To date, I cannot recall any film noir that lulled me into such a false sense of ho-hummery as The Big Heat. One kind of has to wonder what the game is all about for the first 20-30 minutes or so; it just seems like a crime drama. A cop (right?) has killed himself, but something is most certainly awry. And, oh, it's not so bad: the cop investigating the (potential) suicide goes back to the placid homestead at 5 o'clock anyway. The baddies and the riffraff do their business in the night, and the good guys clean up by the light of day. Eventually, however, reality comes crashing in quite hard and we realize that The Big Heat, for its weight in dark, misanthropic, post-war gloom, is not to be fucked with. Not at all.
This due in large part (thought not the largest part) to Lee Marvin's Vince Stone. One can basically take Liberty Valance, trade in his spurs for a fedora, and drop him into the high-contrast, duplicitous milieu that is the urban landscape of film noir to get an idea. Marvin, as Stone, is possessed of an intractable temper so powerful as to literally make me (at least) nervous as a viewer. Each scene featuring Marvin is characterized by a torturous uncertainty. This is no small matter; as aforementioned, The Big Heat seems to play with us a bit. If I were to describe a movie to you as a crime drama, questions of moral ambiguity and dehumanizing violence would not immediately come to the fore. But it is precisely through some of the actions of Stone that The Big Heat is transformed from simplistic to sinister. While from the strict perspective of chronology it is the vicious murder of Katie Bannion (Jocelyn Brando) which unhinges the film, Stone's dousing of Gloria Graham with scalding coffee—leaving her with severe burn scars on the better part of half her face—unnerves with potentially greater force. Better to be alive than dead, I guess, but there is a unique cruelty in purposeful disfigurement. Indeed, there is transgression and sin, and then there is sadism.
And yet for all this, Marvin (and moreover, Humphrey Bogart in general) cuts a less than intimidating figure under the shadow of Glenn Ford's David Bannion. Never mind the fact that Ford provides a complete schooling in skillful communication via body language (aided each time by a smart and never pandering close-up shot); the significance of his performance could lie simply in his outright denial of God midway through the film. In Western thought, we know God has been dead. In fact, it wasn't even Nietzsche who killed him; he was simply pointing out the fact that the murder had already taken place (maybe Machiavelli was the culprit—who knows?). So, when Bannion coldly rejects Hettrick's advice of seeing a priest, the death of God can now be the intellectual foundation of common men. Or, taken another way, it doesn't take a mind like Alyosha's to reject God. Thus, in film noir, the world has either denied or killed God, and Ford's David Bannion is sounding the horn. For who is Bannion, anyway? One can certainly not say that he is an unequivocal hero. Hettrick is to a degree right when he tells him, “You can't set yourself against the world and get away with it.” But maybe it is the grim view of film noir or at least Fritz Lang that even though one can't get away with it, it's the only choice he has.
The wickedness of Lee Marvin, the rebellion of Glenn Ford—these are what make The Big Heat an archetypal noir. While I do not intend to wrap up with the question of what makes a noir, I cannot help but contrast the brutality and violence of a movie like The Big Heat with the almost comical and cartoonish qualities of the The Maltese Falcon. Perhaps it's Bogart's over-acting and caricature (which I do not necessarily dislike), but to lump those two films together as embodying the genre is fallacious. Film noir is sinister and it is not cute. It need not resort to the performance-enhancing drugs of Sin City (again, which I do not necessarily dislike), but it is certainly not just about being hard-boiled and sharp-tongued. It is about a worldview, one in which morality is a hard sell because one need not be a philosopher to realize that God is dead.