The Big Heat

Colin McArthur

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780851703428
• eBook ISBN: 9781838718510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The Big Heat first appeared in 1953, towards the end of the film noir cycle that had begun in the early '40s. It was greeted in the United States and Britain as a successful but modest product of the Hollywood system, 'slickly written and directed' in the words of one critic. Only the extreme violence, as in the infamous scalding coffee scene, was singled out for special mention. Yet by the time the film was reissued in Britain in 1988 it had achieved undisputed classic status. How had this transformation come about? Colin McArthur takes 'The Big Heat 'as a case study in film criticism. He examines the film's changing critical fortunes under the influence of the so called auteur theory, and shows how other intellectual currents led to a reassessment of Lang's work in the 1970s. McArthur provides his own perceptive analysis of the film in the light of these revolutions in film criticism.

1

'THE BIG HEAT' AS NOVEL

William P. McGivern's novel was published in 1952. The current critical interest in the American crime novel is heavily weighted towards the 'classic' crime writers of the pre-war period and the 1940s, such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and James M. Cain, although critical attention is beginning to be paid to younger writers such as George V. Higgins. The growing critical interest has prompted better factual documentation of the field in the form of guides and encyclopaedias and it is here, rather than in the critical writing proper, that one can learn something about McGivern and his work.

Several of his novels have been adapted for the screen (Shield for Murder, 1951; Rogue Cop, 1954; Odds Against Tomorrow, 1957); and he has been a screenwriter in Hollywood (The Wrecking Crew, 1969; Brannigan, 1975) and in television, writing regularly for the Kojak series over the period 1973–77. Taking The Big Heat and two of McGivern's other novels adapted for the screen, Shield for Murder and Rogue Cop, one could produce an auteur study which would centre on the theme of police corruption and the blurring of distinctions between legality and criminality, also a recurrent theme in the work of Fritz Lang, who was to direct the screen adaptation of The Big Heat. Unlike Lang, however, McGivern seems to display a profound (often explicitly Christian) moral concern about the capacity of people to pass from legality to criminality, decency to brutality.

The Big Heat as novel begins in the precinct station on a bleak, rainy night with several detectives from the homicide squad hanging around (only one of whom, Burke, survives by name in the film) and a young black man waiting to be interrogated about a murder. It is into this setting – the novel is strong on police procedure – that Mrs Deery's telephone call, announcing the suicide of her policeman husband, comes. Like the film, the novel allows the initiating incident of the plot, the suicide, to be talked about and 'taken on board' before it introduces its central character, Sergeant Dave Bannion:

The double doors of the Homicide Bureau swung open and a young man in a damp trenchcoat came in ... He was a large wide-shouldered man in his middle thirties, with tanned, even features and steady gray eyes. Standing alone he didn't seem particularly big; it was only when Burke, a tall man himself, strolled over beside him, that Bannion's size became apparent. He stood inches taller than Burke, and his two hundred and thirty pounds were evenly distributed on a huge, rangy frame.

Apart from the evocation of the bleak precinct station and the setting out of the procedure for dealing with police suicides, the opening scene of the novel has two functions: to suggest Bannion's immense physical power (it later emerges that he has been a Notre Dame All American footballer) and to signify his basic decency and commitment to legality. The latter is revealed in his relationship with the black man:

'I didn't kill nobody,' the Negro said, standing, his large, bony hands working spasmodically. His head turned, his eyes touched each face in the room, frightened, helpless, defiant.

'Sit down,' the uniformed cop said to him. Burke smiled pleasantly at Bannion. 'I could find out in ten little minutes if you'd just let –.' He stopped at the look on Bannion's face. 'Okay, okay. It was just a stray thought,' he said, shrugging elaborately.

'There won't be any of that stuff on my shift,' Bannion said.

'Okay, okay,' Burke said.

Bannion walked over to the Negro, who seemed to sense that he had got a break of some kind. 'We just want the truth from you,' Bannion said. 'If you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to worry about. But if you have we'll find it out. Remember that.'

The black man surfaces later in the novel, with Bannion visiting his home and talking with his family. He fulfils the role (occupied by the disabled Selma Parker character in the film) of giving Bannion the initial lead in his hunt for the men who killed his wife. The interesting question of why the black man and his milieu are absent from the film is addressed in the next chapter.

