The Big Heat (1953)

 Fritz Lang's "The Big Heat"

By the 1950s, film noir had become an incredibly popular film genre. Stories full of crime, violence, and discovering the darkness that exists in society and in yourself. Many believed that film noirs were directly influenced by the films of Fritz Lang. After all, Lang was dubbed the 'Master of Darkness' by the British Film Institute. Although Lang had dived into noir films with works like The Woman in the Window and Scarlett Street, he had not conformed to the traditional aesthetic that noir films typically employed. His 1953 film, The Big Heat, was no different. Even so, many consider The Big Heat to be one of the most efficiently executed noir films of all time. The subject matter and plot construction is a blueprint form of what film noir is supposed to represent. Despite this, Lang took this well-known format and turned it on its head, both with his visually plainness and his seemingly victorious ending.

The protagonist, Dave Bannion, is a homicide detective at the Kenport Police Department. He has a wife and a daughter, a nice middle-class home, and great relationships with the people in his life. He begins to investigate the suicide of a fellow officer, Tom Duncan. It seems like an open and shut case of suicide before a mysterious woman named Lucy Chapman contradicts the statements made by Duncan's widow, Bertha. After providing this information, Lucy is found dead, covered in cigarette burns, and raped. On top of this, Bannion's boss, Lieutenant Ted Wilks instructs him to stop looking into alternatives to suicide. After Bannion ignores his captain's orders, he begins to receive threatening calls at his home. His wife convinces him to keep investigating and not be bullied. Bannion confronts local mob boss Mike Lagana, the man people are too scared to stand up to, who he discovers is involved with the murder, and has all the police in his pocket. After confronting him, Bannion's wife dies in a car bomb explosion. He renounces his duties as a police officer and decides to investigate the case on his own. This leads him to Lagana's second in command, Vance Stone. After seeing Bannion stand up to Stone in a bar, Debby, Stone's girlfriend, goes with Bannion back to his apartment. She provides him the information that one of Stone's associates, Larry Gordon, arranged the planting of the bomb in Bannions' car. Bannion finds and confronts Gordon, as Gordon admits to the car bombing. Not only this, he reveals that Duncan's widow, Bertha, has documents which would incriminate Stone and Lagana's criminal activities. Bertha is using the documents as a way to blackmail Lagana for her own safety. Bannion restrains himself from killing Gordon, but instead spreads the word that Gordon confessed to him, leading to Gordon's death. Bannion then confronts Bertha, almost killing her as well. She tells him that if she's killed, the documents will automatically be released. Instead, Bannion gets Debby to do his dirty work. Debby, who was scalded in her face with hot coffee by Stone is now bitter and violently angry. Debby kills Bertha, and gets her revenge on Stone by throwing scalding hot coffee in his face before he kills her. Debby dies in Bannions arms, and the evidence against Lagana is now discovered. Bannion is back at the police force resuming his duties.

Production for the film was rushed, shooting for cheap with black and white and the boxy, old fashioned standard Academy aspect ratio. Lang is efficient and economic with his direction, far less expressive than his earlier German work. He does not indulge himself with visual expression or unnecessary shots. Even though the plot is directly lifted from the standard film noir outline, Lang inverts film noir by having the violence and corruption happen not in shadow or dark alleyways, but in well lit apartments. Lang felt that "the more the audience is absorbed in the story and the more they forget the camera angles, the sly tricks of direction, and the director's 'touch,' the better the picture is." Now having spent over 15 years in the Hollywood studio system, Lang embraces classic Hollywood film grammar, a contemporary mode the audience was used to seeing. The result looks plain, forcing the viewer to take what they're seeing at face value. With The Big Heat, there is no elaborate camerawork and no grand expressionism, only meticulously staged and arranged mise-en-scene for symbolic understanding of the story. Many might believe that this limits what a director could do, however, in the hands of a master like Lang, meaning and understanding is always in reach. For example, some of the subtle symbolic representation used in the film: When Lt. Wilks orders Bannion to lay off Duncan, he does so while washing his hands in the washroom, as if washing his hands from any responsibility, absolving himself. Another example is when Bannion goes looking for the bomb maker at the junkyard. The visual graveyard of vehicle carcasses forshadows Katie's demise at the hands of the car bomb. Despite the traditional Hollywood visual style, Lang's expertise allows him to still tell a visually relevant story.

