Retrospective: The Big Heat (Patreon)

Fritz Lang's The Big Heat is an early Cold War thriller, the work of a man who's lived in multiple crumbling power structures. The film envisions a society held together by petty ambitions and stupidity rather than a brilliantly engineered conspiracy. If one piece of the conspiracy in this movie shifts slightly, the whole thing comes crumbling down.

The Big Heat is meticulously constructed, pacing its reveals well. It doesn't fall into the trap of Evil Geniuses Control the World. Its power structure of capitalists, bureaucrats and dirty cops is a loose one, where the culprits are only narrowly on the same page. We see the conspiracy through the eyes of one renegade cop (whose character arc sets the template for the edgy police movies of the Seventies and Eighties) whose life slowly crumbles as he applies pressure to the 1%. It's meticulous, clever, and fun.

Gloria Grahame's character is the heart of the movie, and also emblematic of The Big Heat's flaws. The movie suffers from characteristic noir misogyny, with women only filling the roles of Doting Housewife and Avaricious Sloth. Grahame's character falls into the latter category, but she's also the most compelling character in the picture. When her life of luxury falls apart, she snaps, yanking the chain that's held the conspiracy in place, setting in motion a domino effect that brings down the whole plan. In a world of misogyny, she gets to be the air-headed dame who brings about drastic change. And couldn't we all afford to be that?