Big Heat [Blu-ray]

Glenn Ford is super bad ass in this film . He is 100% convincing as a complex man living in 2 worlds. Family life vs the crime underworld.There have been so many attempt to make films where the point of the revenge story is to have the audience in a morally acceptable blood lust. What i mean by this is in our society if a member of ones family is killed it is automatically accepted for a family member to seek revenge. 9 out of 10 times this is never pulled off convincingly. Fritz Lang brilliantly does it knowing he is making an American film. Instead of doing the crazy violent ending he makes the whole film super gritty and intense leaving the ending mild so as to make it pass as a major release and to not upset a commercial audience too much.Glenn Ford steals the show leaving Lee Marvin's role surprisingly underwhelming compared to Ford. Ford is more badass than Dirty Harry or Bogart in this film, seriously.I am a big fan of the movie Gilda but always did not really like Fords character. This film shows his wide range of acting making this character totally different from the semi creepy character in Gilda. In the club scene they play the theme song from Gilda in the background as a cameo.The only other element that is better than Ford performance is the dialogue.The dialogue is 5 stars and i feel it doesn't get any better than this. It is some of the best writing in film noir history. Almost every line is a gem. There are tons of 1 liners. There is one great retro unintentionally funny scene. What i mean by retro unintentionally--i something that can't escape being dated such as the party scene in Sunset Blvd where Holden is waiting for the phone. In this film there is a club that is frequented. During a scene in this club there is a band with like 4 old men that consists of heavy accordion jamming and like a banjo etc- very acoustic instruments. The lady Banon is talking to makes a comment on the band being very loud and can they go in another room-- I am paraphrasing but it is funny that she was emphasizing that the music was intense and loud-- the band is like jamming polka music. I love that scene though and it does not effect the serous tone of the film.I love this film it is a masterpiece.

The film was on the level, see. There's a whole lotta bad apples on this merry go-round, and this film makes it look good. So good in fact I'd watch it again, if things hadn;t have taken a turn for the worse. But on the run, out of options, and up to no good are a sorry recipe for movie night, but that's a horse of a nother story. Anyway, bub, if noir's your thing, and you could go for a little of the ol' detective flavor, then this flick might just be your bag. Take a look pal, if you know what's good for ya.

You can see and hear a little something in Glenn Ford's character that Clint Eastwood would channel and amplify a few years later in Dirty Harry. Not to take anything away from Eastwood at all, but Ford puts an emotional depth to this role that is remarkable. He conveys so much in a look, a facial expression. And you are with him the whole way; he comes just close to the edge, but not so that he loses your sympathy. The actress that portrays his wife is just wonderful. Too bad they didn't do more films together. Ditto Ford and the incomparable Gloria Grahame. She could steal every inch of the screen when she appears. And you long for more scenes where she and Ford appear together and exchange banter. Great dialogue in this.

A classic film noir, centering on homicide detective Dave Bannion (played by Glenn Ford), in the police department of the fictional town of Kenport. Investigating the suicide of a fellow cop, one that is clearly a suicide, but one that shows a shadowy world of corruption exists in Kenport, Bannion falls down a rabbit hole of investigating how deep the corruption goes, of how much the town is controlled by a crime lord, Mike Lagana (played by Alexander Scourby). Are his fellow cops in his employ? His boss? In turn his boss? A local bartender? Everyone?Again and again nicely and not so nicely people try to warn Bannion off his investigations, with people talking to Bannion about Lagana and his cronies sometimes ending up dead. Not taking no for answer, with the blessing of his wife, even risking his job in order to do the right thing, Bannion persists. Unfortunately for Bannion, the bad guys start playing really dirty, with even Bannion’s family not immune.I really liked the character of Debby Marsh (played by Gloria Grahame), girlfriend of Lagana’s second in command Vince Stone (played by Lee Marvin, great to see). She had a real character arc and went from one of many characters to almost the main character of the film, showing considerable growth. Really nicely done character, I was dubious about her at first but she became my favorite character.Ford did a great job and all around the film is well done. It is interesting that Ford’s character isn’t always nice, that while he is undeniably uncorruptible and detests crime, he has a violent side to him he tries to hide, that his wife and child bring out the best in him but not far below the surface is an angry man who would like to beat the stuffing out of criminals (not that they don’t deserve it in the film, as there are several murderers). He isn’t always likeable but he knows he isn’t likable and tries to be better, to do better. Also he is dangerous to know, as just about anyone connected with him in the film has at the very least a challenging time (if they don’t end up dead).There is good pace, a great gunfight (one of the better ones I have seen in film noir), excellent supporting cast, the picture to me was extremely crisp, wonderful story arc for the femme fatale, just all around a great film noir.

