The Big Heat

The Big Heat is a 1953 crime thriller about Dave Bannion, a homicide detective in an unnamed American city. When a fellow officer is found dead, the case is quickly written off as a suicide, but Bannion is not convinced. A woman claiming to have been close to the dead man tells him the officer was in good health, which suggests the death was not what it seemed. She is murdered soon afterwards, and Bannion's suspicions turn towards Mike Lagana, the gangster who effectively runs the city. As he keeps digging, he is warned off the investigation and pulled from his duties, and the pressure on him and his family escalates into violence.

The film was directed by Fritz Lang, the twenty-first of the twenty-four features he made in chronological order, following Clash by Night and preceding Human Desire. Sydney Boehm wrote the screenplay and Robert Arthur produced it for Columbia Pictures. Glenn Ford plays Bannion, with Gloria Grahame as Debby Marsh, Jocelyn Brando as his wife Katie, Alexander Scourby as Lagana and Lee Marvin as Vince Stone. The credited cast runs to fifty-three names, and the film runs eighty-nine minutes.

The Big Heat holds a critics' rating of 8.6 out of 10 from seventy reviews, noticeably higher than its audience score of 7.7 out of 10 on TMDB from over five hundred votes, a gap that suggests critics have rated it more strongly than general viewers.