The Big Heat: Lang, the Coffee, and the Corruption

A police officer shoots himself at his desk. His widow finds the body, reads the note he left, and before she telephones anyone she makes a call to a man named Mike Lagana. That is the first two minutes of The Big Heat, and everything you need to know about the city is in it. Fritz Lang made the film at Columbia in 1953 from Sydney Boehm’s screenplay, adapting William P. McGivern’s serial, and it is the most violent studio picture of its year and one of the most controlled.

Its reputation now rests almost entirely on a single act of brutality involving a pot of coffee, which is unfortunate, because the coffee is the least of it and because the film’s most interesting decision is that you never see the thing happen. Lang keeps the worst of The Big Heat just outside the frame, consistently and by design, and the result is a picture that feels far nastier than anything it actually shows you.

The cop who will not be managed

Sergeant Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) catches the suicide. It should be paperwork. He talks to the dead man’s widow, Bertha Duncan (Jeanette Nolan), who is composed in a way that does not fit, and then to a bar hostess who tells him a different story about the dead man’s life, and within a day Bannion has been telephoned at home by a superior and advised to leave it.

That call is the film’s real inciting incident. Ford plays Bannion’s first act as a decent, slightly dull family man — a house in the suburbs, a wife called Katie (Jocelyn Brando) he genuinely likes, a small daughter, a life of unremarkable contentment that Lang films with a warmth that should make you nervous immediately. What tips Bannion over is not the crime. It is being handled. He is a man with an ordinary sense of his own competence, and the discovery that his department is an arm of Mike Lagana’s business organisation offends him at a level below reason.

Alexander Scourby plays Lagana as the film’s most quietly appalling idea: a mob boss who lives in a beautiful suburban house, with a portrait of his late mother on the wall and his teenage daughter’s party going on upstairs, and who is offended when Bannion swears in his home. He does not run a gang. He runs a firm, with a lawyer and a police commissioner and a set of manners, and the film’s contempt for him is that he is respectable and knows it.

Lee Marvin is Vince Stone, Lagana’s enforcer, and this is the performance that made him. Marvin plays Vince as a grinning, athletic, casually sadistic man who enjoys his work in a specifically social way — he hurts people in front of other people, at parties, for the atmosphere. He is thirty years old here and already fully formed.

Gloria Grahame walks in

And then there is Debby Marsh. Gloria Grahame plays Vince’s girlfriend, and the film belongs to her from the moment she arrives.

Debby is a comic performance for the first half. She is a bored, funny, quick young woman living in a penthouse she likes very much, entirely aware of what Vince is and entirely determined not to think about it. Grahame gives her a lightness that is completely at odds with the film around her — she is amused by things, she teases Bannion, she talks about mink coats with a self-mockery that suggests a much smarter woman having a nice time on purpose. Her deal with herself is legible in every scene: she is not asking where the money comes from, and she has decided that the not-asking is a fair price.

What makes the performance great is that Grahame plays the shallowness as a decision rather than a limitation. There is somebody home behind it, watching, and the film’s second half is what happens when that somebody is finally forced to arrive.

Why it works: Lang keeps it off screen

Here is the craft argument, and it is the reason the film survives while the decade’s other syndicate pictures have faded.

Lang stages the atrocities out of view. The suicide that opens the film is a hand, a gun and a cut. The single most famous act of violence in the picture happens with the camera on the wrong person, and we learn what has occurred from a scream and then from an aftermath. A later, decisive death occurs behind a closed door with the camera outside it. Charles Lang photographed the film in a flat, bright, almost televisual grey, and the compositions are unremarkable on purpose: there is no expressionist shadow-play here, none of the German architecture of Lang’s M. The city looks like a city.

The effect of that combination — plain images, withheld violence — is that the audience does the work. You are made complicit in the imagining, and what you imagine is worse than any 1953 censor would have permitted anyone to show. Lang understood the arithmetic of the Production Code better than almost any director working in America: a restriction on depiction is not a restriction on horror, and a man who cannot show you a burning body can make you build one.

The other structural stroke is the film’s treatment of domesticity. Lang spends real time on Bannion’s kitchen, his wife’s cooking, a bedtime story, a bottle of beer. It is the only tenderness in the film, and it is placed early and given weight, and it exists so that the film can take it away. Lang was not sentimental about families. He was extremely clear about what an audience will forgive a man for doing after one has been removed from him.

The film’s actual argument

The Big Heat is usually described as a revenge picture, and Bannion’s rampage is certainly the engine. What the film is really about is that Bannion accomplishes almost nothing on his own.

