cult film freak: GLENN FORD, LEE MARVIN & GLORIA GRAHAME IN 'THE BIG HEAT'

Title: THE BIG HEAT Shown: Glenn Ford Year: 1953 Rating: *****

On posters for Fritz Lang's classic film noir THE BIG HEAT there's what looks like an impassioned couple raging with sensuality in Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, which is misleading since neither care about each other within most of the story, and yet, perhaps no other actor and actress have ultimately shared so much energy and chemistry on screen...

She's the beautiful, animated moll of chief gangster's thug Vince, played by Lee Marvin, who, before his days of tough anti-heroes, played neurotic, borderline sociopath hoods: and literally sizzles here as the title becomes too real for scene-stealing Graham, getting scalding coffee thrown on her face, punishment for having visited Ford's hidden cove apartment behind his back...

Gloria Grahame in THE BIG HEAT

The fact is, Gloria Grahame's Debby simply liked (in such a wonderfully childlike/flirtatious way) how Ford's vengeful widower cop Dave Bannion stood up to love/hate boyfriend Lee Marvin.. and before that mob boss Alexander Scourby, as deadpan lethal as Marvin's unhinged crazy...

And between these two is shifty Adam Williams, technically the worst antagonist of the lot: the "thief" (as Ford calls all the villains) having set up a hit for Ford that happened instead to his wife, played by Jocelyn Brando...

A questioning Glenn Ford from THE BIG HEAT

First-act dinner sequences with her initially happy, workingman-detective husband feel a bit contrived, early-50's dated and sometimes over-written compared to the rest of a naturally progressed "bad cop" thriller...

Where Ford, either questioning widow-with-a-secret Jeanette Nolan, more goons including a slimy bartender and that same joint's b-girl, or the entire police station... paid-off or otherwise... is equally intense, uncompromising and yet completely vulnerable in a tour-de-force performance (Grahame as well) that's rarely been equaled in the crime genre.