Generally considered Lang's best post-war film, The Big Heat stars Glenn Ford as a police detective engaged in a personally vengeful crusade against organized crime and police corruption. Few films of the Fifties, or any period, are more ruthless and uncompromising in their observation of social violence in American society. “The world evoked (in The Big Heat) is closely akin to that of Raymond Chandler. The situation is classic: the unassuming crusader versus the high-class racketeer; the crusader operating alone; the racketeer manoeuvring his thugs (inside and outside the city police) from his guarded mansion in the snob section of town. Unlike Philip Marlowe (Chandler's protagonist), Dave Bannion is a professional cop; but his disrespect of persons soon gets him suspended, and his conduct shows the same doggedness, the same human fallibility, the same hunger after righteousness as the Chandler hero's. He challenges the racketeer and pays for it.... Glenn Ford plays this part with a deceptively casual charm that covers without concealing a real inward intensity. As the gay, incautious girlfriend of a vicious hoodlum, Gloria Grahame acts with brilliant wit and considerable subtlety; and all the way down the cast - of generally unfamiliar faces - the characterizations have a welcome individuality of line.” --Lindsay Anderson, Sight and Sound