Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo (1955) isn’t as celebrated as Gun Crazy (1950), his other great film noir, but it’s as perverse and violent as anything in the canon. A vehicle for the husband-and-wife team of Cornel Wilde and Jean Wallace, it’s about a dogged plainclothesman, Leonard Diamond, who has spent three years following Susan Lowell, a masochistic socialite enmeshed with suavely sadistic Mob boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) whose organisation, the Combination, leaves no traces. Diamond thinks Susan will lead him to expose Brown – but, of course, he’s fallen obsessively in love with her, Laura-style.
Thanks to the Rembrandt-influenced chiaroscuro of John Alton’s cinematography, this is one of the most beautiful noirs – an expressionistic shadowplay of sooty blacks and incandescent whites, of fogs and murks, that emphasise the characters’ emotional extremes. The silhouette shot that follows the climactic airport shootout – a proto-feminist improvement on Casablanca’s – is one of noir’s most iconic images; the opening sequence depicting the damaged heroine escaping a boxing arena and tripping along spot-lit alleyways is equally evocative.
It’s Wallace who gives the standout performance. Susan’s sexual dependence on the lover-imprisoner she despises has rendered her tremulous and suicidal. When, in the film’s most disturbing sequence, Brown starts ravishing her with kisses from behind, the camera dollies in for a close-up of her succumbing to ecstasy that borders on agony.
Set in a neon dystopia fanfared by David Raskin’s brash brass score, The Big Combo would be an exercise in nihilism but for Lewis and writer Philip Yordan’s human touches: the deafness of Brown’s humiliated lieutenant (Brian Donlevy), the weariness of the old Mob soldier who gives Diamond a crucial lead, the tenderness of the hard-boiled burlesque dancer who loves Diamond unrequitedly, the feigned insanity of Brown’s traumatised ex-wife, even the love of one of Brown’s murderous goons for his partner-in-crime, the latter played nonchalantly by a handsome Lee Van Cleef.
Watch a clip from The Big Combo
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