A Guy Has To Do What A Guy Has To Do-With Glenn Ford’s The Big Heat In Mind

 

By Zack James

 

Phil Larkin here, Phil Larkin who a lot of you know, and I am not ashamed to admit it like a lot of guy are these days, and gals too, now that they are in the profession, a real hard nose old school private detective. And all that means is, all I mean by that is, that unlike the fluff that you read in the high-priced hard cover so-called crime detection novels and worse on the screen, television or theater take your pick I tell the story straight. Take all the silly romance and intrigue out of what is for real P.Is ordinary to the grindstone work. I’ve told a million stories about my experiences and they are nothing but humdrum; real low-rent missing persons on the lam for some reason; real people trying to hide their assets from banks and loan companies when those institutions come looking for their chattels back, you know the plight of the “repo” man; and real people, real women mostly trying to track down some bum who is behind on his alimony/child support/whatever payments. No sex, drugs and rock and roll, although every seventh year you might get a tumble under the downy billows if some dame is short of cash and pretty please needs some heavy work done. But that is the exception. Yeah stuff that people who live to read crime detection novels and watch such movies for kicks would not believe because it is too much like their own lives but there you have it. I’m off my soap-box now.  

I have never been much for reading, any kind of reading except what I needed to just barely get by in school. Read Dashiell Hammett, Ray Chandler, Mickey Spillane, mostly and re-read them too. More to my liking, more my style ever since I was a kid going Saturday afternoon up to the Strand Theater in Riverdale Square was watching the old time black and white movies, two for matinee, plus a hidden bag of popcorn from Stop & Shop which my mother bought for me to survive those hungry three plus hours (two one and one half films plus intermission to take me to suppertime). Oh sure I like to watch the old time private detective movies too. I never learned much from them about private detection but one, and if you are a film aficionado you will know which I mean and why right off, The Maltese Falcon did teach me something, something I’ve kept with me ever since I first saw the film when I was a kid and then later as a young man, a young cop just starting out (and about five times since then).

I have looked for that lesson in other films that I have watched over the years, one of which I am going to tell you about in a minute but they didn’t come up often. If you know the Maltese Falcon story line bear with me for a minute. If you don’t here is the “skinny” which might just get you hopping to buy it cheap on Amazon or rent it out on Netflix whether you get any “life” lessons out of it or not. This one is about a an average just getting along private dick, Sam Spade, played by Humphrey Bogart who is, or was, every young bud’s idea of a great macho private eye, set the gold standard even if he got twisted up and almost thrown away with the wind before he was done. Sam and his partner, Miles Archer, the late Miles Archer before the film goes too far when he gets knocked off by a party, or parties, unknown got involved with a frail, with this, there is no other way to say it, deadly femme fatale who leads them, leads Sam really on a merry chase for a freaking statue of a bird.

But see the femme, this Briget, played by Mary Astor, was, is nothing but poison from the minute she walked into their low-rent San Francisco seen-better-days office in a then rundown part of town. In the end she was responsible for Mile’s death, big time responsible. And as the bodies kept piling up who knows how many others as the plot thickens and things got desperate. Naturally for a 1940s war-time movie you needed the added attraction of a little off-hand romance, sincere by either party or not. See as much as Sam wanted to let things go for the sake of the romance, let things that he knew straight up in his mind didn’t figure with this dame, even that she might have killed Miles, or had him killed by her actions, had him set-up since he got in the way of her plans and that kind of thing he decided in the end, rightfully so, that as a private detective, as a cop really, he has to send her over, has to avenge his partner’s death, has to look out for the good of the profession. Once he made up his mind-boom she was heading for the big step-off. That was a big lesson for me, a very big one.          

Here’s the funny part it works both ways, works both ways in the detective business, public cops or private. That’s the grift in the film I was watching the other night, this The Big Heat with Glenn Ford who did a lot of cop films like this one and the great “queen of the ‘1940s-1950s B-movies actress Gloria Grahame. I know all about the public cops because like I said once time when I telling another story I started out with the cops after I got out of the Army. I had been an MP where you didn’t learn squat about investigative work but mainly rousting drunk soldiers on Saturday nights and because of that leg-up as a veteran.  I joined the cops in Riverdale, my old hometown.

