THE BIG HEAT (1953) is a film-noir classic featuring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame in the lead roles, with a very young Lee Marvin playing a mobster.
Glenn Ford plays Det. Sgt. Dave Bannion, the straight arrow who refuses to back down when his investigation into the suicide of a fellow police sergeant upsets the mob boss Mike Lagana who has the police commissioner Higgins as well as the Bannion's boss Lieutenant Wilks in his pocket.
The movie opens with a bang, literally the police sergeant Duncan commits suicide at his home, leaving behind an envelope addressed for the DA.
However, his suspiciously cool headed widow Bertha Duncan who walks into his study right after the incident, picks up the envelope while his husband's corpse is still bleeding on his desk, and calls Lagana.
An arrangement is made and Mrs. Duncan is put on the payroll in return for suppressing her husband's letter revealing the mob links. We later on understand that Sgt. Duncan w as on the take himself but regretted what he had done and tried to flush out the mob through his suicide.
Duncan's death is swept under the rug as the suicide of an unhappy man who was sick. But Duncan's girlfriend contacts Bannion and insists that Duncan was not ill, he was happy and actually he carried on a lively affair with her at his summer house suggesting too much wealth for a cop who is supposed to survive on limited income.
Bannion can smell something very rotten in the suicide ruling but he is told to step back and let it be which, of course, makes him even more suspicious and adamant.
Soon Duncan's girlfriend, seen speaking to him at a bar which is staffed by Lagana spies, is found dead, thrown from a car at a ditch outside the city. Bannion realizes he is definitely on to something.
During his investigation, Bannion makes friends with Debby (played by a very gifted Gloria Grahame), the gangster Vince Stone's (Lee Marvin) girlfriend who is regularly abused and slighted in the Stone household. This semi-romantic link becomes crucial later on in the story.
The big plot point arrives when Stone's hired killer Larry Gordon blows up Bannion's car one night in his drive way with his pretty wife in it. The vendetta is on.
Bannion, even after he is ordered to turn in his badge and resign from his post, swears to find Larry Gordon and seek vengeance.
Debby, whose face is burned when Stone splashes a pot of hot coffee on her face during one of his outbursts, takes refuge with Bannion who has evacuated his house after his wife's death and moved into a hotel.
Deeply angry and despondent that half of her face has been burned with an ugly scar, Debby is a woman with nothing to lose. And since she knows the inside score, she takes matters into her own hands by first killing the smug Mrs. Duncan who was certain that she would live on easy street for the rest of her life. Did she get that one wrong.
Then Debby leads Bannion both to Larry Gordon and Vince Stone.
The final confrontation between Bannion and Stone takes place at Stone's penthouse with a breath taking night view of skyscrapers lit up like Christmas trees.
Debby achieves the closure she seeks by burning Vince's faces also with a pot of hot coffee before Vince shoots her lethally. After the mandatory gunfight at the terrace, Bannion captures Stone alive.
Since Sgt. Duncan's hidden letter was the collateral for Mrs. Duncan's life, once she is dead the letter is revealed per her instructions and Lagana and all his men are rounded up in a hurry.
In the last scene Bannion is reinstated to his job as a police detective with integrity and welcomed back in his office with the warm admiration of his colleagues and subordinates.
But what happens to the sold-out police commissioner Higgins and his boss Lt. Wilks is not too clear by the end of the film. Seems like the former, a political appointee, is also sacked but Lt. Wilks survives his checkered past and the ordeal. Such is life.
The production values in this film is inferior as would be expected from a movie shot in 1953. Debby's burn scar for example is a funny sheet of glue pasted to her left cheek and it makes one wonder how primitive the state of make-up artistry was back in those days. But Glen Ford and Gloria Grahame display a nuanced sensitivity and credible approach to their characters.
The story line is not too bad either, especially for film-noir fans like myself.
This classic rates a 7 out of 10.
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