Debby refuses to be a passive victim of Vince Stone’s violence, fighting back and branding his face with boiling coffee as revenge. But while she’s no helpless victim, Lang’s ending reinforces how the sickening status quo, which saw Lucy Chapman and so many other girls maimed and murdered, ultimately remains.
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Among the most vicious moments of violence in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat is the bit where gangster Vince Stone, sitting by a B-girl at a crowded bar, stubs his fat cigar smack into her hand. Her cries pierce the pleasant music playing at the place ironically named The Retreat, and she crouches down into a table, sobbing. Given the brutalities Stone and his henchmen inflict on women using heat of some kind – scalding coffee, cigarette burns, and bombs maim and murder – this is like an act of branding.
But more curious than the cruelty of this small yet scarring touch – both in the B-girl’s hand and in the audience’s mind – is the production history behind it. In Le Double Scénario Chez Fritz Lang, Gérard Leblanc and Bridgitte Devismes lay out side-by-side screenplay drafts for the film. Comparing screenwriter Sidney Boehm’s original script to Fritz Lang’s revised version, one finds that the auteur-director added the cigar-branding bit himself. Boehm just has Stone slap the B-girl – “Doris” in his scenario – and walk away. Lang’s surgical insertion of the slap speaks volumes about the picture’s political subtext, linking the scene to other moments where B-girls bear the brunt of male violence. The director’s depiction of barflies like Doris reveals that both his sympathies toward the stigmatized and his critique of dominant social structures never dwindled from his first American films, but only adapted themselves to outlast the restrictions of the McCarthy era.
Noir-savant Ann Douglas lists, among her fourteen characteristics that make a noir noir, a “noir penumbra” – “made up of working-class and persons-of-color characters, extras or bit players, who often go unnoticed by the stars of the story but not by the noir camera.” Barflies, or B-girls, largely make up the noir penumbra of The Big Heat. But what is a barfly? In The B-girl Evil: Bureaucracy, Sexuality, and Menace of Barroom Vice in Postwar California, Amanda H. Littauer writes that “in the 1940s, B-girls were part of a constellation of women – variously called prostitutes, Victory Girls, khaki whackies, barflies, and seagulls – whose perceived sexual availability generated fear about female sexuality, public health, and male virility.” The Random House Dictionary of American Slang defines a B-girl as a “woman employed by a bar, nightclub, or the like, to act as a companion to male customers and to induce them to buy drinks.” These women are in The Big Heat from the get-go.
The year Lang’s film opened, 1953, was also the moment when both the public discourse and the political demonization of the B-girl came to a boil. “In 1953,” Littauer writes, “the environment surrounding the routine practice of B-ing temporarily changed when political and media attention to ‘the B-girl racket’ suddenly increased.” In San Francisco, District Attorney Thomas Lynch “decided it was ‘time for a crackdown on the B-girls who infest many of the city’s bars and promised a vigorous investigation of vice, gambling, and the B-girl racket.” It’s no coincidence The Big Heat came out in the same year – the film depicts the contempt and cruel indifference toward B-girls Littauer details. But while the characters in The Big Heat don’t often show them sympathy, Lang’s camera does.
Lucy Chapman is the film’s first barfly. After Tom Duncan offs himself, she contacts detective Dave Bannion to tell him key facts that had been covered up about the case. They meet at The Retreat, where she works as a B-girl. Lucy reveals she was Tom’s lover and that he planned to divorce his wife. This is news to Bannion, to whom Mrs. Duncan gave a conflicting account. Dave’s gut instinct is to distrust Lucy without any benefit of the doubt. “What’s your pitch, Lucy? Trying to use us for a shakedown?” he asks. But Bannion’s mistrust of Lucy goes unmatched by the earnestness Lang’s camera finds on her face. As Dave asks the question, we cut to a close-up of Lucy, and witness her genuine hurt and puzzlement. “Shakedown?” she asks, “Me?”
Later, Dave’s distrust of Lucy proves deadly – “Unidentified woman found dead at 6:26 AM off County Parkway. Thrown from car after beating and torture” reads a police report. The audience guesses the woman’s identity before Bannion sees her maimed body at the morgue, covered by cigarette burns. “Trouble automatically catches up to girls like her” – the first comment the coroner makes after Dave identifies Chapman’s corpse – speaks volumes about the very attitude of indifference, about a banality of evil, that leads to crimes of this kind.
Lieutenant Wilks’s reaction to Lucy’s death echoes both Dave’s distrust and the coroner’s indifference. “Lucy Chapman was probably trying to shake down some sucker who wouldn’t shake,” he says, a comment that recalls Bannion’s question to her at the bar, and adds that “when barflies get killed, it’s for any one of a dozen crummy reasons.” Here, the term “barfly” reveals its own underbelly – it dehumanizes the women it applies to and trivializes their lives and deaths. Why should anyone grieve a fly?
