“Especially beautiful in these scenes is what seems to be a lunch room or food vending area, in the wall of some sort of auditorium or giant lobby. Alton has lit the lunchroom and other segments of the wall, so that beautiful geometric patterns of light and darkness are created” – Michael Grost The Big Combo “First is first and second is nobody.” – Mr. Brown “The Big Combo is a 1955 American film noir directed by Joseph H. Lewis and photographed by cinematographer John Alton, with music by David Raksin” - Wikipedia To be honest before I saw this movie I wasn’t aware of Joseph Lewis, which I guess is why we do these courses, but now having seen the movie I am in awe of his ability to turn lead into gold. It’s clear his technique of casting everyone in a black night time world is a function of turning a micro budget into a plus while he somehow manages to create magic with an intermittently competent script, workaday acting (with the notable exception of the excellent Richard Conte) and a pretty banal story. Every frame is a frame, and whilst the film comes to an unsatisfactory conclusion it never fails to engage the eye throughout. I was staggered to see that the film is in the public domain so lightly is it apparently regarded by the general viewing public. Writing in The New York Times in 1991 on the occasion of a tribute to Lewis at the Public Theater, Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks said, ''Low budgets and tight schedules didn't cramp his style; it seems as if they invigorated and helped invent it.'' According to the same article he once told a friend “''In every film I ever directed, I had the sense I could see something beyond the script and beyond the story. It's as if I'm pulling up something out of a place I really don't know anything about.'' He was such a prodigious talent that he also directed the dance numbers in The Jolson Story and later in his career he turned his talents to churning out TV westerns., 49 of them On his voluminous website the film analyst Michael Grost recently noted the risqué sexual themes in the movie, “Lewis' other most famous film, The Big Combo, also has a heroine who has a sexual obsession for the gangster villain, including the only scene in studio-era Hollywood history of oral sex. It also has one of the few gay couples in Hollywood history, the hitmen Fante and Mingo. Despite their being villains, Fante and Mingo are oddly sympathetic, and have been called the most likable persons in the movie” Why such a beauty as Susan is so beholden to Brown is never fully explained. Merely saying she is thrilled by his power hardly explains her continuing attempts to get away from him by flight or death. She is clearly a woman with pretensions, (Her best friend is called Audobon!) and Brown indulges her in her love of classical music, beautifully expressed in the composition of the concert hall sequence. This is an extraordinary shot. Anyone else simply shows a pianist, Lewis gives an atmosphere which then uses the piano to counterpoint Susan and Diamonds conversation. With this a scene given to exposition becomes art. So what is Browns hold on Susan? I assumed that in typically manipulative fashion he has something on her past and keeps her by making her reliant on drugs. Grost certainly believes that Lewis films have a definite cohesive thematic style and themes, citing Mr. Browns reference, rather oddly, to a previous life as a prison guard and a failed marriage, two facts that have no relation to the plot but refer to events in the Lewis movie, Cry of the Hunted. He also notes the conventional nature of the plot, at odds with the often contrary nature of much noir, “The Big Combo is among the purest detective and mystery stories in the history of film noir. Its hero is a detective, and he does detective work throughout the whole movie. His detective work is successful, and he uncovers the truth at the end. The detective work is successful in another way: it makes the world a better place at the end, by breaking the power of Mr. Brown” To me what this means is that The Big Combo is a film noir that should be analysed purely for its style and look. The plot and characterisations, as workmanlike as they are are placeholders for Lewis amazing compositions. We should note the work of the cinematographer John Alton, as Keith Phipps pointed out in Dissolve in 2013 “But John Alton’s camerawork is what truly sets it apart. The influential, Hungarian-born cinematographer had worked in noir before, but here, he seems determined to deliver a master class in noir style, filling the screen with deep shadows, piercing beams of light, and creeping fogs” The film tracks as a standard procedural but as Chuck Bowen noted on the Slant website in 2013, “It's another 1950s American film that's implicitly concerned with repression, which director Joseph H. Lewis expresses formally with tight, compressed close-ups. The film appears to have been mostly shot on sets, and Lewis astutely turns that potential limitation to his advantage: The depth of focus is often pointedly shallow, and the backgrounds are often blacked out in manners that imbue the film with a sense of heightened theatricality. The characters appear to be imprisoned in the foreground, exposed, attempting to huff and bluff their way away from the perhaps inevitable exorcisms of their demons” Grost also notes another theme from Lewis movies “The Big Combo is full of a kind of imagery that runs through other Lewis films: men cooking for other men. Such Lewis scenes often emphasize one man dishing up and serving the cooked food to other men” Whilst finding no apparent reason for this trend he does postulate that it is Lewis slyly subverting 1950’s gender roles. Variety noted the extreme violence in the movie in 1954, reflecting contemporary shock, “One torture scene in particular will shock the sensibilities and cause near-nausea. After honest cop Diamond (Cornel Wilde) has been tormented by gangster Brown (Richard Conte) via a hearing aid plugged in his ear while the receiver is held to a radio going full blast, the cold-blooded crook forces the contents of a large bottle of hair tonic down the victim’s throat” The film never fails to remind us of the ubiquity of Mr. Browns organisation, the Big combination of the title, itself