Watch what he actually achieves. He shouts at people. He goes to Lagana’s house and is thrown out. He resigns, hands in his badge, and continues as a private citizen with a gun, and the syndicate treats him as an inconvenience rather than a threat. The men who run the city are barely disturbed by the angriest cop in America. Bannion’s fury is loud, righteous and structurally useless, and Lang films it with a distinct chill — Ford’s performance is one long clenched jaw, and the film never quite gives him the catharsis the genre owes him.

The institution turns out to be impregnable to a good man’s rage, and Lang’s most subversive decision is to go looking elsewhere for the thing that can actually reach it. Where he looks is the business of the last reel, and it is the reason the film is still argued about seventy years on. Lang leaves his hero holding his coat.

The shelf

For the collector, the essential neighbour is The Big Combo, made two years later, which takes the same premise — obsessed cop, untouchable syndicate boss, a woman in the middle — and answers it with pure expressionist style, John Alton’s light carving the dark into cathedral shapes. Put them together and you have the two available strategies for the mid-fifties crime film: Lewis and Alton go beautiful, Lang goes flat and lets the ugliness do it.

Within Lang’s own American work it pairs with While the City Sleeps, where the institution failing to function is a newsroom and nobody is willing to pay Bannion’s price, and with Scarlet Street, where the punishment arrives from inside a man’s head because no other authority is available. Lang’s American subject was always the same: the machinery is compromised, and the only justice left is personal, improvised and expensive.

Look forward and you find its children everywhere. Kiss Me Deadly two years later takes the brutality further and detonates the genre. And the revenge engine Lang builds here — a man who dismantles an organisation from the outside because the law will not — runs straight into Underworld U.S.A., where Samuel Fuller strips out the decency entirely, and on to Point Blank, where the syndicate has become a corporation and the avenger a ghost with a grievance.

My verdict, with the machinery below: The Big Heat is the best syndicate film of the 1950s, and its greatness lies in its refusal to enjoy itself. Everything the genre normally sells — the style, the shadows, the gangster’s glamour, the hero’s catharsis — Lang withholds, and what is left is a plain, bright, ordinary city in which decent people are destroyed by polite men, and in which the righteous fury of a good man turns out to be the least useful thing in the story. It is available in a good Indicator edition and turns up regularly in repertory. Go in cold if you can.

Spoilers below

Katie Bannion is murdered by a car bomb intended for her husband, and Lang stages it exactly as described above: Bannion is at the door, the engine turns over, and the camera stays on his face. He runs to a fireball. The suddenness is the point, and so is the timing — it arrives before the film’s midpoint, and the sweetness of the domestic scenes has been engineered specifically to make this unsurvivable.

The coffee comes later. Debby, having been seen talking to Bannion, is accused by Vince of informing. He picks up a pot of scalding coffee and throws it in her face, and Lang cuts away before it lands. What we see next is Marvin’s face, and then a hospital, and then Debby with half her head bandaged. Grahame plays the rest of the film with one side of her face ruined and the other untouched, and she uses it — turning her good profile to people, hiding the bad, delivering the film’s best line about having two faces.

Then Debby does what Bannion cannot. She goes to see Bertha Duncan, the widow from the first scene, and learns the mechanism that has protected the whole syndicate: Duncan’s suicide note names Lagana and his organisation, and Bertha has been holding it as insurance, drawing blackmail money and keeping it unpublished. Bannion has known this for an hour of screen time and cannot act, because he is a police officer, because killing her would make him what he is fighting, and because the film has been very careful to establish that he will not cross the line. Debby has no such problem. She shoots Bertha dead, which releases the note to the coroner and destroys Lagana. Then she goes to the penthouse and throws a pot of coffee in Vince Stone’s face, which is the film’s only moment of pure satisfaction and lasts about three seconds.

Vince shoots her. She dies on the floor of the flat with Bannion beside her, and the scene Lang gives them is the film’s finest: she asks him to talk about his wife, and he does, describing Katie at length to a dying woman he barely knows, and Debby listens to a story about the kind of life she was never going to have and then stops breathing. Grahame won her Academy Award for another picture that year. She should have won it for this.

The last shot is deliberately hollow. Bannion is reinstated, sits at his desk in the squad room, and takes a call about another case. Someone mentions coffee. He picks up his hat and goes to work. The syndicate has been broken, his wife is dead, the woman who actually did it is dead, and the machine that produced all of this is still there, running, with Bannion back inside it and answering the telephone.