The Big Heat movie review & film summary (1953)

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."

She always seems a little unstrung in "The Big Heat," as if she knows she's in danger and is trying to kid herself that she isn't. The Marvin character can be brutal to women; he hits one in a nightclub, and she tells Bannion that he hit her, too, "but most times, it's a lot of fun. Expensive fun."

Intriguing, how she half-tries to seduce him in his fleabag hotel room: "You're about as romantic as a pair of handcuffs. Didn't you ever tell a girl pretty things? You know, she's got hair like the west wind, eyes like limpid pools, and skin like velvet?"

Lee Marvin made a scary foil for her, with his long, lean face and his ugly-handsome scowl. If Alexander Scourby's mob boss seems like a writer's conceit, Marvin's character brings real menace into the picture, coldly and without remorse. The scene with the scalding coffee has become so famous that you forget it happens off-screen.

Afterward, when the bandaged Debby turns to Bannion for protection, she bravely still tries to keep up her act: "I guess the scar isn't so bad -- not if it's only on one side. I can always go through life sideways."

On the surface, "The Big Heat" is about Bannion's fearless one-man struggle against a mob so entrenched that the police commissioner is a regular at Marvin's poker game. But if that were its real subject, it would be long and flat and dry.

The women bring the life into it, along with Lee Marvin. We add up the toll. Lucy Chapman, the B girl who loved the suicidal cop and is betrayed by Bannion. Bannion's wife, who trusted him to protect her. And Debby, who likes him and maybe feels sorry for him, and gets her face scarred as a result, and then is sent to do his errand for him. After he explains to her how the widow's death will destroy the mob, he quietly mentions that he himself almost killed Bertha an hour ago, planting the seed. (Before she kills the widow, Debby stays in character: "We should use first names, Bertha. We're sisters under the mink.")