The Big Combo

Joseph H. Lewis was one of the most distinctive low-budget stylists of the 1940s and '50s, a filmmaker who—at his best—was able to overcome budgetary limitations and conventional scripts with shadowy atmosphere, striking images, startling set-pieces, and obsessive characters on the edge. This 1955 production brings film-noir style and attitude to a crime drama starring Cornel Wilde as Lt. Leonard Diamond, a driven cop who hounds preening mobster Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), the latter an arrogant kingpin who has made chilly blonde debutante Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace) his emotional slave. Brian Donlevy is Joe McClure, a Brown cohort with a hearing aid (a detail used in one of the picture's distinctive torture scenes), while Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman are buddy-team hired killers Fante and Mingo, who are also working for Brown. Lewis turns the tale into a personal battle between the obsessive lawman and the megalomaniac criminal in an abstract vision of big-city America that is created from stock sets, slashes of light, and pools of darkness—all courtesy of cinematographer extraordinaire John Alton, who helps create an austere, eerily empty yet simultaneously claustrophobic world that is drenched in death and doom. Newly remastered for DVD and bowing on Blu-ray, this fine film from the late years of the noir era is recommended. (S. Axmaker)