The Big Combo (1955)
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. This movie was sold as film noir, had a name that lead me to believe it was film noir, and even featured Brian Donlevy. Donlevy starred with Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd in The Glass Key , a decent film noir, but here he's purely the second banana and all the fog, shadows, and tough talking can't disguise this movie for being the pretender that it is.
Donlevy does play 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, they have him 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 Susan Lowell, is trying to leave the match and two goons have been dispatched to stop her. The goons are named Fante (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo. These toughs are Mr. Brown's hired muscle and Susan is Mr. Brown's hired hooch. 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. Fante 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. It begins to come off as a canned gimmick that in the real world people would imitate and make fun of, rather than be cowed by. Did anyone think that that Federal Express guy that talked really fast was a tough guy?
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. Is this guy my high school track coach? 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 with the hearing aid (McClure is standing right there) and that hate is the reason why Brown runs the show and why McClure folds his laundry and has to call him "Bruce."
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. Then he goes on a rant about how Brown and his organization (called the Combination, as in The Big Combo, which sounds like a ridiculous wrestling tag team from the eighties) was responsible for opening some gambling joint in the gangster part of town, known as "the Little Mafia" section.
Four young guys lose all their money there so they go and try to steal some money to recoup their loses and manage to shoot and kill some dude that works at a 7-11 or something and now there are four murder cases on Diamond's desk. Now you can see why Diamond hates Brown so much: he's making him a lot of extra work, well that and he's also got this really hot blonde gal that Diamond wants.
And what of this blonde? Well, she's out eating and dancing and overdosing on pills. She's 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. Then he and Diamond have a final tough guy conversation that involves Brown telling McClure to tell Diamond this and that, even though Diamond is standing right next to him. I realize that this is supposed to show that Brown sees Diamond as beneath him and not worth speaking to himself, but it comes off as a bit silly and you wonder why Diamond doesn't just walk away instead of giving this loser the chance to spout off.
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 the 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 nothing. 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!
Some of the high points of Diamond's efforts to bring down Brown include his stripper girlfriend being killed and getting captured and tortured in a pretty brutal scene involving McClure's hearing aid, a radio, and some hair tonic. Did I also mention that Brown blows up Mingo and Fante? Or that he has Susan kidnapped and Diamond's partner shot? When things start happening in this movie, they don't fart around!
There's obviously 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.