“They come and go like flies,” says The Retreat’s bartender Tierney to Bannion, parroting the same prejudices. “Those things happen, Sergeant” he says about Lucy’s torture and murder, “Outside of my place some of these babes keep pretty shady company. It figures – they know nobody cares much what happens to them.” Once again, the indifference to Chapman’s death is regurgitated due to her status as a barfly.
Tierney’s next remark tells us even more: “They’re floaters,” he says, “not much more than a suitcase full of nothing between them and the gutter.” The word “gutter” invokes an idea at the core of a belief system espoused by many characters in The Big Heat – the illusion of a world cleaved between the “clean” and the “dirty.” “I don’t like gutter talk,” says Mike Lagana, who, being both the archetype for a family man and the archetype for a mob boss, stands as the emblem for the hypocrisy of this split, this false dichotomy between what’s good and what belongs to the gutter. And when Bannion tells Bertha Duncan about the circumstances of her husband’s death, she replies that “there weren’t any circumstances, everything Tom did was clean and wholesome” – a remark the film contradicts. Even Dave Bannion himself, whom many take to be the film’s hero, falls into the same folly: near the end of the film, when he visits Bertha Duncan and, hate seething in his eyes, nearly strangles her to death, he says that when she dies “the big heat follows. The big heat for Lagana, for Stone, and for all the rest of the lice.” But as audience members watch him choke her to near death, the line he draws between himself and the mobsters starts to fade. As Debby Marsh tells him later, if he’d done it, there’d be no difference between him and Vince Stone.
Lang’s direction challenges the illusion of a universe split between good and bad, clean and dirty. In the scene with Tierney at The Retreat, the auteur’s mise-en-scène belies the ideology of the character he films. Lang has Tierney polish a glass as he speaks to Bannion, telling the audience that the “clean citizens” of the world aren’t ever really clean – they just work hard to look that way. Tom Gunning writes that “a tension between placid surfaces and hidden corruption structures The Big Heat, and the drama deals with the forces that try to keep the lid on and those which want to force the hidden violence out into the open.” These polished and placid surfaces – seen in The Retreat, Stone, Lagana, and Bannion’s houses – represent the illusion of cleanliness, one that clashes with the violence and evil that play out in them and is thus dispelled.
Lucy Chapman gives voice to Lang’s critique of a Manichean worldview when she says that “the only difference between me and Bertha Duncan is that I work at being a B-girl and she has a wedding ring and a marriage certificate.” She’s spot on – the reason Bannion trusts Bertha over Lucy is a moralistic code that casts Lucy as duplicitous and Bertha as honest due to their social status even when the opposite is the case: it’s Lucy who tells the truth and Bertha who lies.
But Lang’s camera can cut through lies and get at the truth before even his characters are clued into it. His sympathy rests with those who are wronged, marginalized, and stigmatized by the social order – with Lucy the barfly and not with Bertha the wealthy cop’s widow. Stark differences arise in the way Lang films Bannion’s first meeting with Bertha and how he trains his camera on Bannion’s first meeting with Lucy.
Before Dave walks into Mrs. Duncan’s room, the director films her getting ready. She has her back to the camera, and the audience only sees her face in the mirror, which Lang uses to represent illusion. As Bannion enters the room, the audience sees him in Bertha’s mirror, caught in the web of lies she spins. Then, when the two sit to talk, Lang’s blocking has them sitting side-by-side so that they aren’t looking eye-to-eye. Meanwhile, Lucy Chapman is introduced to the film facing the camera. Unlike Bertha, this positioning suggests she’s not trying to hide anything. And unlike Mrs. Duncan, she stares Bannion straight in the eye.
The way Lang positions other characters in the film when introducing them follows a similar pattern. In the second scene, Lagana lies in bed facing away from the camera, and we only see his back. Debby Marsh, on the other hand, faces the audience in the next scene, and so does Bannion when Lang introduces him. Meanwhile, Tierney the bartender has his back to the camera. And at the automobile graveyard, when the audience first sees Atkins – who keeps mum about Slim Farrow – turns away from the camera while Selma Parker – who helps Bannion and tells him all she knows – turns toward it in the same shot. So if Lang uses his blocking of actors to tell his audience who’s worthy of trust and who’s hiding secrets, it’s telling that he frames the barflies – whom so many characters mistrust – facing the audience. The camera sees Doris and Lucy as sincere even when their society too often judges them to be deceitful.
