The Big Combo

A subversive noir featuring obsession, corruption, homoeroticism, and insanity, Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo is like a minefield of desperate acts by desperate characters. With an inky visual palette by cinematographer John Alton, whose final shot in the airport hangar is widely hailed as the singular visualization of the noir style, the film stars Cornel Wilde as Lieutenant Leonard Diamond, a work-addicted police detective with a monomaniacal determination to bring down crime boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), perhaps in large part because Diamond has fallen in love with — and wants to liberate — Brown’s captive, suicidal girlfriend, Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace, Wilde’s real-life wife at the time). With so many witnesses either on Brown’s payroll or having been “disappeared,” including Brown’s own, institutionalized wife Alicia (Helen Walker) who escaped through insanity (“I’d rather be insane and alive than sane but dead”), Diamond continues searching for a clean shot at putting Brown away, even (inexplicably) after Brown and his goons kidnap Diamond, torture him, and force feed him a bottle of liquor. Brian Donlevy plays Brown’s number two, Joe McClure, who resents Brown’s position and ultimately attempts to topple him, while the relatively unknown Helene Stanton plays a dancer whose frequent dalliances with Diamond (“I treated her like a pair of gloves,” he says. “When I was cold, I called her up”) lead to her very unhappy ending. Lewis and Alton, along with famed screenwriter Philip Yordan, create here a poetry of brutality, an inventiveness of despair, even violence, such as the execution by firing line in total silence. The Big Combo also holds the distinction as the only classic American noir to feature what most consider an indisputably gay relationship in the assassin duo of Fante (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl Holliman): they sleep next to each other and refer to a future together, and it’s Mingo’s love for Fante that precipitates Brown’s final downfall.