The Big Combo (Security Pictures, Theodora Productions, Allied Artists, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 16) my husband Charles and I watched an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation of a quite interesting gangster movie with film noir elements from 1955: The Big Combo, made under auspices that reflected the breakdown of the traditional Hollywood studio system in the early 1950’s and its replacement by ad hoc combinations of “production companies,” many of them owned or co-owned by star actors. This one was from two companies called “Security Pictures” and “Theodora Productions,” “Theodora” being the company created by actor Cornel Wilde to make his own movies in association with distributors. In this case the distributor was Allied Artists, formerly our old friends Monogram Pictures until in 1947 they changed their name and started moving up in the cinematic hierarchy. In 1955 Steve Broidy, long-time head of Allied nèe Monogram, announced that he had signed William Wyler, Billy Wilder and John Huston to make prestige pictures for the company – and its stock price immediately went down because, as Wilder biographer Maurice Zolotow explained, his investors realized that “A” productions were a considerably riskier investment than the “B” movies that had previously sustained the studio and given it a source of steady income. (Wyler made Friendly Persuasion, Wilder Love in the Afternoon, and Huston signed to make Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart – only by the time Huston finally got around to making The Man Who Would Be King, it was 20 years later, Gable and Bogart were both dead, and the stars were Sean Connery and Michael Caine.)

The Big Combo was originally planned as at least a semi-prestige film called The Hoodlum, to be shot in color with Spencer Tracy and Jack Palance as stars and Hugo Fregonese directing from a script by – or at least attributed to – Philip Yordan. There’s some question as to just who actually wrote this film because Yordan was making a handsome living working as a “front” for blacklisted writers, and according to Eddie Muller the actual author of this script was Ben Maddow, who had made his name in Hollywood writing the script for John Huston’s 1950 noir classic The Asphalt Jungle. Maddow’s imdb.com biography page includes a quote from him about Yordan: “Philip Yordan has never written more than a sentence in his life. He’s incapable of writing.” (Yet Yordan has a pretty impressive pre-blacklist credits list, including When Strangers Marry, the 1945 Dillinger, Whistle Stop, Suspense and The Chase.) Whoever came up with it, The Big Combo is a quite good gangster/noir film centered around the rivalry of two main characters, police lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) and gang boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte, who joined the cast four days into the shoot after Jack Palance pulled out of the project out of anger that they wouldn’t let his wife play the female lead). The director, Joseph H. Lewis, was called in at the last moment just two days before shooting was supposed to begin. Fortunately he had the great noir cinematographer John Alton on the project, and Alton used his trademark skill of shooting fast and well on a low budget throughout the movie. Also, whoever wrote the script (Yordan, Maddow or both), The Big Combo has some fascinatingly multidimensional characterizations, especially among the three principal women.

It’s also one of those movies in which the lead crook is in some ways more sympathetic than the lead cop: Lt. Diamond is arrogant, self-righteous and generally a pain in the ass, while Mr. Brown (Richard Conte gives the performance of his life; he’s still a crook but a far savvier and more sophisticated one than the hoods he usually played) is suave, sophisticated and skilled at maintaining a front of respectability even though he’s the Big Boss of crime in that city and the dialogue explaining the reach of his power sounds a lot like Sherlock Holmes talking about Professor Moriarty to me. (Frankly, Richard Conte plays the part considerably better than Jack Palance would have; Palance was a first-rate actor as a figure of stylized menace but couldn’t have pulled off the character’s surface suavity as well as Conte.) As for the women, Jean Wallace (then, and until they divorced in 1982, Mrs. Cornel Wilde) is superb as Susan Lowell, a former aspiring concert pianist who gave up her career to pair up with Mr. Brown and who lets him push her around out of self-loathing. Also, Lt. Diamond is attracted to her – even though he’s already got a girlfriend (more on her later) – thereby setting up one of those hero-heroine-villain love triangles that powered many of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films. The woman already in Lt. Diamond’s life is a stripper named Rita (Helene Stanton) whom he sees regularly after she finishes her nightly shows, only she gets eliminated when Mr. Brown sends a pair of hired killers, Mingo (Earl Holliman) and Fante (future spaghetti-Western star Lee Van Cleef), over to Lt. Diamond’s apartment to kill him – only she’s let herself in with his key and they kill her instead.

