One of the best crime films Fritz Lang made within the studio system, the tough, unsentimental procedural The Big Heat charts the erosion of several American bedrocks: the family, the justice system, democracy itself. Glenn Ford's good cop Dave Bannion refuses to drop suicide and murder cases that point toward widespread corruption on his own force; when his enemies start striking close to home, he merely makes his investigation personal. There's an argument that journo-turned-director Sam Fuller would have punched up the source material (a serial in the Saturday Evening Post) further still, but Lang's film retains a newspaperman's sense of the scope of this story, and of the scale of the racketeering, extending sideways to scenes with Bannion's nervy superiors and upwards to a crime boss with political aspirations. Everybody remembers an unhinged Lee Marvin, as the kingpin's chief heavy, scalding nice Gloria Grahame with a pot of coffee (an act of violence kept off-screen, but still shocking), but Ford gives one of his most underrated performances: a trenchcoated knight less ironised than a Spade or a Marlowe, he's also able to play the cardigan-wearing familyman in a way Bogart, Mitchum or (especially) Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer almost certainly couldn't.
The Big Heat is available on DVD through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
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