****/**** Image A Sound C+ Extras B
starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Alexander Scourby
screenplay by Sydney Boehm, based on William P. McGivern's SATURDAY EVENING POST serial
directed by Fritz Lang
by Walter Chaw The pinnacle of Fritz Lang's American noir output, The Big Heat vacillates between hard-bitten and surprisingly tender. A movie of dualities, it positions Glenn Ford's Det. Sgt. Bannion on
the liminal borders between dialectic states: he presents a familiar hardboiled
veneer on the one side, a broken, exhausted, eventually devastated family man
on the other. The picture partitions noir bodily, forcefully into the margins of
the gender divide, and it confronts, full-on, the popular conception of the
'50s nuclear family. It appears fully formed, an irritant to the hegemony of
the American myth of nuclear/consumer nirvana, and it suggests that the cultural
upheaval that would result in the helter-skelter '60s started showing its
fatigue early. The Big Heat is Rebel Without a Cause, except the
mother is killed and the gay kid lives.
|
It's essentially modern, then, the
product of Lang's already dark, paranoid sensibility–made darker by his
struggles with HUAC, which somehow translated a strident stand against Nazism as
an implicit sympathy with Communism. Although he was only "blacklisted"
for about six months before being rescued by Harry Cohn at Columbia and given a
two-film contract, the ordeal–the testimony, the indignity–served to validate
the worldview under which Lang had laboured since the 1920s. For Lang, HUAC was
proof that the only thing that ever changed was the name the oppressors gave
themselves. The whole of his ethos is expressed in the giant "Give Blood
Now" poster that greets his penitents at the entrance to The Big Heat's
police station.
The first image of the film is of a standard-issue .38
snubnose, picked up and used offscreen. The head and
upper torso of a man falls forward into the frame, onto a desk. In a
different age, a pool of blood would stain the blotter; we mentally insert
it. A wife appears, the first of two wives in The Big Heat. This is Mrs.
Duncan (Jeanette Nolan), and she's neither terribly shocked nor terribly sad
that her husband has just stepped off the carousel. The dearly departed is a
corrupt cop who's left behind a confession that fingers, essentially, everyone
at the station. Mrs. Duncan spirits it away before upright Det. Bannion (Glenn
Ford) shows up for the requisite post-mortem interrogation. It's all a
formality. We've almost forgotten that someone else was called first, a lackey
for gangster Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby).
Soon enough, Bannion is tipped
off that nothing is as it seems and no one is to be trusted–that the only safe
place is at home, with his adorable daughter and his doting wife, Katie (Marlon's
older sis, Jocelyn Brando). Bannion is offered sanctuary in The Big Heat,
but his outrage causes him to gamble it and, in a loaded sequence, he
accidentally knocks over his daughter's wood-block police station (that she's
malapropped as "It's just like you, daddy" instead of,
presumably, "Just like where you work, daddy") and snaps at his
ever-patient wife, then sends his wife to her doom in a car-bomb explosion meant for him.
A prototype for the revenge films that would crop up in the early-'70s,
most specifically those in the tenor and character of Don Siegel/Clint Eastwood's Dirty
Harry, The Big Heat finds Bannion turning in his shield and engaging in a holy crusade
against the men who killed his wife.
Julie Kirgo's very fine essay included in the keepcase
for Twilight Time's Limited Edition Blu-ray release of The Big Heat correctly
reads the picture as a diary of the cost women pay for Bannion's single-minded lust for vengeance. The main victim is plucky moll Debby (Gloria Grahame): Attached to lizard Vince Stone (Lee Marvin) for "expensive" laughs, she decides, after Vince
puts out a cigarette on hapless B-girl Doris (querida Carolyn Jones), that she might help Bannion in his blood quest. This, after we put one-and-one
together and figure out that a murdered girl from earlier, Lucy (Dorothy
Green), whose corpse was tossed from a car and found riddled with cigarette burns,
was the victim of a "sex murder" and the same "psychopath." What Kirgo doesn't examine with regards to women in the film is that The Big Heat treats them almost traditionally (despite allowing Katie to drink and smoke; despite its
frank depiction of prostitution and good-time girls) in suggesting they are the
primary "check" that balances the innate bestiality of men. Without
Katie, Bannion becomes uncivilized. He renounces his profession, gives over
his child to his in-laws' stewardship, and becomes torturer, judge, and executioner.
Without Debby, Stone loses his position, too; already on the wrong side of
civilization, he loses his freedom.
The violence in The Big Heat remains savage. The
scene where Stone disfigures Debby with hot coffee is all the more effective for Lang's perverse interest in the villain's chiselled cruelty over Debby's agony. Consider Katie's
death, a father-daughter moment that makes a whiplash transition to a frenzied,
failed freeing of a corpse from a burning car. Katie, the second wife of the
film, is now rhymed with not the inconstant, unfeeling Mrs. Duncan but rather B-girl Dorothy, whose corpse has been likewise
extracted from a car. Fascinatingly, this now pairs Bannion with the corrupt
cop whose death opens the piece. In a very real way, something of Bannion has
died–when he submits, somewhat, to Debby's attempts to seduce him, he becomes
paired with Stone; and at the end, when Debby pairs in death with Katie, he returns to himself. Bannion, like all men, is defined by his most recent object choice.
The ending, read by Lang biographer Patrick McGilligan (Nature of the Beast) as
bittersweet when Bannion resumes "business as usual" and accepts his
shield and position again, is predicted by his "marriage" to his
corpse bride and the stability she represents. It's bittersweet because
Bannion's agreed to honour an ideal that's already proven to be a lie and
lifeless besides. The Big Heat is about accepting hopelessness as the
one, true existential state. When Debby delivers that classic throaway line upon seeing the furniture-less home Bannion used to share with his family ("Hey I like
this: early nothin'"), I can't help but think back to the slimy barkeep (Peter Whitney) dismissing the girls who "work" in his bar as "suitcases full of nothin'."
What you see at the end of The Big Heat isn't resolve–it's resignation. Two years later, Robert
Aldrich defines nihilism as the central mover in noir with his Kiss
Me Deadly, though it was already swirling there in the middle of The Big
Heat.
THE BLU-RAY DISC
Twilight Time's Blu-ray contains a very fine
1.33:1, 1080p presentation of The Big Heat that ramps up the clarity and
sharp contrasts of Charles Lang's (no relation) black-and-white cinematography. For what it's worth, I peeked at the various versions
available for streaming online, and they are simply no substitute for this crisp, fine-grain image. The 2.0 DTS-HD MA mono track registers low on my system, but as it's
even throughout, there isn't a lot of scrambling to adjust the volume once it's amplified. An optional isolated musical score is one of those extra features I never really
understand (it must hold some appeal for soundtrack fetishists), while the
theatrical trailer, in native HD, rounds out the disc-based supplements. As mentioned above, Kirgo's insert essay is fantastic–I would have loved an audio commentary from her. For the record, in addition to McGilligan's
book on Lang, I recommend reading Vincent Curcio's biography of Grahame, Suicide
Blond. Anyway, The Big Heat is awesome.