There’s a third woman in the dramatis personae: Alicia Brown (Helen Walker in her final film; before this she’d been in some major mid-1940’s noirs including Nightmare Alley, Call Northside 777 and Impact), Mr. Brown’s estranged wife. Her presence in the story is part of an elaborate set of cons Mr. Brown has pulled to make it look like she ran off with a gangster named Grazzi (whom we never see except in an old still photo) and later was killed. Only it turns out that Mr. Brown’s agents killed Grazzi on a steamship that was supposedly taking him home to Sicily and threw his body overboard, then made it look like Alicia was dead instead of Grazzi when in fact she’s alive in a New York state nursing home obsessively tending a stand of flowers she’s grown. Lt. Diamond traces her there and arrests her in order to force her to testify against Mr. Brown, which she’s initially reluctant to do but ultimately agrees. There are some quite chilling scenes in The Big Combo that definitely pushed the envelope of the sorts of violence usually permitted under the Motion Picture Production Code, including a scene in which Lt. Diamond is held hostage by Mr. Brown and his thugs and is force-fed an alcoholic beverage – it looks like he’s being waterboarded, only with booze – and a great scene in which Mr. Brown’s assistant, Joe McClure (Brian Donlevy), tries to get Mingo and Fante to kill Mr. Brown – only they kill McClure instead. The gimmick relies on the fact that McClure, who used to run the rackets Brown now controls, is nearly deaf and relies on a hearing aid, and just before Mingo and Fante turn their guns on him, Mr. Brown unplugs McClure’s hearing aid. Lewis stages the scene of McClure’s murder totally soundlessly, with the guns blasting away but without making noise.

The Big Combo is also unusual in that the hired killers are portrayed more or less as a Gay couple, though this wasn’t as innovative as Eddie Muller seemed to think it was; eight years earlier, in an RKO “B” noir called Born to Kill, Lawrence Tierney and Elisha Cook, Jr. had similarly been portrayed as a criminal couple with Gay undertones. There are also bits that dramatize Susan Lowell’s disquiet with her current status as Mr. Brown’s moll and her yearnings for her old life as an aspiring concert pianist. In one scene she picks up an older man named Audubon (Roy Gordon) for a dance in a nightclub, and as she’s in his arms she collapses and later explains she’s O.D.’d on pills as a way of committing suicide. (This was apparently inspired by Jean Wallace’s two real-life suicide attempts in 1946 and 1949, while she was married to actor Franchot Tone.) Then we see her at home playing a record of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 3 in C-sharp minor by pianist Jakob Gimpel (whose Vox album of Chopin selections I remember having as a child), only Mr. Brown comes home unexpectedly and makes her stop the record. In an even later scene we get to see Gimpel as himself playing the same Chopin piece as part of a live concert Susan attends, though she’s overcome with disgust and leaves the concert early. The film’s climax takes place at an airport where Mr. Brown is waiting in vain for a pilot to bring his private plane and fly him out of the country – only the pilot doesn’t show (he’s previously been arrested by Lt. Diamond’s men) and the cops do instead, taking Mr. Brown into custody for a presumed trial with Susan and Alicia as the key witnesses against him.

The original plan was actually to shoot this at an airport à la Casablanca, but John Alton had a better idea. He said he could shoot the entire thing on a soundstage, with just shadows and pin lights. Since the airplane never shows up, Alton didn’t think they needed to budget the rental for a real plane. Instead they created the effect with shadows and spotlights alone, and the climax of the scene comes when Susan, showing that her loyalties have changed and she’s now on the side of good, grabs hold of a spotlight attached to one of the cars in the scene and uses it to point the police to just where Mr. Brown is so they can aim at him. Charles and I had seen The Big Combo once before in the 1990’s on the UCSD channel, though in a far inferior print that was cut down to the old 4:3 aspect ratio, but this time around I liked it a lot better. It’s generally acknowledged as Lewis’s second-best film (after his audacious 1949 masterpiece, Gun Crazy) and it’s certainly one of the better movies from the tail end of the first film noir cycle. It’s also noteworthy for the jazz background score by David Raksin (composer of the 1944 Laura), featuring Shorty Rogers and His Giants, one of the top white L.A. jazz bands of the time. Producer Sidney Harmon and director Lewis deserve kudos for not slapping another generic mittel-European score on this one and using the music its characters would have listened to instead – anticipating Henry Mancini’s use of a jazz score for the noir TV series Peter Gunn by two years.