With Glenn Ford (such an underrated actor) at his best, all restrained intensity as good cop Bannion, glorious Gloria Grahame as winning as ever, Lee Marvin gangly and dangerous in an early gangster role, and the too rarely seen Jocelyn Brando (Marlon`s big sister) excellent as Bannion`s wife, The Big Heat is one of the most enjoyable late film noirs - it`s from 1953 - and one of Fritz Lang`s most tightly directed movies.Glenn Ford now looks like one of the most quietly powerful actors of Hollywood`s `Golden Age`, and it was taut performances like this one that made him such big box office for so long. He had a rare ability to portray a kind of slow-burn tension, here a homely family man who is also perhaps an eternal loner, and who may well be hiding a few unexorcised demons. He has reason enough for the cold rage Ford does so well by the second half of this relentless thriller. It`s a deftly masterful performance.Lee Marvin gives notice of how natural he could be, as well as how smilingly vicious. Then there`s the notorious pot of scalding coffee...Gloria Grahame was born for roles like this one, both tough and vulnerable, the ultimate tragic moll. She`s terrific here, almost as if she were in her own world, in a film of her own devising.Alexander Scourby, a suave, beautifully spoken actor better known in the US than here, is slickly superb as the mobster kingpin, with Adam Williams (later to turn up as a similarly slimy baddie in Hitchcock`s North By Northwest) good as one of his lowly minions, a big baby-faced heel you just know won`t make it to the final reel.Twenty-two year-old Carolyn (Morticia Addams) Jones, in her sixth film, has a brief but effective scene getting mauled by Marvin in a bar.If you like film noir, if you are a Ford fan, if you appreciate any chance to watch Grahame, and if you revere Marvin, then you`ll want to see this dark and seedy movie.This is a film I watch at least once a year, and it never fails to entertain. One of the great dark thrillers to make it out of post-war Hollywood.Highly recommended.

