This film has a reputation that may exceed its accomplishments. It is usually credited with bringing such familiar cinema noir themes as revenge, brutality, and pervasive corruption into domestic space. In other words, this film shows us a bit of the home life of both the hero (Detective Dave Bannion) and the villain (Mike Lagana). The entrance of violence into domestic space (the killing of Mrs Bannion), results in Dave Bannion going on a campaign of vengeance. He becomes or nearly becomes as violent and brutal and callous as his adversary, Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), Lagana’s muscle. Bannion proves to be lethal for the women he deals with. First he meets Lucy Chapman (Dorothy Green) in a bar; the next thing we know, Lucy has been tortured and killed. Then his wife (Jocelyn Brando – yes, Marlon’s sister) gets blown up in the Bannion car. Then Debbie Marsh (Gloria Grahame) has a pot of coffee flung in her face, and later her boyfriend shoots her. And we must not forget Mrs. Duncan (Jeanette Nolan) who receives a few bullets courtesy of Debbie Marsh, who thinks she is doing Bannion and the law a favour. We might conclude that Bannion’s reluctant respect for Debbie saves him from shooting Vince and becoming as murderous as the bad guys. In other words, this film shows how deep violent instincts are in the human psyche.
But how can we relate the film to HUAC and the mood of the early 1950s? What we need to look at is the background to the story – and to the infiltration of the public into the private.
1. Background: by “background,” I mean the environment Bannion navigates. Remember the paranoia of films such as Rear Window and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and remember the pervasive corruption in films such as On the Waterfront and Pickup on South Street, and remember the emphasis on individual responsibility in 12 Angry Men. In The Big Heat we have a world in which corruption runs deep. We know that Lagana runs things. We have scenes in which we see Vince Stone playing cards with the Police Commisioner. Remember in On the Waterfront, Johnny Friendly is not the head honcho. In Kazan’s film, we have a mysterious Mr. Upstairs, a faceless man who lives in a posh place with a butler. The point is that corruption is top down, rather than bottom up. This is the world as Senator McCarthy saw it – a place in which even the highest places have been infiltrated by the “bosses.” No place, not the police and not the city government is free from corruption.
2. Public and Private: in the world pervaded with paranoia, no place is immune to invasion by the forces of evil. In The Big Heat, we see Bannion’s home life in all its ideal purity. Husband and wife share things – cigarettes, scotch, beer, a steak, washing up. They have what appears to be an ideal marriage. They banter. They entertain. They go to the movies. But this apparently safe and pure private life is vulnerable to the ugliness from outside. When Dave Bannion asks his wife what the man on the phone said, she replies that he knows the four letter words she listened to. Then Bannion goes to Lagana’s house while Lagana’s daughter is having a party. Lagana says he will not have talk of murder and crime in his house. But we see murder and violence in domestic space throughout this film. The Bannion car blows up in their driveway. The shooting of Bertha Duncan takes place in her house. The scalding of Debbie takes place in her domicile. No place is secure. Even to make his brother-in-law’s place safe for his daughter, Bannion has to agree to have four army buddies stand guard with guns in their belts.
In other words, this film is not directly about HUAC or Communists or surveillance (although we do have shots of police surveillance) or paranoia. But it does fit neatly into the paranoid sensibility of the early 50s. We might recall that Fritz Lang left Germany in 1933 because he felt he could not work to support Hitler’s regime. In other words, he could not support restrictions to basic human freedoms. The Big Heat is a film that examines how corruption and violence lead to more violence. The title of the film evokes the Cold War in its nod to nuclear heat. The Big Heat is what follows a nuclear blast, and it is pervasive spreading far beyond the epicenter of the blast. When corruption begins, it spreads like a virus or like a big heat. We might begin to see the relevance of the heat in such films as 12 Angry Men and Rear Window. The war may be “cold,” but it may heat up. In the film, we have the fire that tears through the Bannion car after the blast, and the scalding heat of the coffee to remind us of just how hot it can be when corruption is everywhere.
Another connection with the paranoia of the 1950s is apparent in the duality of so many of the characters. Note when near the beginning of the film, Bertha Duncan sits in front of her three-paneled mirror in her bedroom, while downstairs the police are going over the scene of her husband’s apparent suicide. When Bannion enters the bedroom, we see a double reflection of him in the same mirror. The moment is crucial because it shows us visually that both Mrs. Duncan and Bannion are two people. They have their exterior, public faces, and they have their interior private selves. Mrs. Duncan is the grieving widow and she is also the blackmailing black widow. Bannion is the upright family man, and he is also the vengeful cop capable of almost anything, even strangling Mrs. Duncan. The duplicity of other characters is also apparent: the Police Commissioner is obviously on the take, Lagana has his good citizen side and his gangster side, Debbie Marsh is both a good-time party girl and a sentimental dame. We do have straight-arrow cops such as Wilks (Willis Bouchey), and thorough-going creeps such as Vince Stone, but the main characters all have their double-sidedness. We might reflect on the paranoia of the McCarthy years when people feared that “they were among us.” Even the person next door could be on the wrong side of the law, and we might never know because he or she looks so normal.
