Rachel Ward, remembered for The Thorn Birds on TV, creates a wounded and drifting Faye, a woman without hope or purpose, her beautiful face rising bravely to a world of those too exhausted or damaged to be moved by it. The precise evolution of her feelings during the final scene is crucial, but I was also touched by her tenderness in earlier scenes; she plays a kind woman who has been deposited into an ugly situation by the inertia and hopelessness of alcoholism. As for Bruce Dern, there is a calculation in the way the movie denies him a life outside the immediate plot. Yes, we get a glimpse of an associate or two at long range, but here is a man who functions for Collie and Faye only in terms of his need to use them. Uncle Bud, who is nobody’s uncle and probably not named Bud, projects the patient intelligence of a man who can convince you of one thing and himself of another.
That ambivalence is the essence of Thompson’s novel and Foley’s film: It begins with exhaustion and despair, stirs itself into half-hearted evil, and then in a final desperate sequence finds barely enough heroism to bring itself to a stop again. I have seen After Dark, My Sweet four times, and it only deepens with the retelling.
The Big Heat
NO MPAA RATING, 89 m., 1953
Glenn Ford (Dave Bannion), Gloria Grahame (Debby Marsh), Jocelyn Brando (Katie Bannion), Alexander Scourby (Mike Lagana), Lee Marvin (Vince Stone), Jeannette Nolan (Bertha Duncan). Directed by Fritz Lang and produced by Robert Arthur. Screenplay by Sydney Boehm, based on the serial in the Saturday Evening Post by William P. McGivern.
Glenn Ford plays a straight-arrow police detective named Bannion in Fritz Lang’s Big Heat (1953)—unbending, courageous, fearless. He takes on the criminals who control the politics in his town and defeats them. One of his motives is revenge for the murder of his wife, but even before that happens he has an implacable hatred for the gang headed by Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) and his right-hand man Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). “Thieves,” he calls them, preferably to their faces. He is the good cop in a bad town.
That at least is the surface reality of the film. But there is another level coiling away underneath, a subversive level in which Lang questions the human cost of Bannion’s ethical stand. Two women lose their lives because they trust Bannion, and a third is sent to her death because of information Bannion gives her. That may not have been his conscious intention, but a cop as clever as Bannion should know when to keep his trap shut.
The film is as deceptive and two-faced as anything Lang ever made, with its sunny domestic tranquility precariously separated from a world of violence. Bannion thinks he can draw a line between his loving wife and adorable child, and the villains he deals with at work. But he invites evil into the lives of his wife and two other women by his self-righteous heroism. Does it ever occur to him that he is at least partly responsible for their deaths? No, apparently it doesn’t, and that’s one reason the film is so insidiously chilling; he continues on his mission oblivious to its cost. Oh, he’s right, of course, that Lagana and Stone are vermin. But tell that to the women he obliviously sends into harm’s way.
He’s working on a case that begins with the suicide of a cop who was sick of being on the mob’s payroll. He questions Bertha, the cop’s widow (Jeanette Nolan), who says her husband killed himself because he was sick. Bannion doesn’t think her story smells right, and then is approached by Lucy (Dorothy Green), the cop’s mistress, who tells him the cop was in perfect health. Bannion unwisely tells Bertha what Lucy told him, she tells Lagana, and Lucy is dumped dead on a county road. If he suspects Bertha and half-believes Lucy, and Bertha is still alive, then she must be talking to the mob. Why didn’t Bannion suspect that? How naive can he be?
Bannion is told by his boss to lay off the case: “I got a call from upstairs.” That night his wife (Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister) gets a threatening telephone call, and Bannion is enraged. He walks into Lagana’s house, threatens him, and beats up his bodyguard. Does he think this might put his own family in danger? Apparently not, until a bomb goes off when his wife starts the car.
Within a few days, he threatens Vince Stone and orders him out of the bar where the mob hangs out. Stone’s girl Debby (Gloria Grahame), fed up with Stone, follows Bannion onto the street. He takes her to his hotel room, where they drink and he pumps her for information, and there is just a moment when he almost forgets he is a recent widower.
Debby was followed to the hotel, and when she returns to Stone, he throws a pot of boiling coffee into her face, in one of the most famous scenes in noir history. Her face half-covered by bandages, she escapes from the hospital and asks Bannion to protect her. He tells her that Bertha the widow has the goods on the mob, is being paid off by the week, and has arranged for the information to go to the papers if she dies.
Does he tell Debby this because he wants her to kill the widow? Does it even occur to him that she might, as a way of avenging the scars to her face? Does he expect that will lead to her own death? Of course not. In a passive-aggressive way, he blandly sets these women up for death. When the elderly, lame bookkeeper at a junkyard risks her life to give him information about his wife’s killer, he even persuades her to knock on the killer’s door so she can identify him. Dangerous? Yes, but, to Bannion, an acceptable risk—for her.
Fritz Lang (1890–1976) was one of the cinema’s great architects of evil. His Metropolis (1927) is one of the best of all silent films, but it was with M (1931), and Peter Lorre’s eerie performance as a child murderer, that he stared unblinking at pure malevolence. He fled Hitler and Germany and became a prolific director of Hollywood genre pictures—some competent, some masterpieces of film noir, the greatest The Big Heat. There is a kind of ironic pessimism in his work, undermining the apparent bravery of his heroes.
Glenn Ford plays a perfectly acceptable honest cop in The Big Heat. He can be quiet and contained and implacable, but that Bannion is for surface and show. When he gets angry, he’s capable of sudden violence—as when he nearly strangles two characters. The Big Heat advances dutifully with Bannion like a conventional police procedural until about the halfway point, when it takes fire with the performances of Lee Marvin and Gloria Grahame.
This is one of the inspired performances of Grahame, a legendary character who became known as “the Can’t Say No Girl,” and not just because she sang the song in Oklahoma! Her untidy personal life led to four marriages and many affairs; one of her husbands was the director Nicholas Ray, after she worked for him in In a Lonely Place (1950), and another was Ray’s son, Anthony. She won an Oscar for best supporting actress for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and should have won again the next year for The Big Heat, where her energy is the best reason to see the film.
There was something fresh and modern about Grahame; she’s always a little ditzy, as if nodding to an unheard melody. She was pretty but not beautiful, sassy but in a tired and knowing way, and she had a way of holding her face and her mouth relatively immobile while she talked, as if she was pretending to be well behaved. “It wasn’t the way I looked at a man,” she said. “It was the thought behind it.”