The Big Heat: Fate’s Network

The casting is ideal. Gloria Grahame, playing the gangster’s moll Debby Marsh, balances a femme-fatale delivery of her chewiest hard-boiled lines—the script lays her a feast of them—with a glinting playfulness and fragility. Grahame would become a noir legend, but there lurks in her a measure of Jean Arthur innocence, just under the skin. Lee Marvin is galvanic in what served as his coming-out party as a major Hollywood heavy, his Vince Stone an early audition for Liberty Valance in John Ford’s film a decade later. As the investigating policeman Dave Bannion, Glenn Ford’s earnest stolidity is matched by his capacity for ice-cold seething. The film discomfits us with the implication that Sergeant Bannion might in fact be reduced, in his revenger’s role, to a kind of vigilante robot. Yet Ford never once exaggerates; Lang’s scheme pivots on the restraint of this performance.

It’s a scheme with the precision of mathematics. In Lang’s view of the American system, coercive power comes from above. “I’m getting pressure calls from upstairs!” complains Bannion’s superior, the craven Lieutenant Wilks (Willis Bouchey). Meanwhile, the sultry crime boss Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby—and what wonderful names these minor players carry around!) berates and threatens his operatives, Marvin’s Vince Stone and the slimy out-of-town hit man Larry Gordon, played by Adam Williams (on hearing that Stone might dump Debby, Gordon licks his lips: “I’m a rebound man from way back”). On the verge of his vengeance-sickened triumph, with his hands around the neck of the cop’s widow, whose death will trigger the release of information naming Lagana and his gang as the secret masters of the corrupted city, Bannion crows that her death will trigger payback: “With you dead, the big heat falls. The big heat for Lagana, for Stone, and for all the rest of the lice.” In a parallel scene, as Bannion nearly strangles Larry Gordon to death in return for planting the car bomb that killed his wife, he stops short, seeing that he doesn’t need to kill Gordon, only to spread word that he finked: “I’m through with you, but your friends aren’t.” Study the design: Is what’s on top truly the big heat of justice? Or only more chaos and retribution? This conflation is no accident; we’ve seen that the police commissioner himself plays cards at Vince Stone’s table. Does Bannion believe that the exposure of one boss can rewire the network the film delineates? Lang’s ambiguity carries the pressure of an axiom.

Lagana and Stone may be lice (Bannion also calls Lagana a “thieving cockroach”), but in this realm, women are regularly referred to as barflies, a term soon shortened to simply “flies,” then “floaters.” Meanwhile, Debby sneers that her perfume “attracts mosquitoes and repels men”—an insult Vince Stone seems barely to register. Bannion’s working-class marriage is contrasted with all the filth, in domestic scenes both charming and cloying—yet this, too, serves Lang’s purposes in the end, deepening our shock at the casual destruction of Bannion’s illusions, and our own. The film’s verdict on the prospect of alliance between men and women is dark indeed, exercised through a sequence of associations and equivalences: Vince and Debby; Bannion and Debby; the suicidal cop Duncan and his bleakly corrupt wife, Bertha (Jeanette Nolan—superb); the suicidal cop and his desperate “barfly” girlfriend. The final and fatal pair are Debby and Bertha: Debby dubs them “sisters under the mink.”

As much as Fury, The Big Heat is a film about a world torn suddenly from its moorings, and the resultant trauma, which is to say it may also be a film about Germany after all. We veterans of multiple viewings of The Big Heat shouldn’t underestimate the intact force of the film’s two principal shocks: the car bomb, landing in the midst of a lulling bedtime story (a blast that anticipates, and perhaps influenced, the wrenching destruction of the homestead in John Ford’s The Searchers three years later), and the now-iconic pot of scalding coffee flung in Debby’s face, destroying the seductiveness that is her most cherished possession. This doubling, one of many that give the film its remarkable structural integrity, unites Debby and Bannion, though only Debby knows it. Bannion believes he’s nobly aloof from Debby’s reality; in truth, he’s become a zombie figure, lurking in a margin between life and death. Lang soft-pedals any notion of Bannion’s attraction to Debby (a notable change from the book), preferring the suggestion that certain losses not only are irrevocable but leave numb monsters in their wake. Bannion’s walk through his own devastated, emptied-out home resembles Peter Weller’s glimpse of the scene of his former life in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop thirty-four years later.

Though Bannion will be allowed to live—trailing dead women behind him—it’s Debby’s movie, not just because of the ebullience Gloria Grahame is able to manifest in this vale of death. After Vince’s attack, with half her face either bandaged, hidden in shadow, or revealed as badly scarred, self-knowledge is hers alone: she is a living manifestation of what Leonard Cohen once called “a crack in everything.” Is there anywhere to hide, between the big heat above and the bugs crawling below? Not in Bannion’s hotel room, whose decor she identifies, unforgettably, as “early nothing.” “I can always go through life sideways,” Debby muses—while seeming to know that no such margin exists. Lang resists any pat urge to redeem Debby’s essence. Never has a character we delight in been more regularly captivated by her own reflection in mirrors. “Vince shouldn’t have ruined my looks,” she murmurs, dying. “It was a rotten thing to do.”

Bannion is restored not to domesticity—consider his seemingly forgotten daughter—but to his policeman’s desk, to resume his function in the city’s heat-and-bugs algorithm. No sooner has he reclaimed his chair than the phone rings. Phones bring only nightmares, yet it is with seeming satisfaction that Bannion reports what he hears: “A hit-and-run.” Likely this is no isolated occurrence but another ominous node in fate’s network; Bannion is no longer the naive operator who’d believe in something like an innocent suicide. “Keep the coffee hot, Hugo,” he quips, as he exits past a sign reading GIVE BLOOD NOW. (It is always worth noticing the signage, advertising, and artwork that Fritz Lang hangs on the walls.) Is it blood or scalding coffee that now runs in Bannion’s veins? Glenn Ford’s grim smile is impossible to decipher. Unlike Debby’s, Bannion’s scars are hidden on the inside. As in so many of Lang’s greatest films, both in Germany and Hollywood, the city of strangers is not only a nightmarish maze in which the protagonist becomes lost, but also a fractured mirror for his soul.