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Comments 1 - 12 of 12

MrE2Me's avatar

MrE2Me

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!
13 years 1 month ago
Siskoid's avatar

Siskoid

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.
5 years 3 months ago
acolthart's avatar

acolthart

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.
10 years 6 months ago
MKej's avatar

MKej

Commissioner Higgins: "I suggest we call it a night."
Vince Stone: "I suggest you shut up!"
8 years 11 months ago
jwagoner0507's avatar

jwagoner0507

"you're about as romantic as a pair of handcuffs."
2 years 10 months ago
Dieguito's avatar

Dieguito

Great vengeance!
11 years 8 months ago
MMDan's avatar

MMDan

"Prisons are bulging with dummies who wonder how they got there."
9 years ago
Abdullah Ozu's avatar

Abdullah Ozu

one of the Greatest Noir
10 years 2 months ago
saydin7's avatar

saydin7

magnificent.
11 years 2 months ago
sammysin's avatar

sammysin

Fritz Lang does it yet again.
11 years 5 months ago
nicolaskrizan's avatar

nicolaskrizan

raw, powerful, straightforward

http://beyond1001movies.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/backtrack-the-big-heat-1953/
10 years 8 months ago
demagogo's avatar

demagogo

I fail to see the appeal in this movie. I guess it's just too much social pressure to dislike "a noir by Fritz Lang".

There's little, if anything, redeemable about this thing, not even technically. Cinematography is lazy even for 1953, and dialogue is plain and doesn't even try to leave the "film noir" trope comfort zone, not in even one aspect for what I could notice. The just a little bit dated "daddy knows best" segments are as gratuitous as any scene in The Room, minus the fun. Even for its time, that was lazy, easy writing.

Seriously, I feel like the entire tone of the movie is an overstatement to the audience. Let alone the propaganda behind the whole good cop bullshit. It's hard for me to believe this can be regarded as "elegant", "classy", or whatever, when every line is so vulgarly self-evident. It doesn't get any smarter than Dirty Harry or any other redneck-targeted film for that matter. One can say, to defend this director guy unconditionally, that the studio would have "butchered" it? That is not a excuse to save the movie from being shit.

The coffee meme isn't more than a cinematic catchphrase. I did know about it before watching the movie, and I expected from it a bit more than... well, what just happened.

This movie is shit.
7 years 9 months ago
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