Now Riverdale isn’t like New York City where the action in The Big Heat takes place, or any  big city but the ethos is the same-actually the same as in the Army-“go along to get along” which is where most cops pick up the song. It also has about the same social structure, the social structure that counts, who is on top and untouchable and who isn’t-everybody else really. I ran into a snag with the public cops when I forget that “lesson number one,” when I wouldn’t look the other way when our Mr. Big in town drunk as a skunk one rainy night went off the highway and killed the woman he was with, a woman not his wife although he had had three of those previously including one just then at home. And Mister Big walked away clean, didn’t have a scratch on him, and walked away from the law clean as a jaybird. Nothing happened to him not a damn thing event though I, as the guy who was the lead investigator on the case wanted to throw the book at him for manslaughter. Upstairs said close it down, close it down tight. The girl’s parents, and she really was just a girl at eighteen just barely out of the local high school and who had tangled up with Mister Big when she thought he could get her places, couldn’t even get a peep of justice on that one. So I walked, walked into private detection and I have been glad as hell I did ever since. Maybe that too was my way of saying for the “good of the profession” like Bogie’s Sam Spade.   

Once in a while a public cop in the films will too. Take Bannion, the role played by Glenn Ford in the film I am talking about. He starts out as a kind of “go along” guy, has a wife and daughter, making payments on a nice leafy neighborhood house he doesn’t see often enough, likes his work enough that he sees thirty years and nice pension from a grateful citizenry while he plays with those grandchildren that he never had time for with his daughter. Nice scene. Except that “goes along” got pulled up short one day when he had to investigate the “suicide” of a fellow officer, a guy he barely knew but knew was on “the take” was in Mister Big’s pocket. Mister Big who doesn’t need to be named any more than that moniker because every town outside some small hamlet in mountainous New Hampshire or out in the desert in old-time Joshua Tree and maybe there too I don’t know for sure as some variation on that “leading citizen” theme. Half the force was in the pocket one way or another and the other half, most of the other half, was looking the other way.    

Bannion decided that he would do his normal full throttle investigation except he knew enough to pull up a shade bit short because it was a “department matter.” But every time Bannion tried to figure out why a cop on “the take” took his own life, why his wife was “blowing smoke” his way he kept getting signals that he should lay off. That only made him dig in his heels. (A public cops brother of Sam Spade for sure). When that dead cop’s bar-fly mistress turned up dead after talking to him he made some mental calculation that for the good of the department he was going to the mats on this one. And he did, except don’t forget Mister Big knows all, sees all, does all. Oh no not him personally for he like milords of old has personal retainers, thugs, to take care of business. How do you think that poor harmless bar-fly wound up face-down in the East River?  Yeah Mister Big’s hatchet man Lenny, let’s call him Lenny but like Mister Big it could be any moniker, took care of business, took care of that poor bar-fly who was slated to get even less justice in this wicked old world that that poor teenage girl back in Riverdale when I walked away.

Of course when you surround yourself with stooges you have to make sure they don’t make matters worse than when you started out. All Mister Big cared about in the beginning was to keep a lid on that “on the take” cop’s death since his widow had a piece of paper in a safety deposit box which would put him in the ditch with all the other geeks and losers. No way was Mister Big going under for that silly rap. Lenny made a cardinal mistake though he sub-contacted the work of getting rid of that bar-fly to out of town talent. The tough guy talent pool must have been getting thin though because this guy was something out of the “gang who could shoot straight” school of hard-knocks. He botched the bar-fly killing, worse, much worse, let’s call it fatal, the hired-help had the bright idea of planting a bomb in Bannion’s car-but Bannion’s wife got to the car first. BOOM. And now you had a man driven, a man driven to eradicate the cockroaches like Mister Big and his henchmen.

The man did it too. Almost single-handedly since most of the police department was still “on the take” or more than happy to keep looking the other way. Got some nifty help from that playgirl, Debby, played by Gloria Grahame, Lenny’s plaything, any man’s plaything as long as he kept playing the bills, kept the booze flowing and kept not asking too many questions about what she was doing in her off time. But guys like Lenny, hard guys when it comes to soft women made his own fatal mistake. Tramp or not Debby didn’t take kindly when in a fit of rage Lenny threw coffee in her face, her money face. Lenny got the big kiss-off. So did Mister Big when he tried to use Bannion’s young daughter as a shield against him. Too bad it wasn’t so easy to get rid of real Mister Bigs. But you know Bannion was right, Bannion had it figured just right because he knew if you could take down a cop like him, a straight and narrow guy, it was bad for the profession bad for every cop, good or bad. Maybe he too had watched Bogie’s Sam Spade go through his paces.