The Big Combo desperately wants to be a dark and violent film noir, but it merely succeeds in being a rather unmemorable crime melodrama, though it is fairly violent.
Brian Donlevy has the most interesting role in the movie, the right hand man of a gangster named Mr. Brown. Donlevy’s Joe McClure is routinely humiliated by Brown, who never fails to remind McClure that the crime organization could have been his if he was more of a man.
The constant emasculation of McClure is probably the really only interesting twist in this film. McClure is completely pathetic, yet still harbors hopes of someday unseating Brown. Brown though is able to show him rather frequently why that won’t happen since McClure is whipped like a dog.
Just to drive the point home that McClure is not a complete male, he’s wearing a hearing aid! A gangster with a hearing aid? How could this movie not be better?
As with fully one third of all gangster flicks, this one starts off at a boxing match. A blonde chick, who we learn is Mr. Brown’s squeeze Susan Lowell, is trying to leave the match and two goons have been dispatched to stop her.
They tell her that Mr. Brown doesn’t want her leaving the match and finally she says that she’s hungry so they go out for a bite to eat. One of the goons explains that if that’s what makes her happy, that’s okay, because Mr. Brown wants her kept happy. Why can’t she be happy sitting around watching one of Brown’s palooka’s getting his brains bashed out? Didn’t she realize that was in the job description when she signed up to be a gangster’s moll?
In the locker room after the fight, we meet Mr. Brown. He’s a serious looking guy who talks in a fast, clipped style that is supposed to come off as being tough and criminal, but eventually makes you think that he talks that way just so that he doesn’t get interrupted.
We get a peek into Brown’s mentality when he slaps his loser boxer and tells him that if he really “wanted it” he would have punched him back.
He also tells the boxer that the key to succeeding in life is hate. You have to hate the other guy and want to destroy and kill him and eat his children and stuff. He makes a point of saying that the boxer is pretty much like that old wuss McClure (McClure is standing right there) and that hate is the reason why Brown runs the show and why McClure runs a Miracle Ear.
There is someone else in this movie with a bunch of hate balled up inside him. His name is Lieutenant Leonard Diamond and he is one of those super-square cops who is constantly having to explain to his lazy, unambitious, and three days away from retirement superiors, why he keeps spending all the department’s money trying to bust the town’s biggest gangster.
Diamond has somehow managed to spend $18,000 on his investigation of Brown. This money seems to mainly include the cost of following around his sexy blonde girlfriend, Susan. In fact, Diamond even spent his own money to follow her to Cuba!
His boss says that he thinks Diamond is in love with her. Diamond insists that she’s just a grody girl who probably has cooties and that he’s bound and determined to bring Brown to justice.
And what of this blonde? Well, she’s out eating and dancing and overdosing on pills. She obviously feels like her and Brown’s relationship needs work and this causes Brown and Diamond to meet up at the hospital. There’s a lot of tough talk and Diamond tells Brown that he’s going to charge her with trying to kill herself and that she could face up to six months in the county lock up for that and Brown goes and gets a court order to let her go.
Before Diamond has to release Susan, he obtains a nugget of information that propels his case and the movie’s plot along. Suzy mentions the name “Alicia” and Diamond finds out that she saw Brown writing that name in the fog on a window and then erased it and played dumb when Suzy asked him about it. Immediately, Diamond realizes that this Alicia must somehow hold the key to unraveling Brown and his nefarious Combination!
Diamond arrests 95 people in Brown’s Big Combo (it is pretty big, isn’t it?) including Brown and questions everyone about Alicia, but no one knows anything. Then they get Brown hooked up to a polygraph machine and start asking him questions. Brown doesn’t have to do it, but he’s one of those wiseguys who’s a little too wise for his own good. An unlikely slip during some word association sends Diamond down the path that ultimately unravels the case!
There’s plenty of action to keep you involved in this movie and it’s pretty rough and tumble with some nice visuals, but the story is such a generic crime melodrama, that The Big Combo has to rate as a fairly major disappointment.
Outside of McClure, the characters are your standard issue bad guy, good guy, and gangster girl, with little depth or dimension to any of them. Brown is a one-note villain and though he is done in by his women, he treated them like so much crap that the only question you had about them turning on him is what took so long.
Diamond isn’t even mildly conflicted about anything in this movie. He’s just after Brown for being a bad guy. There is mention that he’s motivated by his feelings for the girl, but there’s never any information that they had any past together.
Am I supposed to think that he just saw her and got obsessed with her and now is trying to destroy her boyfriend so he can have her? That’s fairly creepy (and interesting), but that angle is never really followed up on or developed beyond the initial comments from Diamond’s boss and the fact that they end up together.
The film’s got plenty of hard boiled dialogue and atmosphere to keep aficionados of that sort of thing happy and it’s a sturdy enough crimebuster movie, but it never transcends its story and develops into anything beyond that due to its run of the mill characters.
© 2011 MonsterHunter
What interested me in this movie is that the two thugs played by Lee van Cleef and Earl Holliman are obviously gay lovers : they share a bedroom ( with twin beds, but this was the 50s after all,) and Van Cleef wears a silk dressing gown in one scene, which is Hollywood shorthand for effeminacy. Also Holliman’s last word is the other guy’s name. IThey’re practically an earlier version of the duo in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER.