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Plot The PlotPolice detective Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) is obsessed with both organized crime boss Mr Brown (Richard Conte) and Brown's girl friend Susan (Jean Wallace). He wants the criminal in jail and the once innocent blonde for himself. His boss wants him to quit wasting tax payer money, but Diamond dives still deeper into his burning dual quests, experiencing cheap sex, dry lust and torture on his way down through ever darker mysteries. Film Notes"It's Unnatural to Be So Innocent"Cornel Wilde mouths the words above in The Big Combo. Innocent, however, is not a word to describe anyone in this unjustly forgotten surperb example of Film-Noir. B-Movie master Joseph H. Lewis, director of the great Gun Crazy, and the not so great (but fun) Invisible Ghost, combined his talents with screenwriter Phillip Yordan and cinematographer John Alton to create one of the darkest (literally) journeys into sexuality in film history. The UnnamableDetective Len Diamond is after something he cannot admit, or maybe even name. He is using the job and the law as a mask for his dark neurotic impulses that cause as much destruction and pain as the crime lord's more conscious actions. He hungers to save a woman he has never met, and sublimates his appetite using and abusing another woman who dies in his place, killing his denial and ratcheting his rage to even higher levels. Someone must be punished, and almost everyone is, including Diamond, before the end credits roll. What defines bad in a bad world? A Light in the DarknessFilm Noir always means the screen will be filled with darkness as light from below sculpts the subjects and objects with shadows. For most of the 90 minutes running time, Lewis and Alton stick to the plan as obsessively as the neurotic cop and quietly crazy criminal pursue their pathological paths. Two short scenes are the exceptions. The first is at a concert hall balcony during a performance. Detective Diamond talks to Susan in what normally would be a darkened space. Instead it is overlit. The second is an insane asylum, where Diamond has tracked down a woman named Alicia. Though possibly just anomalies of low budget and little time, the careful cinematography of every other moment of the film suggests that the world and reality have been turned inside out. The concert hall for Susan, a former classical pianist, represents her old life before her fall, the overlighting here representing a brief respite from psychological darkness. The bright insane asylum, where one would feel that minds are in everlasting confused darkness, becomes a place of clarity compared to the "normal" outside world. To Hear or Not to Hear, to See or Not to SeeThere are so many brilliant moments in The Big Combo. Two concern a seemingly innocuous hearing aid worn by Brian Donlevy, Mr Brown's number 2 guy. The aid is used as an instrument of torture on Cornel Wilde, pumping up the sound of wild jazz music until Wilde's ear drum bursts in volcanic pain. The aid then performas an opposite role later in the film, as Mr Brown removes Donlevy's ear on the world moments before he is shot, to spare him the horror of the sound of guns blasting him away. We see the guns flashing as the film goes silent for the killing. A more subtle moment of brilliance in the film comes when Mr Brown tries to soothe a seething Susan by first kissing her ears, her neck, then her shoulders, and then disappearing far down below the line of the screen image as Susan's face in close up turns sensually ecstatic bathed in light against darkness. This subltely sensational action goes all the way in explaining why a once innocent society girl continues her enthrallment with the underworld. Image = Action = ImageThe Big Combo fills the screen with: ...big band Jazz...John Alton black and white perfection... nightmare alleys...low key lighting...shadows on shadows...bare walls...suicide by pills...ghostly nurses...torture by Jazz...force feeding hair-tonic down a man's throat...back stage burlesque joints...a silent shooting... Responsiblity Lies...Beyond the intensely wonderful black and white, extreme camera angled style and perfectly seamy story, actors carry their share of the load in The Big Combo. Richard ConteStage trained Richard Conte was Don Barzini, Don Corleone's rival in The Godfather. However, in a long career in mostly crime films where he began in the 1930s as the "New John Garfield," The Big Combo is possibly his greatest achievement. As Mr Brown, Conte underplays almost every moment with a quiet, reckless confidence. When an outburst of anger or violence comes, it's like a flashbulb in the face that then fades back into calm, leaving a trace behind the eyes. Most importantly, his performance stands in perfect contrast to Wilde's wild eyed cop. Who is the real bad guy? Cornel WildeHandsome and athletic Cornel Wilde played heavies, swashbucklers, gypsies, emperors; he even played Frederick Chopin. Intelligent and ambitious enough, forming his own production company in 1950s and directing a number of films, he was neither a gifted actor nor a big star, but usually competent enough. In The Big Combo though, he's on the right track, and though he never quite gets there, he heads in the right direction. It's certainly not a bad performance, but you can't help wishing for someone else who could go deeper. Robert Ryan? Ralph Meeker? Burt Lancaster? Still, it's a more than honorable attempt, and he doesn't hurt the film. Jean WallaceMarried to both Cornel Wilde and Franchot Tone, Jean Wallace had a kind of vacant blondness to her, somewhat like Veronica Lake, a glowing absence of personality that draws you in, or possibly allows you to draw whatever you'd like to see. Cast perfectly in The Big Combo, her bright beauty shines in the darkness, from the very first view of her running through dark alleys. She is the silver screen upon which men project all their desires. Strangely, and somewhat perversely, she attempted suicide twice in real life before her on-screen suicide attempt in The Big Combo. You can catch Ms Wallace in two other Alameda TV cLASSICS – Man in the Eiffel Tower and Jigsaw. Brian Donlevy Lee Van Cleef and Earl HollimanBrian Donlevy joined the U.S. Army at age 14 and fought against Pancho Villa. He joined the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I, and he seemed well on the way to an illustrious military life when stage and screen called. His role as sporadically ambitious, but indecisive and nerveless Joe McClure in The Big Combo had him playing against his usual blustery confidence to a wonderful effect. Check out Donlevy in another Alameda TV cLASSIC – Impact. Lee Van Cleef and Earl HollimanLast but not least, come Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman. Lee Van Cleef, of course, is most famous for The Good the Bad and the Ugly and For a Few Dollars More. Those films, however were made in the mid-sixties, after a decade and a half of playing secondary roles as gangsters, cowboys and Indians in movies and TV. The two Sergio Leone films catapulted him for a time into starring roles in Spaghetti Westerns and European Spy films. Best known as Anige Dickenson's partner in TV's Police Woman, Earl Holliman was a go-to supporting actor in A-movie comedies and dramas in the late 50s and early 60s. In The Big Combo, Van Cleef and Holliman play Fante and Mingo, Mr Brown's muscle. The pair are richly sketched into the background, precursors to Harold Pinter's gunmen in The Dumbwaiter. And in a daring character detail, the two are also more than hinted at as being in a homosexual relationship. Watch for the moment when they are hiding in the wine cellar of the hotel and Mingo (Holliman), gently touches Fante's arm. It may be the the only real affection between two characters in the film and is shown without condescension or irony. And I Quote"The only thing I play now is Stud Poker." – Susan "You should have hit me back. You haven't got the hate." – Mr Brown. "First is first and second is nobody." – Mr Brown "Nobody knows how another person feels." – Susan "You should wear white. I like you in white. A woman dresses to please a man." – Mr Brown "I'd rather be insane and alive than sane and dead." – Alicia
-- Ed Schneider - Alameda TV Cast
Production Credits
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