Lang’s refusal to engage in easy moralizing also shows itself in the film’s departure from its source material. Gunning writes that the character of Lieutenant Wilks, for instance, is “an oddly composite character … a literal condensation of two polar characters in McGivern’s original novel, Inspector Cranston, the single unblemished figure in the upper echelons of the police department and the Wilks of the novel, who is totally corrupt.” While Wilks blindly follows orders from his corrupt superiors, Willis Bouchey plays him as a man plagued by conflicted allegiance, ultimately succumbing to “the pressure from upstairs.” Wilks’s character in the film embodies Lang’s refusal to show people as only good or bad, and suggests that evil often comes from blind conformity.
In the novel, the presence of an “unblemished figure in the upper echelons of the police department” also signals a possibility for the police to be redeemed. But in vanquishing a fully good cop character from his film, Lang’s critique of the police grows more pointed. And while some critics take Dave Bannion to be a redeeming cop figure, this logic is tough to follow when one looks at the scene where he almost chokes Bertha Duncan to death. As Gunning points out, another key difference between McGivern’s original novel and the film is that in the source text what stops Dave from killing Bertha is his conscience, while in Lang’s film he only lets go of her neck because two cops show up at the door. Later at the hotel, he tells Debby without a drop of guilt, “I almost killed [Bertha] an hour ago. I should have.”
Like ridding the film of Inspector Cranston, the choice to turn Bannion into a morally gray character paints a portrait of police as a force that may be flawed structurally, rather than one that just has a few bad apples. And Dave’s speech about “the big heat” coming for “the lice” also advances a Manichaean view of morality Lang opposes and whose violent end he exposes. When Bannion positions a hypothetical good police force against evil “lice,” we should note that there’s no “police” without “lice.”
And if The Big Heat critiques the police as an institution, one of its main targets is the imbalance of value placed on different human lives. After Duncan offs himself, the audience is told how “when a cop kills himself, [the police] want a full report.” Yet when Lucy Chapman gets tortured to death, the department is eager to brush all evidence under the carpet. Meanwhile, when Katie Bannion, a cop’s respectable wife and, in the words of Leblanc and Devismes, “the ideal American woman,” gets killed, the commissioner tells Dave that he wants “this case broken if it takes a hundred men to do it.” Lang makes his audience witness how the barflies, then, hold less value to the department than a cop or a “respectable” woman and don’t receive the protection the police promise.
The Big Heat’s critique of the police is consistent with Lang’s earlier American films. You Only Live Once, from 1939, is a scathing indictment of the criminal justice system and its double standards. Before we meet the star-crossed lovers who lead the film, Lang introduces his audience to a street salesman at a law firm telling a story about a cop who steals apples from his fruit stand. No matter how many times the salesman tells the policeman to leave his apples alone, there’s nothing to be done – he can’t call the police on the police! “The idea’s no good, you know,” he says, “because so many policemen have unions, and one cop is not going to arrest another.”
In his book of film criticism, The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin praises the picture. He explains how “the premise of You Only Live Once is that Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is an ex-convict who wants to go ‘straight’: but the society will not allow him to live down, or redeem, his criminal past.” Baldwin also praises the “genuine indignation” that marks Lang’s film. In an essay for Cahiers du Cinema, François Truffaut writes that You Only Live Once shows how when a criminal “goes back to his ‘old game,’ ‘falls again,’ it isn’t because ‘once a thief always a thief,’ but because society dictates ‘once a thief, always a thief.’” Like Baldwin, Truffaut is attuned to Lang’s “indignation” with society, even taking his analysis a step further by stating that the film “is organized around the principle that law-abiding people are villains.”
Both Baldwin and Truffaut recognize Lang’s subversive politics in You Only Live Once, as well as the director’s focus on social outcasts – in the case of the 1939 picture, a convict. But just because Lang’s politics in the film are subversive, should that mean his fifties films share the same rebellious bend? Baldwin argues they don’t. After You Only Live Once, he writes, Lang “never succeeded quite so brilliantly again” and adds that “considering the speed with which we moved from the New Deal to World War II, to Yalta, to the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, to Korea, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, this may not be his fault.” Truffaut, on the other hand, sees Lang as unwavering: “Fritz Lang,” he writes, “was a man whom the world Nazism, war, deportation, McCarthyism, etc., confirmed as a rebel.”
Would McCarthyism and HUAC – the most repressive period of censorship and political persecution Hollywood saw in its history – lead Lang to curtail his level of political subversiveness, as Baldwin writes, or rather double down on his convictions, as Truffaut suggests?
