The Big Heat

The Big Heat (1953) opens with a policeman's suicide. Investigating it, Detective Bannion finds that the city's police force and a crime syndicate are entangled. When the pressure comes he does not stop, and his family pays for it. The source is William P. McGivern's story, serialised in The Saturday Evening Post in December 1952 and published as a novel the same year. Columbia bought the rights for 40,000 dollars. Sydney Boehm, a former crime reporter, wrote the screenplay and changed a great deal, moving the story from Philadelphia to the fictional city of Kenport and reworking the relationships and outcomes. The casting shifted too. Producer Jerry Wald had wanted an older lead like Paul Muni or Edward G. Robinson; the role went to Glenn Ford. Columbia wanted Marilyn Monroe for Debby Marsh and balked at the loan fee 20th Century Fox demanded, so Gloria Grahame got it. Its best known scene involves a cup of coffee. Lee Marvin's enforcer throws boiling coffee into Grahame's face. The critic David M. Meyer describes it as the moment the film is known for, and it is counted among the defining images of violence in postwar cinema. Fritz Lang directed. He had fled Germany, and institutions rotting from the inside is a recurring subject in his work. It entered the National Film Registry in 2011, with the Library of Congress calling it one of the great postwar noir films. Roger Ebert added it to his Great Movies list. It runs 89 minutes. Good for: film noir, institutional corruption, and Gloria Grahame. Less good for: violence against women is the engine of the film and plays badly now. Bannion's rage goes unexamined. The plot moves fast but the characters are thin.