William P. McGivern's serial in The Saturday Evening Post, published as a novel in 1953, was the basis for the screenplay, written by former crime reporter Sydney Boehm.

[4][5] Homicide detective Sergeant Dave Bannion, of the Kenport Police Department, is called on to investigate the suicide of a fellow officer, Tom Duncan.

Bannion that Tom Duncan had not been in ill health, and had no reason to kill himself, but had recently agreed to a divorce with his wife.

The next day, Lieutenant Ted Wilks is under pressure from "upstairs" to close the case, and orders Bannion to drop his investigation.

He confronts Mike Lagana, a mob boss who runs the city, and discovers that people are too scared to stand up to the crime syndicate.

When Lagana's second-in-command, Vince Stone, punishes a woman there, burning her with a cigar butt, Bannion stands up to him and his thugs.

Bannion forces Gordon to admit to the car-bombing, and to reveal that Duncan's widow is blackmailing Stone and Lagana with incriminating documents.

Bannion goes to deal with Stone when Wilks arrives, now prepared to take a stand against the mob and his corrupt boss.

The film was based on a serialized fiction by William P. McGivern, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post from December 1952 and was published as a novel in 1953.

Initially, McGivern's novel was to be produced by Jerry Wald, who wanted either Paul Muni, George Raft or Edward G. Robinson (who worked with director Fritz Lang in Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street) for the role of Dave Bannion.

In the end, Reason was not cast and Peter Whitney and Robert Burton got the roles of Tierney and Burke respectively.

In the scene at the bar where Stone and Bannion first meet, the house band is performing "Put the Blame on Mame," a song also heard in the 1946 noir classic Gilda, also starring Ford, and also produced by Columbia.

Bosley Crowther of the Times described Glenn Ford "as its taut, relentless star" and praised Lang for bringing "forth a hot one with a sting.

The website's consensus reads: "Presented with stark power by director Fritz Lang, The Big Heat is a delightfully grim noir that peers into the heart of darkness without blinking.

[18] Proclaiming it "one of the great post-war noir films", the Registry stated that The Big Heat "manages to be both stylized and brutally realistic, a signature of its director Fritz Lang.