Bannion's visit to the scene of the cop's suicide is much more procedurally detailed than in the film. Unlike the film, the novel does not divulge right away the crookedness of Tom Deery and his wife, but it does offer a clue that there is a problem by making separate characters comment on the absence of a suicide note. In the novel, Bannion has a substantial interior life, mostly signified by the kinds of books he reads and what he thinks, feels and says about them. This theme is set in play in the course of Bannion's detailed examination of the contents of the room in which Tom Deery died:

Bannion closed the drawers, after replacing everything as he had found it, and walked over and glanced at the volumes in the book cases. Most of them were in standard sets, history, biography, the novels of Scott and Dickens, and a selection of book club premiums.

There was a shelf of travel books, he noticed, all of them well-worn. He picked out a couple of them and flipped through the pages, wondering idly at this bent of Deery's. There were pencilled notes in Deery's handwriting in the margins, and Bannion immediately became more interested. There was nothing more potentially revealing, he felt, than a man's honest, impulsive reactions to a book ...

As the analysis of the film in Chapter 5 reveals, one of its major structural oppositions is that between the world of crime and Bannion's home. This opposition is strong also in the novel:

It had been a run-of-the-mill night, like a thousand he had known in the past. He felt comfortably tired as he followed the curving Schuylkil out to Germantown, listening with only mild interest to a news programme on the radio. It was good to be on his way home, he thought. Home to dinner, to Katie.

As with many of the words actually spoken in the novel, as opposed to the framing narrative discourses, the dialogue in the scene in the film in which the Bannion home is introduced is taken almost verbatim from the novel, evoking the friendly, bantering relationship between Bannion and his wife. What is absent in the novel are the various acts of sharing which the film shows. But, of course, the (purportedly) egalitarian relationship in the film is constructed in direct opposition to the series of hierarchical relationships, based on corrupt power and wealth, with which the film opens.

The domestic scene in the novel is also detailed about the kind of books Bannion reads, for it is primarily in relation to them that his moral consciousness is signified. Bannion is reflecting after dinner:

Deery's travel books, tracked with marginal notes, was an odd thing. Why the devil did people read travel books? To learn something, to kill time, to escape into a world of armchair adventuring. All of these reasons, perhaps. Possibly Deery was simply bored, and used the books as a crutch to help him through the long evenings. Bannion smiled slightly and glanced at the bookcase beside his chair. There were his crutches then, comfortable well-worn ones, with pages as familiar to him as the lines of his hands. They were travel books of a sort; they were volumes of philosophy, and the world of ideas could be travelled and explored as well as foreign countries, and strange jungles. Deery read about the bullfighting in Spain, while he read the spiritual explosions of St John of the Cross, who was a Spaniard but no bullfighter. What was the difference? Why did one man read one thing, the next man another?. ... I read philosophy, he thought, because I'm too weak to stand up against the misery and meaningless heartbreak I run into every day on the job. I'm no scholar. I wouldn't touch Nietzsche or Schopenhauer with a ten-foot pole ... I don't want to listen to idols being smashed, I want to read something which puts sense into life. ... Deery, he thought, might have been better off with these books than with the descriptions of fertility charms in Pompeii. These were the men he had gone to himself for peace of mind. St John of the Cross, Kant, Spinoza, Santayana. The gentle philosophers, the ones who thought it was natural for man to be good, and that evil was the aberrant course, abnormal, accidental, out of line with man's true needs and nature.

Unlike many examples of the crime novel – the works of Mickey Spillane come to mind – McGivern's novel is a profoundly moral work in the sense that it is concerned with the necessity of preserving standards of decency and legality in a meaningless universe. The passage quoted above comes close to stating the controlling idea of both novel and film.

The novel and film are most similar at the level of plot, with the events of the latter tracking those of the former quite closely: the bar girl Lucy Carroway's (Lucy Chapman in the film) call to Bannion's home querying the circumstances of Tom Deery's (Tom Duncan in the film) death; Bannion visiting her at the bar where she works, 'The Triangle' ('The Retreat' in the film); Bannion's second visit to Mrs Deery/Duncan; Bannion being reprimanded by his superior, Lieutenant Wilks, for bothering her; the discovery of Lucy's tortured body; Bannion's sense of guilt at not having taken her story more seriously; and Bannion's visit to Lagana's house. Certain changes in the way the film deals with these events can be explained partly by the film censorship conventions of the time: the suppression of Lucy's account of Mrs Deery/Duncan's feigned pregnancies; references to drug-taking and drug-dealing; and Bannion contemplating Lucy's tortured and murdered body on a slab in the county morgue – a scene which, if the film had been made from the late 1960s on, would almost certainly have been shown on screen.