The Big Heat (1953) is Fritz Lang's greatest achievement of the '50s. There are those (especially in France) who acclaim Moonfleet (1955), and it is possible to argue that his last urban thrillers (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and While the City Sleeps - both 1956) are hugely under-rated, but The Big Heat is so obviously a great film noir that one is tempted to say it is indeed Lang's final masterpiece. Its greatness lies in the tight no-fat Sidney Boehm script which features barely a scene or line of dialogue which fails to develop a story which hurtles along at breakneck pace to deliver it's sophisticated revision of the noir genre with the full force of a gun in the gut. Take the film's opening for example. In the first 4 minutes all the main characters are introduced, the plot is initiated and developed, and the film's main theme of the exposure of corruption is telegraphed as clear as a bell. Lang achieves this by the brilliant use of the telephone. The first shot shows a gun on a desk (note the absence of any establishing shot). A hand picks it up. We hear the gunshot off-screen, the camera dollying back (a Lang trademark this) to reveal a man slumped dead over his desk, his police badge and a letter in front of him. Obviously this is the suicide of a crooked cop. Enter the wife (Jeanette Nolan) next to one of Lang's clocks showing the time to be 3:00 AM - yet another of Lang's destiny machines is up and running. Is the woman horrified? No, she is involved in the corruption. She reads the letter and picks up the phone. Does she call the cops? Again no. It is the henchman of mobster Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) who picks up and hands the receiver on to his boss. Lagana thanks Mrs. Duncan for the information and advises she now call the police. After hanging up Lagana orders his henchman to phone his chief heavy, Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). Again the phone is picked up by a minion, this time Stone's girlfriend, Debbie Marsh (Gloria Grahame). She passes on to Stone who is ordered to (it is strongly hinted) arrange the blackmail payments to Mrs Duncan to prevent the contents of that letter from ever being exposed. A flash of photo bulbs clears to reveal detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), the hero-to-be of the rest of the film beginning his investigation into the suicide. Lang takes a mere 4 minutes to depict an entire world - a dirty world which amounts to a garbage can, the lid of which Bannion spends the rest of the film trying to lift off. The precise economic concision of Boehm and Lang's story-telling here is simply breath-taking.Matching the incision of the narrative drive is the superb mise-en-scene which Lang deploys to delineate the differences between the corrupt immoral world of Lagana and the upright moral world of Bannion. Ingeniously, Lang paints immorality as a positive - Lagana's impressive mansion, the Duncans' well-appointed house, Vince's stylish penthouse suite and the chic jazz bar named 'The Retreat'. There's nothing menacing or sinister about any of these bright well-lit locations. Lang reserves seediness for the world of the honest people - the police bureau and especially Bannion's home. In the film corruption is seen as all-pervasive and because corruption is in place all the way up to the police commissioner (who plays poker with Stone!) Bannion's investigation amounts to a criminal activity which everyone wants to see quashed. In the world of the bad, it is a crime to be good - it's possible Lang thought he had captured the very essence of American society here! At any rate, the sophisticated facade of respectability does sucker in Bannion at first. It needs a dirty phone call to his wife and a bomb to really turn him into a rogue cop fighting against the system.One of the many interesting things about the film is the fact that Lang was working from a script already in place and many of the key sequences were written by Boehm, not Lang. This means that many things are in the film which we don't find in other Lang films. The Bannion marriage (Jocelyn Brando - sister of Marlon - playing much better than many claim) is depicted as a warm positive - other Lang films show marriage to be anything but. Also the character of Bannion himself is an out-and-out hero who actually defeats the destiny machine (the organized crime depicted in the film) and leaves the film with society changed for the good. No other Lang 'hero' is so upright and morally 'clean'. There is a warmth to the picture which is absent from much of his other work. Note the way Bannion solves the investigation courtesy of people helping him (the old lady at the demolition yard, his old war buddies who protect his daughter, even his old partner and boss who eventually change their hearts) and there is a very real sense of a tragic man who has lost his life and his home (the sequence in his empty house), but who regains interest in life through the actions of a woman who yearns for the domestic joys which have always elluded her. The last scene of Debbie dying in Bannion's arms while he tells her about his wife is deeply moving in a sentimental manner rare in Lang.And yet, master film-maker as Lang was, we have to acknowledge the extent to which he changed Boehm's script to something more starkly Langian. Most obvious is Lang's insertion of extra violence such as Stone stubbing the girl in the bar with his cigarette. Then there is the ending of the film which Lang completely re-wrote. Boehm originally had Lagana kill Mrs Duncan so that with Debbie free of guilt she was allowed a happy ending with wedding bells ringing in the distance for her and Bannion! Lang makes Bannion into a harder, colder character. One reading of the film would be that 'Bannion the rogue cop out to bring the system down' actually achieves nothing himself. He brings down Lagana by using Debbie instead. We musn't ignore Debbie's own motivation for shooting Mrs Duncan (which is clearly there in the script), but she is used by Bannion nevertheless. She dies in the process, as do all the women in the film who associate with Bannion. Something in Bannion seems to die along with his wife and every time a character tries to help him, he simply brushes them aside with some kind of acid comment (Debbie receives the brunt of this). The clincher for me is when he throws the gun on the bed for Debbie to (presumably) protect herself. Actually he is asking her (consciously? sub-consciously?) to go ahead and kill Mrs Duncan for him.And let's not get carried away by the film's 'positive' ending. In the coda, life goes on at the police bureau meaning that 'the big heat' brought down by Bannion on organized crime hasn't entirely cleaned things up. Bannion's last action is to answer yet another phone call which might set everything up all over again, an added chaser being to order the coffee be kept heated up as he leaves - this in a film where we know exactly how dangerous that beverage can be!!As you can tell, I think the film is a masterpiece - it never dulls with repeated viewings. The script and direction are so good that the acting just falls perfectly into place. Gloria Grahame has received most of the plaudits from the critics, but for me it is Glenn Ford who delivers the film's greatest performance. It's a masterpiece of non-performance in which the mechanics of the acting craft utterly disappear. The DVD itself is a model of its kind. Released by Columbia, the images are as crisp and as steely hard as one could wish for - a welcome change from the usual poor state of available transfers of Lang's other American films. Now if only Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Scarlet Street (1945), House by the River (1950) and The Blue Gardenia (1951) could receive the same treatment...

