The Big Heat’s Resting Gun
Scenes of a resting gun open and close Fritz Lang’s vigilante film noir The Big Heat, but there are no silenced weapons of any sort in between.
The Big Heat Fritz Lang Criterion 1 July 2025
Fritz Lang’s career as a filmmaker is strewn with crime melodramas that stand as iconic examples of film noir. His vision is dark and fatalistic as he specializes in characters caught in what he called “nets of circumstance”. A 1953 masterpiece of brutality called The Big Heat is probably his most hard-hitting work in terms of delivering one jolt after another to the viewer.
The violence aroused some controversy in its day, and Britain gave the film an X rating. Today’s noir fans just call it a classic. The proof is on display in Criterion’s new Blu-ray.
The Big Heat opens with a close-up of a gun resting on a desk next to a decorative filigree on a pad. As the camera quietly pulls up and back, a right hand lifts the gun out of frame. When visual evidence of man and gun vanish from the screen, we hear the bang.
The back of the man’s upper torso falls forward onto a desk. He is surrounded by smoke that becomes especially visible on this 4K scan, just as many compositions throughout the film will surround characters in a cigarette haze symbolizing their moral fog. Everyone’s lives are going up in smoke.
In a shot of the stairs, a woman (Jeanette Nolan) rushes down in a nightgown and stands posed on the landing beside a grandfather clock. It is 3 o’clock, a precise hour of death. She looks frightened now, but she never will again, not even when someone makes moves to strangle her, not even when the scenario of The Big Heat circles around to bring her again to that desk, which she and the camera now approach smoothly as a cat.
A close-up of another detail on the desk reveals a police badge and an envelope addressed to the district attorney. With a new calm, the woman comes forward, opens the envelope, and reads through several pages rapidly. After closing the window blinds, she goes to the phone on her dead husband’s desk and makes a call.
It’s not to the police or the D.A. she’s calling. Speaking the first words of dialogue, she tersely summons “Mr. Lagana”. Straightening her back with authority, she snaps, “I know it’s late, wake him up. Tell him it’s Tom Duncan’s widow.”
Cutting to the other side of the call, we meet this Lagana (Alexander Scourby) in bed, and standing beside him in a robe is the man who answered the phone. He’ll be referred to as Lagana’s bodyguard, as good a word as any.
As noir scholars Alain Silver and James Ursini remark on Criterion’s commentary track, such is the era’s coding for the implication that something queer may be going on. To resolve doubts, Lagana will be shown as a worshipper of his late mother, who looks down from a painting in the study where he conducts business. To throw us off track with plausible deniability, he’ll also obsess over his beloved daughter’s debutante antics. Back to the other hand, he seems to be full of hints about how she should catch football players, as though living vicariously through her, but we get ahead of ourselves.
Film Noir Calling
The drinking game that would put you under the table soonest while watching The Big Heat would be to take a shot every time someone is on the phone. The narrative is structured by phone calls, which is also how all power is organized in the unnamed city. Some calls occur on screen, but many are only referenced, implied, or assumed. Someone is always calling someone who calls someone else, and things get done.
All calls lead to Lagana, who pulls most of the telephonic strings, and apparently, it’s an open secret that he’s the boss of a corrupt machine expressed through all levels of the police department, from the beat cops to the mysterious higher-ups. This is a very noir vision of imminent corruption.
Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame) is introduced answering a phone as she curls on a sofa, flashing her legs in a pose deliberately reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe’s small role in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and perhaps in a nod to the fact that Columbia couldn’t get her for the role. The kittenish, purse-mouthed, high-voiced Grahame was in the middle of her great years as a string of sexually aware, unapologetic “bad girls” whom the audience loves, from an Oscar-nominated role in Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947) to an Oscar-winning role in Vincente Minnelli‘s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) to the unrepentant “girl who cain’t say no” in Fred Zinnemann‘s Oklahoma! (1955).
