Combustible Celluloid Review - The Big Heat (1953), Sydney Boehm, based on a "Saturday Evening Post" serial by William P. McGivern, Fritz Lang, 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
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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
IMDB

The Big Heat (1953)

4 Stars (out of 4)

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.

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