The Big Heat

Grahame spends much of Fritz Lang’s bleak, thrilling noir with half her face hidden behind a bandage or a layer of prosthetic makeup, yet she is unmistakably the film’s center of gravity. Her role as a gangster’s moll caught between her luxurious life of crime—“most of the time, it’s a lot of fun”—and her affections for a rigidly honest cop (Glenn Ford) confirmed and deepened her reputation as a sinister seductress, beyond giving her some of the finest lines of her career. (“You’re about as romantic as a pair of handcuffs.”) But this reputation never fully captured the scope of Grahame’s emotional range in films like The Big Heat, where she projects a magnificent combination of pride, fear, restlessness, confidence, and doubt.