Monday | April 22, 2002 7:00 pm

The Big Heat

Screening on Film

Directed by Fritz Lang.
With Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin.
US, 1953, 35mm, black & white, 90 min.

Generally considered Lang’s best postwar film, The Big Heat stars Glenn Ford as Dave Bannion, a police detective who wages a crusade against organized crime and police corruption. The campaign becomes a personal vendetta after Dave’s wife is killed by a car bomb. As in M, Lang portrays this violence suggestively yet forcefully, using close-ups, eliptical transitions, lighting, and decor to follow Bannion’s descent from bourgeois normality into a world of virulent cynicism and moral ambiguity. Few films of the fifties (or any period) are more uncompromising in their indictment of violence and corruption in American society.