On the phone, Debby shows her saucy sang-froid as she summons her rich, violent boyfriend to speak to his master. She makes mocking gestures of genuflection and says she likes to make her boyfriend jump. As played by Lee Marvin in his breakthrough role, he’s Vince Stone, easily one of the top five most vicious and sadistic hotheads in all noir.
In a fit of rage, he commits one act in particular that never fails to shock an audience and decisively turns the narrative, because it turns Debby from an insouciant shoulder-shrugging apologist who knows how she lives and says “It’s better to be rich” into a genuinely powerful, virtually unstoppable force whose dual character becomes embodied, like Batman’s False Face, into a “good” profile and a “bad” one. Her final gestures make me wonder if Akira Kurosawa used her as inspiration for Ran (1985).
As the commenters observe, and as critic Farran Smith Nehme elegantly reinforces in a visual essay, it’s not merely women who suffer in The Big Heat, it’s women who act most decisively and push the story forward at every turn, from the widow Duncan to untamable Debby to two different “B-girls” (Dorothy Green and Carolyn Jones) to a genuinely heroic older woman with a limp (Edith Evanson) who knows that nobody notices her. Then there’s third-billed Jocelyn Brando as Katie, a wife and mother described by her husband as a loving “Irish blow-top”, who also plays a pivotal role.
Katie’s husband is Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), nominally the heroic lead. He’s an honest cop and not a very good one. His honesty is the problem, as it’s inappropriate in this world. Where everyone else uses the phone, he runs around, figuratively making the wrong calls, blundering in like an alpha male butting heads with others and getting people killed. The Big Heat‘s trailer even blames him for the body count, yet he never kills anyone directly, even when he wants to.
Indeed, Dave Bannion is less a chick magnet than a death magnet, as he creates an aura of fatality around the lines of his web. He’s an homme fatale, a ball of anger and hatred at his helplessness in the system, the things that happen to him, and guilt over what he indirectly causes.
One through-line is Bannion’s redemption for his bull-headed and sexist assumptions; he recognizes that Debby is a good woman, and his wife would have liked her. In the scene where he stands in an empty house and his weary elder police partner advises him to see the chaplain for help with his hate, we see black shadows cross in the background. Is Bannion the wrath of God or the one suffering for society’s sins?
Silver and Ursini point out subtle religious references that dot The Big Heat, as well as references to the idea that the little people have to come forward and act, whether as voters or vigilantes. As seen in stories as diverse as M (1931), Fury (1936), and Hangmen Also Die (1943), Lang is very interested in vigilantes.
Fritz Lang’s Maximized Minimalism
Charles Lang’s black and white camera keeps gently pulling back, pushing in, or panning across, not in virtuoso flourishes but with quiet command at expertly staged scenes. Moments of expressionist lighting are subtle rather than lush with contrast. Lang’s late style tends to be flat, as Martin Scorsese observes in a bonus interview.
Lang seems to have developed an economy of staging under the threat of lower budgets, although he doesn’t have one with The Big Heat. Columbia’s production under Robert Arthur extends to a detailed world of sets populated with extras, and that creates a happy medium between his bare-bones approach and expressionist riches.
Novelist William P. McGivern was known for his cop stories, especially those of corruption and rogue cops. Three of his novels were turned into screenplays by crime reporter Sydney Boehm, who won an Edgar for The Big Heat. Seventy years have transformed viewers from a society that might recoil at its violence to one that might show it at Sunday school, yet the fact that certain scenes retain a startling impact testifies to the artistry of Lang and his colleagues.
My favorite extra on Criterion’s Blu-ray is Nehme’s analysis of the women’s roles. While themes and perceptions have evolved to the point where the commenters can declare that The Big Heat is “about toxic masculinity”, she asserts that the film presents a diverse world of women navigating through the sexist conventions, making things pop, settling the moral balance, and bringing down what Bannion calls “the big heat” over the corrupt city.
In one of Debby’s best lines, she tells Mrs. Duncan they should be first-name friends as “sisters under the mink”. Mrs. Duncan doesn’t go for it, but Debby never felt more right in her life. In one of The Big Heat‘s many echo or mirror shots, once again we see a gun at rest by itself.