redolent of the idea that crime is a combination with all the other parts of authority, or as one character, Police Capt. Peterson, points out in the films best line, “What do you think this is, a homicide investigation? You’re dealing with the largest pool of illegal money in the world! You’re fighting a swamp with a teaspoon.” I did think that Bollemac was an odd name for a company so I did a web search. It isn’t an anagram but I did find this in a mystical word finder website “The life path number of Bolle Mac Kolle is 1. The destiny number 1 is one of the most important figures within numerology, because it symbolises the origin of life. The destiny number one is the symbol of a new beginning and is considered to be the number of God. At the same time 1 is also the basis for all other numbers. This suggests that people with this life number can obtain strong fundamental skills in their lives. The destiny number or even the life number 1 ensures that a person has a particularly strong ability to analyze things objectively and to draw conclusions” Make of it what you will. Which leads us into what the film is really about. Mr. Brown hardly seems bothered with spending money (He stores it away like an African dictator) and whilst power certainly attracts him he seems to gain more pleasure from torturing people (He has clearly tortured his weak assistant Joe with his patented deaf technique before he does it to Diamond) and sexually dominating women. As noted Australian critic Rose Capp noted in 2003, “Lewis makes clear that The Big Combo is as much concerned with the dynamics of power, money and sexuality, as with the nexus between business, crime and the forces of law and order” The film begins with a typically dazzling opening sequence which first takes us through the city, briefly moves through a smoke filled boxing match redolent of the battle about the come, and then drops us into a confusing chase scene that we are introduced to half way through. Many of the distinctive stylistic nuances that litter the film are introduced here. As the AS Film Studies website observed in 2008, “Notice the way in which in the opening to the film we are taken down into the city and within a short time find ourselves within a maze of corridors, uncertain who is chasing who and for what reason, and disorientated in the sense that we are unsure which is the way out of this complex of spaces in which we find ourselves. If you consider the composition of shots, you will find that characters are often alone within large spaces, or characters within the frame are separated from each other by being placed at different depths within the space. Actors’ bodies are also often carefully orientated towards or away from each other, or towards or away from the camera. This often seems highly staged but is also visually suggestive; for instance, see how Susan is enclosed or entrapped by the flanking bodies of Fante and Mingo when they catch her in the opening sequence” Another scene worth noting is Diamond (tough? Priceless?) interrogating Susan in the hospital. Apart from this extraordinary composition, implying death and angelic presence we see a number of ambiguous moments. Diamond has spent the first part of the movie torturing himself and being tortured for his honesty and virtue and yet when it comes to getting information out of Susan, who we know is the object of his desire, he is prepared to firstly refuse her drugs and give her coffee instead!! And then deprive her of water. As Grost notes we have a clear Lewis theme here as well as a contradiction “In Diamond's first interrogation of Susan in the hospital, he feeds her coffee. Coffee is a ubiquitous Lewis subject. In this scene in The Big Combo, it helps save the heroine's life, as a medical treatment after her poisoning. But soon Diamond is refusing the heroine water, insisting she answer questions first. This “using of thirst as an interrogation technique is morally wrong. It parallels a scene in the early Lewis film The Spy Ring, which also use this tactic. This brief episode of the water, is the only scene in The Big Combo where the hero clearly steps over the moral line, and uses interrogation techniques that are unequivocally morally wrong.” There are only a couple of outside scenes in the film and even those appear claustrophobic, all the interior scenes seem to be set in ambiguous spaces as if they are not buildings at all. Grost notes, “There are only a few genuine exteriors in the film. Shots that take place "outside", such as in the entrance to the theater, or the flower path, tend to be on sets that are as enclosed as any of the interiors of the film. This avoidance of exteriors also aids in the lack of any architectural quality to the film: few buildings are shown” With regard to the Brown character, we never see him during the day and he seems to suck the life out of everyone that he meets (The early scene with the boxer is them mirrored with Joe later. He uses these people up) Brown also never faces the police officer Diamond until he has him tied up showing him a lack of respect and suggesting he could kill him with a look. Brown is clearly always one step ahead and when he is questioned he never answers, merely responding with another question. What’s with the German? Dreyer is Swedish On a final point I must mention a couple more shots. This composition is exquisite in a film full of exquisite compositions. I have inserted the line to show the way the light line cuts through the characters while Susan is in outline. Brilliant The final shot, is a clear homage to Casablanca showing that even a master such as Lewis has to show his influences, in this case another Hungarian Michael Curtiz References LAWRENCE VAN GELDER, “Joseph H. Lewis, 93, Director Who Turned B-Movies Into Art”, New York Times, September 13, 2000 Michael E. Grost, “The films of Joseph H. Lewis”. Website, December 2015 Variety Staff, Review: ‘The Big Combo’, DECEMBER 31, 1954 Chuck Bowen, Slant magazine, OCTOBER 5, 2013 Keith Phipps, Dissolve website, The Big Combo, OCTOBER 14, 2013 Rose Capp, Senses of Cinema website, “First is First and Second is Nobody: Hoodlums and Heroines in Joseph H. Lewis’ The Big Combo”, March 2003 Sarah Casey Benyahia, Freddie Gaffney, John White, AS Film Studies, 2008