The Big Heat

The Big Heat belongs up there with the meanest and darkest of noirs, among the likes of M (Lang’s true masterpiece), The Big Sleep, and The Sweet Smell of Success. Ironically, Lang’s late-career triumph does not feature many scenes that illustrate the visual mores of noir is; namely, tall shadows and terrors in the night, gunfights in back alleys and back rooms, the protagonist and his femme fatale locked in a one-way ride to Hell. Much of The Big Heat is well-lit – the characters’s are what makes The Big Heat a true noir. They’re nasty, with few exceptions.

While the scenes set in the Bannon home are a little cloying, they are the lynchpin upon which the journey of Glenn Ford’s character depends. He is a man, driven to the brink, who looks into the void, embodied by Lee Marvin’s snarling victimizer and cold-blooded murderer, and walks himself back with a righteousness that feels earned to the viewer. Ford always does a great job with roles of this kind: others would play virtuous very stolidly, like a man who knows he’s right, a type that the Hayes Production Code would ensure remains that way throughout the film’s length; Ford, however, plays Bannon angry. He is unsure if his motives are pure but he knows what his gut is telling him, so he trudges through the dark happenings of the plot, hoping to come to the end and be able to look his daughter in the eyes again.

The Big Heat is a great late-period Lang film for anyone interested in his work or in the noir genre itself.