Stream it:
|
Own it:
|
With: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Alexander Scourby, Lee Marvin, Jeanette Nolan, Peter Whitney, Willis Bouchey, Robert Burton, Adam Williams, Howard Wendell, Chris Alcaide, Michael Granger, Dorothy Green, Carolyn Jones
|
Written by: Sydney Boehm, based on a "Saturday Evening Post" serial by William P. McGivern
|
Directed by: Fritz Lang
|
MPAA Rating: Unrated
|
Running Time: 89
|
|
Date: 10/13/1953
|
|
|
|
Coffee Break
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
The Big Heat is generally recognized as one of Fritz Lang's strongest pictures from his American period. Glenn Ford plays a detective whose wife (Jocelyn Brando) is killed after he pokes his nose too far into a local gangster's business. Lee Marvin co-stars as a nasty thug in charge of funny business and Gloria Grahame all but steals the picture as his smart-aleck girlfriend. The most famous scene has Marvin pitching a pot of hot coffee into Grahame's face, but the most powerful scene shows Ford at home enjoying his family life for a good five minutes before an explosion ends his wife's life -- Lang at his cruelest.
The Criterion Collection released The Big Heat on Blu-ray and 4K in the summer of 2025. (Twilight Time previously released it on Blu-ray, but in two limited editions that are long out of print.) It's a wicked piece of filmmaking, presented as if it were a straightforward detective story, but riddled with corruption and rancid with evil. It's a great film, one of the truly dark films noir. The black-and-white transfer is crisp and nicely contrasted, and the audio track is uncompressed monaural. Film-noir experts Alain Silver and James Ursini provide a new commentary track. Other bonuses include a new video essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme, about the women in the film; audio interviews with Lang, conducted by film historian Gideon Bachmann and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich; interviews with filmmakers Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese, and a trailer. There are also optional English subtitles. Author Jonathan Lethem provides the liner notes essay.
|
