Joe Lewis' The Big Combo (1955)is a vicious, low-budget the film noir that looks like a million dollars. In a metropolis where the sun never shines, cops and gangsters strut through alleys cloaked in fog. In the opening sequence, a pale blonde in a shimmer of white radiance runs through the shadowy archways of a nightmare colosseum. A boxing match is underway in an orb of smoky light, but the dame is appalled and wants to escape the bloody spectacle. Two gunsels run her down, plunging through the chiaroscuro corridor under the arena. There's a lunch counter that looks like something out of Edward Hopper, a small, fragrant oblong of light in the dark wasteland of the city. In the belly of the colosseum, a sadistic gangster is taunting the bloodied losing boxer while his cowardly obsequious sidekick nods and grimaces. The lecture that the gangster is giving to the defeated gladiator resounds with the sidekick, a man who is also defeated, although by the mobster who has taken over his hotel, his gang, and his life. "First is first," the mobster, Mr. Brown, says, "Second is nobody." The Big Combo channels the energy and vivid imagery of another "big"-named picture, Fritz Lang's The Big Heat -- it's got a similar plot involving an incorruptible if reckless cop pursuing a gangster whose tentacles have corrupted the whole city where the action is set. There's an abused moll cowering before the gang boss and some colorful supporting actors, mostly playing psycho-thugs. The Big Combo works variations on the patterns of light and dark that animate Lang's film. In fact, the climax of Lewis' movie pays homage to another Lang film, Metropolis. In the silent picture, the villain Rotwang uses a spotlight to pin his victim, the virtuous Maria, to the walls of a dripping catacomb. In The Big Heat, the roles are reversed; the abused girlfriend takes her revenge on the villain by flashing a light mounted on the fender of a big, dark sedan on the bad guy, again using a beam of light to pin him against the all-encompassing darkness.
A dedicated cop, Lawrence Diamond (Cornel Wilde) is obsessed with convicting a mobster, Mr. Brown, the boss of the "big combo." The combo runs the city and, through byzantine machinations, has caused four high school students, compromised by the criminals, to be on trial for murder. Diamond is a "righteous man" -- this is how Mr. Brown describes him -- and he's a thorn in the side of the mobster. Complicating Diamond's crusade is the fact that he has fallen in love with mobster's girl, Susan Lowell, the pale wraith-like figure we see fleeing the boxing arena in the first scene. Susan Lowell was once a concert pianist although she doesn't play any longer. (Her vocation motivates some showy and thunderous piano accompaniment to some of the action.) The plot is complicated and barely credible, full of baroque details -- Mr. Brown tortures Diamond by jamming a hearing aid in his ear and, then, playing amplified jazz, including a "crazy" drum solo as Wilde's character writhes and trembles in a puddle of light in a dark room. A number of bystanders get killed in various picturesque ways. Mr. Brown seems obsessed with someone named "Alicia" -- he has scribbled the letters of her name on a wet window. (Susan Lowell whispers "Alicia" as she collapses in an early scene, knocked out by pills she has taken to attempt suicide. Diamond arrests the delirious woman, threatening her with six months in jail for attempting to kill herself.) It turns out that Alicia has been incarcerated in an insane asylum by Mr. Brown, her former husband. She wasn't insane when he put in the mad house but she is now -- she casts her wild eyes at the camera behind a frieze of orchids to which she attends in the asylum. There are two homosexual thugs, Fante and Mingo. They get blown up by a hand grenade delivered to them when they are "on the mattresses" in a safe house that turns out to be not so safe at all. (Mr. Brown wants them out of the way since they know too much.) The one thug is killed outright but the other, apparently covered in third degree burns, sobs as he sees the wreckage of his buddy. There are psychoanalytical "free association" word games with Mr. Brown attached to a polygraph. When he's not mooning around over Susan Lowell, the film's snow-white blonde, Diamond dates a show-girl, a burlesque cutie, named Rita. Brown sends thugs to machine-gun Diamond but they accidentally pump 11 bullets into poor, serpentine Rita, the dark-haired heroine who contrasts with the virginal platinum blonde Susan Lowell. Conscience-stricken, Diamond realizes that he was just using Rita for sex while investing all his love in the unapproachable Susan Lowell, a woman who is owned by the vicious Mr. Brown. "I treated her like a pair of gloves," Diamond says about Rita, "when I was cold I called her up." Pretty much everyone in the movie ends up getting murdered. With Susan Lowell's assistance, Diamond captures Mr. Brown on a backlot set steamed up with black fog. "I don't want to go to jail," Mr. Brown wails, begging the cops to shoot him dead.
Richard Conti is excellent as the suave and vicious gangster. Cornell Wilde manfully endures torture, one of his specialties as an actor. Rita looks like Morticia Adams and, when she's gunned down, we see a flashing light in the darkness spelling out "burlesque." There are a lot of crumpled-looking and bruised character actors to savor. The dialogue is particularly pungent and clipped. This is an excellent genre piece. There is one noteworthy scene. Mr. Brown's second banana (played by Brian Donlevy) as a cringing subordinate gets shot by a tommy gun. Before he kills him, Brown pulls out Donlevy's hearing aid, used as a torture device in earlier scenes: the music abruptly stops and, in the silence, we see muzzle flashes blossoming on the screen. I guarantee you'll like this movie from beginning to end; I also gurantee that you'll forget it in about thirty minutes -- all good film noir are, more or less, alike. You can watch a colorized version of The Big Combo on Amazon Prime for free; resist the temptation and pay the 99 cents to see the picture in its original black-and-white. The superb camera-work is by John Alton.
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