The Big Combo (1955)

Posted by Karen

My pick for this week's NOTW is The Big Combo, one of my favorite – and most watched – noirs. Of all my favorites, it has more fascinating and memorable characters than almost any other. The heart of the film centers on a triangle between Mr. Brown, a hood played with venomous glee by Richard Conte, his weak-willed society girlfriend, Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), and Leonard Diamond (Wallace’s then-husband Cornel Wilde), a police detective who is driven both by his obsession for Susan and his determination to bring Mr. Brown to justice. Ultimately, Diamond gets his man and the girl, but it is the characters, rather than the plot, that make this film so unforgettable.


We start with Conte’s Brown – a vicious, conscienceless, unflappable mobster whose power and demeanor are hinted at in the film’s first few minutes. Brown’s girl, Susan, is seen running through the bowels of a boxing arena, chased by two of Brown’s henchmen. When they catch her, they insist on returning her to Brown, who is watching the match above. “Mr. Brown is mad already,” one of the hoods tells her. “We lost you for two minutes.” Brown himself illustrates his persona in a lengthy speech that ends in his pronouncement that “first is first and second is nobody.” He not only holds a lofty opinion of himself, but a low view of most others. In one encounter with Diamond, he declines to address the cop directly, instead telling an underling, “Joe, the man has reason to hate me. His salary is $96.50 a week. The busboys in my hotels make better money than that.” And, later, he contemptuously browbeats his second-in-command: “Go to bed. Stay there. You been sick, understand – sick. And if they take you to police headquarters, shoot yourself in the head. It’ll make everything a lot simpler.” The second-in-command that Brown addresses is Joe McClure (Brian Donlevy), an aging mobster with a hearing impediment who was once Brown’s boss. Now, McClure is the “Rodney Dangerfield” of the outfit – he garners respect neither from Brown nor from Brown’s other underlings, Fanty (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl Holliman) – in one scene, McClure objects when Fanty charges him a fee for the privilege of working Diamond over. “Didn’t Mr. Brown pay you?” McClure asks. And Fanty replies, “You’re not Mr. Brown. For Mr. Brown, I’d snatch a judge from Superior Court for a chocolate soda.”

Diamond and Susan Lowell are only slightly less fascinating than Brown and his band of miscreants. We learn early on that Diamond is in love with Susan, that he spent money out of his own meager salary to trail her around the country for six months – yet, we find soon after that she isn’t even aware of his existence. We also discover that, despite his seemingly upstanding, beyond-reproach countenance, he has an on-again, off-again relationship with a showgirl who winds up getting murdered in Diamond’s apartment in a case of mistaken identity. “I treated her like a pair of gloves,” Diamond tearfully admits after her body is discovered. “When I was cold, I called her up.” As for Susan, her beauty belies a lack of self-esteem and direction, and she is sexually drawn to Brown despite his possessiveness and sadistic treatment. She is obviously miserable and, like his other underlings, even calls him “Mr. Brown” – yet, she has been with him for four years.

Small but equally memorable characters included Brown’s long-estranged wife, Alicia (played by Helen Walker who here, after years of alcohol abuse, looked far older than her 35 years); Bettini (Ted deCorsia), a shipman who is able to tie Brown to his wife’s disappearance and who resignedly expects to be killed for the knowledge; and Nils Dreyer (John Hoyt), a hard-boiled antiques dealer who coolly refuses to reveal to Diamond his connection with Mr. Brown (“Because I have lunch with him, that is not a crime,” Dreyer says with amusement. “I have lunch with anybody – I’m democratic. I’ll even have lunch with you. Ha ha.”)

Aside from its fascinating characters, The Big Combo features shadowy cinematography by John Alton, a great melancholy jazzy score by David Raksin, and direction from Joseph Lewis, who also helmed such noir gems as Gun Crazy and My Name is Julia Ross. It’s a must-see – and see it over and over again.