The Big Heat

In the German Langs—Dr. Mabuse, The Spies, M—one can’t tell the cops from the robbers, and the director was no less cynical in his Hollywood noirs. In The Big Heat, Glenn Ford gives a fine performance of inward obsession as a police detective who crusades against organized crime and police corruption after his wife is killed by a car bomb. But the moral and magnetic center of the film is Gloria Grahame, who intelligently develops the two sides of the bad girl. Few films of the fifties or any period are more ruthless and uncompromising in their observation of violence in American society.