The Big Heat (1953) review
Glenn Ford, Lee Marvin and Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953)
Glenn Ford plays Bannion in the The Big Heat (1953): a good man, as decent as they come. And of course, then, he's in danger. It's corruption all the way up and down: what good will it do, then, for a man to seek truth and justice? Fritz Lang, a German expatriate in L.A. who fled Nazi Germany, knows well what it is to live in a rotten polity. He takes us to low-level bars, fancy penthouses, police precincts: rotten, rotten, rotten. The higher up, the dirtier. Balzac was right it seems and indeed there's a crime behind every fortune: the mansions uptown smell of foul murder, while honest cops struggle to make ends meet.
The Big Heat takes us back to the first book of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates and Thrasymachus dispute the definition of justice, and whether the unjust or the just life is more advantageous. Well, The Big Heat answers it: the unjust life is more advantageous and the unjust man is happier— Thrasymachus vindicated in the big city.
Bannion suffers without respite: a criminal organization held tightly to power kills his wife, fires him and all but destroys his life. He decides to seek justice outside the system, going at it alone, that is, he abandons justice for vengeance: and we're back in the old west, which means what was promised then (justice through legal order) was not delivered. The result: he has to become a bit like them, violent, mean and lawless, which is to say that in order to win he must lose. Only injustice will defeat injustice. The game is thus set and in its terrifying moral pessimism The Big Heat resonates with much of political philosophy: the world's gone wrong, so wrong you cannot live right.
Besides Glenn Ford’s steady, ruthless performance, we have Gloria Grahame as Debby in all her material girl glory, the tipsy girlfriend of a gangster, Vince (Lee Marvin). Debby understands the machinery of the world much better than all the other characters. She’s been poor and she’s had money: she has no doubts over which state of affairs is best. Thus set on expediency as a general policy, she finds her role in the hierarchy, dancing around the strings held by the big shots. She shops, drinks, dances and lies about the sofa of her Vince’s penthouse – that’s her life and she’s getting a kick out of it.
There’s only one problem: deep down, she has a sympathy for honesty, and so she identifies with Bannion in his struggle to bring down the racket which killed his wife. And yet she thrives, and lives, in that racket–– and with such residues of dignity she should not have kept so close to crookedness. No good deed goes unpunished among those who are power-greedy enough to enjoy violence. The most vicious scene in a film of vicious scenes shows Vince assaulting her to the point of throwing a pot of boiling coffee in her face. She’s left with a half-burned face, which means she’s lost the looks which made it possible for her to get ahead in life. The only thing left is revenge, which she exerts with corresponding cruelty, partnering up with Bannion, ensuring they all go down.
In a typical Hayes Code ending, every wrong is set right in the end, and the criminals are caught. But it's done so vulgarly, and Lang lingers so little on it that the artificiality escapes no one. It's not an ending to the story–– it’s wishful thinking. No amends can be made in a world gone wrong.
