police officer uses his service weapon to take his own life. Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) is called in to investigate the death, and soon discovers that it’s somehow connected to gangster Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) and one of his lieutenants, Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). But the more Bannion investigates, the more danger he finds himself in. With the unlikely help of Stone’s girlfriend, Debby (Gloria Grahame), Bannion relentlessly chases down the truth.
Gritty and brutal, this crime thriller keeps you on the edge of your seat courtesy of memorable characters and shocking plot turns.
Let’s talk about Gloria Grahame in this film, because she is a revelation and the most interesting thing happening (in a very interesting story!) by a long mile. We first meet Debby when she answers a late-night call from Lagana. Asked to get Stone on the phone she replies that she’s happy to go and fetch him, “I like seeing him jump.” Debby strongly cultivates a little girl persona, which keeps her in the relatively good graces of Lagana’s crew, but doesn’t protect her from the violence she receives at Stone’s hands. Still, she seems swayed by the lavish lifestyle that being with him affords and, if you read between the lines even a little, she probably knows how dangerous it would be to leave Vince.
But as the film goes on, we see Debby become restless. It may be because a woman is tortured to death by Vince, something that makes the endgame of their relationship more stark. Or it might be because her contempt for Vince--who is violent and cruel, but also a total puppet to Lagana’s needs---gets harder and harder to hide. It might also be a crisis brought about by seeing the raw anger and grief from Bannion as the human cost of his investigation rises and gets more personal. When something finally does happen that convinces Debby to turn against Vince, it’s the most brutal and shocking moment of the entire film. And yet, to the film’s credit, Debby is given a degree of autonomy and power afterward, and Grahame’s performance kicks into a whole other gear.
And while obviously Grahame’s performance was my favorite, the rest of the cast is just as good. Ford begins as someone who is merely stubborn and determined, but as the film goes on his emotional connection to the case begins to erode his own sense of decorum. There’s a line where his determination to bring Stone and Lagana to justice becomes a sort of frenzy. And for a man who begins as very straight-forward and buttoned down, it’s quite the transformation. Marvin also makes a strong impression as the vile Vince Stone. He’s a yes-man with a sadistic streak, protected from the censure of his friends through his wild and unpredictable violence. In a standout sequence, Vince doesn’t like the way that a woman is rolling some dice, and so he burns her with a cigarette. As she screams and cries in pain, not a single person in the bar does anything about it.
The world in this movie is a bleak one, where people--including many of Bannion’s superiors---merely accept their place as abetters to evil deeds either out of fear or the enjoyment of the spoils of crime, or some mix of the two. Bannion repeatedly comes up against others who will not help him in his pursuit of justice. And while his frustration practically radiates off of the screen, we can understand that it would not be so easy to speak up when people who are seen as liabilities are being tortured or murdered without hesitation. The victims of this violence are often people who are not powerful: an over-the-hill woman searching for love in bars, a working class man dealing in explosives. It’s power helping power, and Bannion---who has long been someone with power due to his position---doesn’t know what to do when he comes up against it.
I did have some conflicting feelings about how the women characters were treated in this movie, both in terms of the on-screen violence perpetrated against them and how they function in the plot. On one hand, there are three women characters with their own personalities and very different characters. While the character of Bannion’s wife, Katie (Jocelyn Brando) is probably the least developed, we do get some fun hints about their relationship in specific details like how she always steals a little pour of his beer for herself. As I wrote about expansively above, I loved the character of Debby and her plot arc. But there’s also the frequent use of violence against the women in a way that feels borderline exploitative. And in a slightly different category, I thought that one of the women was used to shield Bannion from crossing a line that might have made his character less popular with the viewing audience. I honestly felt like it was a bit of a cop-out--a way of giving the audience the blood they’re baying for without implicating the honorable male protagonist.
On the whole, this is a captivating thriller with memorable turns from its cast and a wonderfully winding plot.