The main difference between novel and film, however, is the narrative condensation the film imposes on these events and the paring down of the number of characters involved. In keeping with the novel's representation of police work as dogged routine and procedure, the events in the novel extend over several chapters and involve slow, painstaking investigation of the circumstances surrounding Deery/Duncan's suicide and Lucy's disappearance. Also present in the novel are several characters absent from or only vestigially present in the film, and 'The Triangle', although seedy and threadbare, does not have the force 'The Retreat' has of being at the centre of a web of violence and corruption. In the novel, throughout these events, Bannion has substantial relationships with several characters who do not appear in the film: Parnell, the county detective; Furnham, a newspaperman who hangs round the precinct office; and Inspector Cranston, the single unblemished figure in the upper echelons of the police department. In the film this figure is merged with that of Wilks, totally corrupt in the novel, to produce a highly ambiguous figure, semi-corrupt though ultimately straight. The period covered by these events in the novel is also dominated by a criminal, Biggie Burrows, who does not appear but who, Bannion establishes, has been seen escorting Lucy out of town. Much of the action is concerned with establishing Burrows' background and appearance and tracking his movements, in fact tracking an absence.

Because of the procedural detail which forms a core of interest in the novel, the blowing-up of Katie Bannion by a car bomb meant for Bannion himself comes closer to the centre of the novel rather than about a third of the way in, as with the film. The closing up of the marital home, Bannion's quitting the police and becoming an avenger rather than an investigator, and his inhabiting the soulless world of those he hunts, are all present in both novel and film, Bannion's moral decline in the former being signified primarily through his changing relationship with his books. Where the film has to rely on milieu (the Bannion home is completely bare of furniture) and the actor's performance, the novel can use milieu and Bannion's interior life to chart the change in him:

Bannion stood in the front room, his hands in his overcoat pockets, glancing about for the last time. There was nothing else to hold him here. ...

He dropped his keys on the coffee table, and then looked around again, at the imitation fireplace, the mantel, bare of pictures now, at the radio, liquor cabinet, at the sofa where she had usually sat to read, and at his own big chair. It was a room he had known by heart, but it was strange and unfamiliar to him now, as impersonal as a furniture arrangement in a shop window. It was a clean and silent room in a clean and silent apartment and he looked at it without any feeling at all.

He glanced once at his books beside his chair, his old, familiar companions. He wasn't taking them with him, Hume, Locke, Kant, the men who had struggled and attacked the problems of living through all their lives. What could they tell him now of life? He knew the answers, and the knowledge was a dead, cold weight in his heart. Life was love; not love of God, love of Humanity, love of Justice, but love of one other person. When that love was destroyed, you were dead too.

Bannion's priest prevails upon him to take just one book with him, The Ascent of Mount Carmel by St John of the Cross, but when he reaches the anonymous hotel room which, as avenger, will be his home, he throws it contemptuously in a corner. But since the controlling idea of the novel (and the film) is that there is a line between good and evil, criminality and legality, which should not be crossed, the narrative has to bring Bannion back from the pit of vengeful hatred into which he has sunk. This is orchestrated, in the novel, by the rallying of many of the characters to his aid, particularly after the corrupt police department takes the guard off his brother-in-law's house, where his young daughter is living, thus exposing her to kidnap by the mob. Parnell, the county detective, helps; Bannion's brother-in-law replaces the withdrawn police by a posse of his ex-Army buddies; Inspector Cranston stands guard outside the house; and even Bannion's priest shows up. It is this which begins to rehumanise Bannion.

Bannion walked to his car and slid in behind the wheel, feeling something other than hate inside him for the first time since Katie had been murdered.

The process of Bannion's rehumanising can be tracked by comparing the way he deals with Larry Smith and the way he deals with Mrs Deery. In the film (see below) the scenes are mou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 'The Big Heat' as Novel
• 2 Enter Columbia Pictures
• 3 (Re)Constructing 'The Big Heat'
• 4 'The Big Heat' and Critical Method – A Personal Memoir
• 5 'The Big Heat' as Complex Text
• Credits
• Bibliography
• eCopyright