The Big Heat (1953)

Directed by Fritz Lang. Starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin, Alexander Scourby, Joselyn Brando, Jeanette Nolan, Willis Bouchey, Peter Whitney, Dorothy Green, Robert Burton, Howard Wendell, Adam Williams.

One of Ford’s darkest and most intense performances invigorates this sizzling noir, along with scowling Marvin as a vicious brute of a gangster and ditzy Grahame as his boozy but anxious moll. Ford’s detective is investigating what looks like an open-and-shut case of suicide, but he goes deeper, crosses the wrong people, and danger finds him; car bombs, cigarette burns, and gunfire ensue. Lang sneaks seamless style into his direct, thudding treatment of the crime pic formula cornerstones. Casts a searing spotlight on an ugly but provocative brand of anti-hero, the kind who’s a knight in shining armor on the surface, determined to bring reprobates to justice, but at what cost? Possibly his soul and his sanity, and surely the women in his life, who are inevitably destroyed through his interference. The disfigurement by scalding coffee still rates as a potent shock of violence even today. Script adaptation by Sydney Boehm from a William P. McGivern story, a Saturday Evening Post serial that was then turned into a novel.

84/100