Fritz Lang's 1953 film has all the classic ingredients of its genre, film noir - a tight plot (of police corruption and retributive vengeance), razor sharp and darkly comic script (courtesy of Sydney Boehm), a brooding, atmospheric look and feel (courtesy of Charles Lang's cinematography), impressive acting turns (both lead and 'character' parts) and more than its fair share of (for the time) unusually sadistic violence. Indeed, the 'step-up' in the nature of The Big Heat's violent content is one of the clear 'progressions' which distinguishes the film from Lang's earlier noir classics, The Woman In The Window and Scarlet Street.It is perhaps a little surprising therefore that Lang chose to cast (the admittedly versatile) Glenn Ford for the central role of Detective Sergeant Dave Bannion, the homely family man whose world is turned upside down when his investigation of an apparently mundane 'police suicide' (that of police records bureau man, Tom Duncan) reveals a web of mob violence and police corruption (the 'big heat' of the film's title), thereby transforming Bannion into an uncompromising, distrusting avenger ('You're on a hate binge'). Lang depicts Bannion's contrasting 'love and hate' worlds particularly skilfully, as the 'loner cop' lambasts his complacently corrupt (ex-)colleagues, with Ford carrying the role very impressively (thereby rendering irrelevant any thoughts you may have had as to what the likes of Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum might have made of the role).Less surprising, casting-wise, is Lee Marvin's (increasingly) trademark depiction as the cruel Vince Stone, chief henchman to Alexander Scourby's smooth, but ruthless, local gang leader, Mike Lagana. Vince doesn't flinch at stubbing out a cigar on a girls' hand or throwing scalding hot coffee into girlfriend Debby's (Gloria Grahame) face. Grahame is typically impressive here as the vivacious and flirtatious 'moll', and Boehm saves his best lines for her - on describing her perfume, 'It attracts mosquitoes and repels men', and, on beginning to feel attraction to Bannion's righteous, single minded cop, quipping, 'You're about as romantic as a pair of handcuffs'. In addition, also particularly impressive is Jeanette Nolan's outwardly prim but inwardly cynical, 'corrupt' widower, Mrs Duncan, whose prize possession is the letter written secretly by her deceased husband which threatens to blow Messrs. Lagana and Stone's world apart.Although, for me, Lang's film does not quite reach the heights of such genre classics The Maltese Falcon or Double Indemnity, in keeping with these films, The Big Heat has not an 'ounce of fat' in its 90-minute running time, and Grahame's Debby provides a nice piece of avenging 'girl power' (mink-coated, no less) in the film's brilliant denouement.

The American limited edition release of Fritz Lang's classic film noir 'The Big Heat' has sold out. Analysis by DVD Beaver suggests that the Spanish bluray 'Los Sobornados comes from the same master. Picture and sound quality are superb. While I generally treat Spanish releases with some caution, this is an absolute cracker. I can also recommend the Spanish release of Kubrick's Film Noir 'The Killing' - 'Atraco Perfecto' which is also superb

I don't know how high does this film rank in the Fritz Lang canon,but I was amazed by how efficiently the director establishesthe setting, and the theme, and how quickly he propels the plot.A director tackling the same story today, would probably adda lot of gore and explosions, but would not improve the final result.