The Big Heat, 1953
One night, a police officer uses his service weapon to take his own life. Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) is called in to investigate the death, and soon discovers that it’s somehow connected to gangster Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) and one of his lieutenants, Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). But the more Bannion investigates, the more danger he finds himself in. With the unlikely help of Stone’s girlfriend, Debby (Gloria Grahame), Bannion relentlessly chases down the truth.
Gritty and brutal, this crime thriller keeps you on the edge of your seat courtesy of memorable characters and shocking plot turns.
Let’s talk about Gloria Grahame in this film, because she is a revelation and the most interesting thing happening (in a very interesting story!) by a long mile. We first meet Debby when she answers a late-night call from Lagana. Asked to get Stone on the phone she replies that she’s happy to go and fetch him, “I like seeing him jump.” Debby strongly cultivates a little girl persona, which keeps her in the relatively good graces of Lagana’s crew, but doesn’t protect her from the violence she receives at Stone’s hands. Still, she seems swayed by the lavish lifestyle that being with him affords and, if you read between the lines even a little, she probably knows how dangerous it would be to leave Vince.
But as the film goes on, we see Debby become restless. It may be because a woman is tortured to death by Vince, something that makes the endgame of their relationship more stark. Or it might be because her contempt for Vince--who is violent and cruel, but also a total puppet to Lagana’s needs---gets harder and harder to hide. It might also be a crisis brought about by seeing the raw anger and grief from Bannion as the human cost of his investigation rises and gets more personal. When something finally does happen that convinces Debby to turn against Vince, it’s the most brutal and shocking moment of the entire film. And yet, to the film’s credit, Debby is given a degree of autonomy and power afterward, and Grahame’s performance kicks into a whole other gear.
And while obviously Grahame’s performance was my favorite, the rest of the cast is just as good. Ford begins as someone who is merely stubborn and determined, but as the film goes on his emotional connection to the case begins to erode his own sense of decorum. There’s a line where his determination to bring Stone and Lagana to justice becomes a sort of frenzy. And for a man who begins as very straight-forward and buttoned down, it’s quite the transformation. Marvin also makes a strong impression as the vile Vince Stone. He’s a yes-man with a sadistic streak, protected from the censure of his friends through his wild and unpredictable violence. In a standout sequence, Vince doesn’t like the way that a woman is rolling some dice, and so he burns her with a cigarette. As she screams and cries in pain, not a single person in the bar does anything about it.
The world in this movie is a bleak one, where people--including many of Bannion’s superiors---merely accept their place as abetters to evil deeds either out of fear or the enjoyment of the spoils of crime, or some mix of the two. Bannion repeatedly comes up against others who will not help him in his pursuit of justice. And while his frustration practically radiates off of the screen, we can understand that it would not be so easy to speak up when people who are seen as liabilities are being tortured or murdered without hesitation. The victims of this violence are often people who are not powerful: an over-the-hill woman searching for love in bars, a working class man dealing in explosives. It’s power helping power, and Bannion---who has long been someone with power due to his position---doesn’t know what to do when he comes up against it.
I did have some conflicting feelings about how the women characters were treated in this movie, both in terms of the on-screen violence perpetrated against them and how they function in the plot. On one hand, there are three women characters with their own personalities and very different characters. While the character of Bannion’s wife, Katie (Jocelyn Brando) is probably the least developed, we do get some fun hints about their relationship in specific details like how she always steals a little pour of his beer for herself. As I wrote about expansively above, I loved the character of Debby and her plot arc. But there’s also the frequent use of violence against the women in a way that feels borderline exploitative. And in a slightly different category, I thought that one of the women was used to shield Bannion from crossing a line that might have made his character less popular with the viewing audience. I honestly felt like it was a bit of a cop-out--a way of giving the audience the blood they’re baying for without implicating the honorable male protagonist.
On the whole, this is a captivating thriller with memorable turns from its cast and a wonderfully winding plot.