In the biography Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, Patrick McGilligan writes that when a new wave of congressional hearings took place in the spring of 1951, Lang was targeted. “To the list of producers and studios that considered Lang an ‘untouchable,’” McGilligan tells us, “he could now add the US government, whose agents he knew to be scurrying around … trying to pinpoint his political coloration.” As if the HUAC harassment wasn’t enough, Lang was blacklisted in 1951 after production wrapped on Clash by Night. While his blacklisting didn’t last long – Harry Cohn hired him to direct The Blue Gardenia less than a year later, the whole ordeal was enough to drive the director a little nuts. McGilligan describes Lang’s “embattled psychology” and “paranoia,” convinced that every phone he picked up was wiretapped.
But did all this scare off Lang from critiquing American culture or stop him from imbuing doses of political subversiveness into his films? On the contrary – the director only became more bitter. In an interview with Lang, Peter Bogdanovich described The Blue Gardenia as a “particularly venomous picture of American life,” to which the director replied that “the only thing I can tell you about it is that it was the first picture after the McCarthy business, and I had to shoot it in twenty days. Maybe that’s what made me so venomous.” Maybe Lang’s blacklisting, then, backfired.
So could The Big Heat in fact be every bit as subversive as You Only Live Once? Lang’s treatment of the figure of the barfly in his 1953 picture showcases his sympathy toward the stigmatized and his critique of the police. And while some argue the film’s ending defeats all that – with the department’s return to order and a redemptive arc for the cop hero, Dave Bannion – Lang’s clever choices at the closing seconds of The Big Heat put this interpretation on shaky ground.
The first choice is having a close-up of Debby Marsh fade to a newspaper announcing the fall of the Lagana crime ring. Through this transition, Lang stresses that Dave isn’t, after all, the hero of The Big Heat – Debby is. Bannion never exposed the syndicate, Debby did by gunning down Bertha Duncan. “The lid’s off the garbage can, and I did it!” she says. And yet, during the film’s closing moments at the police department, a young man named Hugo enthusiastically helps Bannion get set up on his former desk, suggesting Dave has taken all the credit. Even more disturbing is the film’s last line, when Bannion shouts: “Keep the coffee hot, Hugo!” In a film remembered most of all for the brutal moment when Vince Stone scalds Debby Marsh’s face with boiling coffee and leaves it forever scarred, this last line strikes an unnerving chord. It’s almost as if Debby’s sacrifices have been erased from memory.
While Debby is wealthy due to her marriage to Stone, she didn’t come from wealth: “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me, rich is better!” she tells Dave. Considering Debby’s impoverished background, and her taste for bars and cocktails, she may very well have been another one of those barflies Stone mutilates. In any case, her background is closer to Lucy Chapman’s and Doris the B-girl’s than anyone else’s in the film. And if Debby is part of that “constellation of women” Littauer writes about, she also adds a higher degree of complexity to the film’s depiction of the “barfly” kind of girl. Debby refuses to be a passive victim of Vince Stone’s violence, fighting back and branding his face with boiling coffee as revenge. But while she’s no helpless victim, Lang’s ending reinforces how the sickening status quo, which saw Lucy Chapman and so many other girls maimed and murdered, ultimately remains.
After Vince Stone stubs his cigar on Doris the B-girl’s hand, an eagle-eyed audience member will witness one of The Big Heat’s most important moments, yet one that happens in such a flash you miss it if you blink. As soon as the cigar goes down, Debby Marsh bolts out of her seat and tries to yank Stone’s hand away from Doris’s, yelling stop! Not enough viewers consider that the catalyst for Debby trailing Dave out of the bar is not her spontaneity, nor boredom, nor her interest in Bannion, but her identification with the B-girl whose hand Stone burns. The importance of this moment is clear for Lang: in Boehm’s original screenplay, Debby never gets up, merely nonchalantly observing the act. By having her resist, in fact rebel against Vince, Lang gives more agency and focus to the figure of the barfly, or B-girl. What’s more, he imparts to Debby, the film’s heroine, a bit of his own subversive spirit. He too was scalded, by HUAC, and never cowered into fear or submitted to conformity – he pushed further into rebellion.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. Library of America, 1998.
Bogdanovich, Peter. Fritz Lang in America. Praeger, 1969.
Devismes, Brigitte, and Gérard Leblanc. Le double scénario chez Fritz Lang. Armand Colin, 1991.
Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang. British Film Institute, 2000.
Littauer, Amanda. “The B-girl Evil: Bureaucracy, Sexuality, and the Menace of Barroom Vice in Postwar California.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Apr. 2003, Vol. 12, pp. 171-204.
McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. St. Martin’s, 1997.
Truffaut, François. The Films in My Life. Translated by Leonard Mayhew, Simon & Schuster, 1985.