With The Big Heat, it becomes clear that the idealistic domesticity Bannion is accustomed to in the beginning is propped by a tainted and corrupt foundation. Bannion is able to take down this corrupt system, but at the cost of his domestic paradise. This is a common trope of the film noir, as the protagonist realizes throughout the story that the safety and comfort he is accustomed to is directly linked to dishonorable regulators. In order for the protagonist to take down this societal corruption, he must sacrifice his own idealistic and comfortable environment. Thus comes the question of one's own moral virtue, as most of the protagonists of the film noir have a 'hero complex' that enables them to continue with their own destruction. This is equally true of The Big Heat, as everyone who chooses to stand against the moral corruption has tragic consequences. Lucy, who provides Bannion with information about the dead cop, is brutally molested and murdered. Bannion's wife, Katie, convinces him to keep going, telling him to, "go ahead and lead with your chin." After doing so, she dies violently in a car bomb. Debby, who goes off with Bannion for the way he stood up to Stone, gets horribly burned, scarred, and even murdered. Bannion, who is the protagonist of this morally virtuous quest, has everything ripped from him save his daughter. However, it is the women, most notably, who receive the more disturbing of fates. The world that is inhabited in the film is a world not safe for women, especially women who stand up for themselves. This idealistic domesticity is actually a way to suppress women through oppression and violent control. When the women reject this, they get the most brutal of consequences. However, perhaps this is why the women act out. In most film noirs, the 'femme fatale' represents a woman gaining her independence by 'fighting fire with fire' and throwing the violence they receive back at the misogynist men in the story (to tragic consequences). It is the men who perpetuate the corruption for their own control in their society, or else suffer the same consequences. In The Big Heat, the male characters Bannion interacts with have an opportunity to help him, but choose to continue conforming to the corrupt structure, whether to retain their control or retain their safety. For example, the junkyard owner doesn't want to help Bannion out of fear of his own family's safety, saying, "I have a wife and kid too, you know." 

With his typical process on formal aesthetic choices, Lang made Bannion a symbol of the American everyman, represented by an ideal world clashing with the realities of a disturbing, morally corrupt world. However, in the end, Bannion becomes victorious by allowing others, like Debby, to sacrifice their own moral code, leaving his clean. The question then becomes, 'what is more morally corrupt: sacrificing your own moral code to bring an end to corruption; or using others to take the heat so that you don't get your hands dirty to bring about the same desired result?' Bannion continuously puts others in harm's way to protect his own sense of moral purity. But doesn't that make him directly responsible for the carnage? He uses the junkyard woman to verify Larry Gordon by making her knock on his door, he lures Debby back to his apartment for more information even if he knows she will be brutally punished for it, and he slyly convinces Debby to kill Bertha just so he won't stain his own moral purity. What's dark about this film is that there doesn't seem to be any sort of purity anywhere to be found, even in those fighting the corrupt system. Was Debby more morally courageous by taking matters into her own hands, even if it meant dirtying them? 

In the end, we do not see Bannion reunited with his daughter with a typical Hollywood 'happy ending.' Instead, he is back at the police precinct heading out to investigate a hit-and-run. He walks by a poster with a man rolling up his sleeves, which reads, "Give blood." Perhaps this is Lang telling us that battling the darkness of the world requires sacrifice, even giving up your own life. But even if Bannion did lose everything, he did not give up his life - it was the women of the film who were sacrificed, while Bannion just replaced the snake's head. His last lines are even, "keep the coffee hot," an obvious reference to Debby being burned by scalding coffee. Perhaps Bannion is just going to take the role of the men who came before him. After all, his American idealism in the beginning becomes desecrated by a vile world. Perhaps the ending reads as, 'good cop overtakes corrupt system,' but the ending actually appears darker: a good cop becomes blind to his own moral corruption. This ending paints an incredibly cynical view of America - a world of violence and deceit creating stability for an idealistic middle-class America, while pushing against this viciousness takes everything from you while turning you into the same amoral beast you despise. What the most troubling thing about the film, however, is that Bannion believes that he has not stooped to the level of his enemies by committing murder, remaining the pure 'hero' who does not corrupt himself morally. What's troubling about this is that although he himself did not murder, he convinced others to do it for him, making him no different than Lagana, who operated from behind a desk, instructing his vast crime syndicate to enact violence and brutality (leaving himself clean as well). The Big Heat is a film noir as black as they come, thanks to Lang. It demonstrates how America has become convinced of its own heroism, not realizing how delusional we are in the face of our own moral code.