“we can also determine that he is a "cold-war liberal" precisely because he is engaged in building a bridge to those to the right of himself and bringing those to the left along with him” (Whose 16).
The “Lagana's game is the only game in town. There is no recourse to his power, no court of appeal. There are no honest. cops, no Driscoll, no Crime Commission. Bannion's extremist view of the society is borne out by the film itself. Crime and the system are synonymous. And, as the titles of films like The Case Against Brooklyn indicate, the enemy is not only crime but the city itself, urban life, culture” (The Enemy Within 190-191).
In the final shot of The Big Heat, after dispatching Lagana, Bannion is back on the job, answering the phone with the familiar, reassuring, "Bannion, Homicide"; he appears to have rejoined society, having relinquished his extremism, but in fact, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it is society that has given in. Those who resisted, the business as usual organization men and the corrupt professionals, have been either converted or purged” (The Enemy Within 193-194).
The Enemy Within: The Big Heat, pp. 189-194.
Whose in Charge Here? We the Jury: 12 Angry Men and the Anatomy of Consenus, pp. 10-20.
...