When Austrian director Fritz Lang fled WWII Europe for America, there was a sea change in his style. Gone were the extreme touches of German Expressionism which had been the most distinctive aspect of such masterpieces as Metropolis. That isn’t to say he stopped making significant films when he started working within the Hollywood production system, but the darkness became less visual in nature and more of an undercurrent, something nefarious lurking under the contentedness of suburbia.
This made him well-suited for noir, and one of the best films in that genre is his The Big Heat from 1953. And like the change in his style, this movie especially struck me with the abrupt changes some characters suddenly display in their personality.
Glenn Ford is a police detective initially investigating the suicide of a colleague. There will eventually be several homicides related to this first death. Related to these, we will see more violence than I thought censors of the time would allow, including a character being permanently disfigured when a pot of boiling hot coffee is thrown in their face.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start back with that suicide. The picture opens just as a man seated at a desk has shot himself. Jeanette Nolan doesn’t look overly concerned as she descends the stairs, then opens and reads a note he left behind for the district attorney. She calmly calls wealthy gangster Alexander Scourby, but we don’t know the nature of that conversation at this point.
Nolan is one of the most duplicitous of the characters here and her performance is flawless and full of subtle nuances. The first couple of times Ford interviews her, she plays the fretful grieving widow. The ruse is dropped completely in their last scene together, after she has been instrumental in him getting kicked off the force. It is astonishing to see just how repellant this character really is. When police arrive just as Ford looks tempted to hit her, she says, “The sergeant will be leaving with you. I’m sorry, [smiling] ex-sergeant.”
Back in earlier, friendlier conversations, she tries to lead Ford astray with allegations of a vaguely defined illness her husband supposedly had, which she advised him to discuss with the police surgeon. If she was so concerned, it seems odd she told him to go to somebody we would now call a forensic examiner, instead of recommending he see his doctor. In a follow-up interview, her story changes to that of her husband having an affair with a Lucy Chapman, and this being one of a string of such dalliances: “In the time we were married, there were four Lucy Chapman’s” I think it would be hilarious if the other three women had actually been named Lucy Chapman, as that would have to be a very distinctive kink.
We will only meet Chapman once. Played by Dorothy Green, she tells Ford the deceased would never have committed suicide and that there was nothing wrong with his health. I hoped in vain she would elaborate on that, waxing about his stamina and ability to engage in positions which require great dexterity. She’ll be found dead the next day, with that police surgeon concluding she had been beaten and tortured before her body was tossed from a moving car. He also said it appeared to a sex crime, and it took a second for the penny to drop and I realized he was saying she had also been raped. Like I said, this is a dark and violent work, even if we don’t see some of that violence.
To my pleasant surprise, it is the death of Green which really gets Ford worked up. He’s angrier about what happened to this woman than he was about one of his own possibly being murdered, or at least being provoked into ending his own life. There is much talk from other cops about Green being a woman of low morals, as if that justifies her demise. Ford’s deeply punchable immediate superior (Willis Bouchey) adds to the detective’s statement of her being the deceased detective’s girl: “and, before that, the Army’s and Navy’s.” Fortunately, the tone of the movie is not in agreement with such sentiments.
Similarly dismissive remarks are made by an especially repellant bartender (Peter Whitney) at the club where Ford interviewed Green. This scene is another fascinating demonstration of a personality doing a sudden heel-turn. Initially, Whitney is deeply obsequious and saying so many vague things about “loose women” like Green that Ford says, “You should be doing radio commercials. Talking a lot and saying nothing.” After Ford leaves, Whitney immediately calls up his boss, the gangster Scourby, to report on the encounter. Only after hanging up does he discover the sergeant has been right around the corner the entire time and listening in. Instead of being embarrassed, Whiney completely drops his earlier ruse and is now smugly obstinate. Like Nolan, it is a tad creepy how completely and sudden his demeanor does a 180.
Back at police HQ, Ford is getting pushback from Bouchey and the commissioner (Howard Wendell) to stop investigating the case. It isn’t any surprise those two (and who knows how many others in the department) are on Scourby’s payroll. There are even four patrol officers providing around-the-clock protection at his mansion. Ford’s disdain of Bouchey when talking to wife Jocelyn Brando is a good take: “…that leaning tower of jelly”
Brando (sister of Marlon) is good here, though in a small role. At least she has more personality than many of the similar housewife roles of the time. We first see her making dinner for herself and Ford, yet she does little things that are intriguing, like take a sip of his pre-dinner whiskey and a pull off his cigarette when he has his hands full. These moments may not be much, but they are indicators of the increasing independence of women at the time.
Alas, the oasis of sanity Ford has at home with his wife and four-year-old daughter can’t last forever, and there is only so long the enemy can be kept outside the gates. A seemingly irrelevant moment I liked which foreshadows this is when he accidentally brings down the castle his daughter had been making from wooden blocks when he tries to add his own piece on top.
If Brando is a subtle indication of coming changes to domestic roles, Gloria Grahame is a giant neon sign and fireworks displaying announcing more headstrong women are about to take the stage. She’s cast as the girl of a violent henchman (Lee Marvin) in Scourby’s organization. Marvin is in the kind of role he excelled in at that time, so I’m amazed Grahame gets away with her behavior towards him as much she does.
We first see her answering a phone when Scourby calls and she calls out to Marvin in a mocking sing-song lilt: “It’s HIM-EMMM…” Then she bows in an exaggerated manner, and I was stunned to see her top has a wide open vertical slit from collar to waist. That is not common attire for a movie made in 1953. Then there’s this exchange between Marvin and Grahame when he arrives home unexpectedly: “You weren’t expecting somebody else, were you?” “You’ll do.” I also liked her line about her new perfume: “It’s something new. It attracts mosquitos and repels men.”
Grahame owns The Big Heat, even with such competition as Ford on the screen. It helps when one has as good of dialogue as this line she says when considering Ford’s bare-bones hotel room: “Say, I like this: early nothing.” This character (and, to a lesser extent, those of Brando, Green and even Nolan) show a more forthright and confident femininity just around the corner. It wouldn’t be as radical and fast of a change as the many of the personality shifts here, but it would be similar to the extreme change in Lang’s work after fleeing Nazi Germany to work in the U.S. Grahame says of life as a gangster’s moll: “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me, rich is better.” I think Lang considered the compromises inherent in working the American studio system versus life under the Nazis and decided being alive was better.
Dir: Fritz Lang
Starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando
Watched all Powerhouse/Indicator blu-ray (region-free)