A classy noir by the almighty Fritz Lang. Gloria Grahame steals the film as a gangster's moll with attitude and heart. Beware of hot coffee!

A near perfect film noir by Fritz Lang, arguably darker than most. The action is brutal, the acting is excellent. A complete thrill ride, just be carful where you put the coffee when you watch this one.

Fritz Lang's The Big Heat is a brutal noir that ups the stakes considerably when it dares to show us the protagonist's home life in addition to the case he's pursuing. Suddenly, the threats he receives when he gets too close to the solution to the badly explained suicide of a colleague are more visceral and suspenseful. Glenn Ford is great in this, juggling both sides of his copper's life through believable attitudes. Can a police detective keep both his integrity and his family intact when faced with this amount of corruption? And boy, is this ever violent for its time. That's the best part, really. Just how shocking it can be without really showing us anything that might attract the notice of the censors. Though nearer the end of his career than its beginning, Lang creates one of the iconic noirs of American cinema, with memorable characters and incidents, precision storytelling, and some cracking lines as well.