But over these past few months, as my colleagues and fellow film obsessives have spent so much of our time stuck indoors and exploring old movies, I keep seeing people discovering and championing his work. Some of it is just coincidental timing and programming. The Criterion Channel\u2019s second round of \u201cColumbia Noir\u201d dropped in April<\/a>, and was thus scheduled long before lockdown, but Lewis\u2019s My Name is Julia Ross<\/em> turned out to be a sublime piece of quarantine viewing, a dreamlike throwback \u201cthis can\u2019t be happening\u201d nightmare, its quicksilver 64-minute running time perfect for decreased covid-concerned attention spans. Over the summer, Amazon Prime added Terror in a Texas Town<\/em><\/a>, Lewis\u2019s final film, a deliciously lurid Western with a magnificent Sterling Hayden performance at its center. And around the same time, the Criterion Channel added a double bill of Lewis\u2019s beloved, hyper-sexual lovers-on-the-run picture Gun Crazy<\/em> (1950) and his 1955 noir<\/em> masterpiece The Big Combo<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first and most important thing to know about The Big Combo<\/em> is that it was shot by John Alton, the quintessential noir<\/em> cinematographer whose paintings of light and shadow brought similar vibrancy and mystery to such classics as T-Men, He Walked by Night, <\/em>and Raw Deal. <\/em>There are images and compositions in The Big Combo<\/em> that you want to freeze on the screen and slap a frame around; the first of them comes early in the picture, as the opening credit images of flashing neon lights and wide cityscapes home in on a municipal auditorium (\u201cBOXING TONITE\u201d), and then the shadows and smoke created by a handful of loiterers out back. It\u2019s the kind of moment that a million lesser directors and photographers would\u2019ve flitted by with nary a second thought; Lewis and Alton use it to create a palpable tension and urban mood (and a pretty picture to boot).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The story, adapted by Phillip Yordan from his short story \u201cThe Hoodlum,\u201d is pretty standard noir stuff. Lt. Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) is \u201ca righteous man\u201d who wants nothing more than to slap the bracelets on Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) \u2013 that\u2019s how everyone refers to him, \u201cMr. Brown\u201d \u2013 a smooth-talking, ruthless gangster. Our introduction to Brown is a model of narrative efficiency, one of those wonderful piece of writing where a screenwriter simultaneously gets the story going and tells us everything we need to know about a character; Mr. Brown gives the third degree to Benny, a boxer he controls, and explains to him what makes him particularly good at his job. \u201cWhat makes the difference?\u201d he asks. \u201cHate.\u201d He smiles at the palooka, a gleam in his eye; moments later, he slugs him. \u201cYou shoulda hit me back,\u201d he explains. \u201cYou haven\u2019t got the hate. Tear up Benny\u2019s contract, he\u2019s no good to me anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As with so many films noir<\/em>, the conflict of these two bull-headed men takes a physical and psychological toll on the women in their lives. For Brown, it\u2019s his moll Susan (Jean Wallace), whom we first meet in the act of attempting to escape from his clutches; not long after, she attempts suicide, in pursuit of the same goal. For Lt. Diamond, it\u2019s the burlesque girl Rita, who is introduced in what seems a clever bit of narrative hoodwinking \u2013 it seems as though the good cop is busting her for doing more than dancing (\u201cEither book me or let go of my arm!\u201d) before she calls him by his first name and kisses him \u2013 but is also very easy to read as a kinky bit of role-playing. Either way, Diamond is clearly not as squeaky-clean as he first seems, and Rita\u2019s got his number; \u201cDetectives, hoodlums,\u201d she shrugs in the next scene, \u201ca girl doesn\u2019t care how a man makes his living. Just how he makes love.\u201d (She leaves that scene by announcing, \u201cGive me my shoes, I\u2019m going home, put them on for me,\u201d which he does, happily, as the soundtrack fills with saxophone trills. The filmmakers cannot show us everything they want to!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s worth noting that Rita is brunette, while Susan is blonde \u2013 and Diamond clearly sees the latter as a fallen angel whom he must save. (Mr. Brown, incidentally, tells her he prefers her to wear white.) He tries to appeal to her morality, to get her to drop the dime on Mr. Brown, who doesn\u2019t take kindly to the interference \u2013 so Brown sends his hoods (including an impossibly young and handsome Lee van Cleef) to kidnap and torture his nemesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conte\u2019s work is difficult to overpraise \u2013 it\u2019s a truly chilling performance, seething with calm menace as he asks the cop, gently, \u201cWhat are you lookin\u2019 for? Maybe I can help you.\u201d Even when he loses his temper, he doesn\u2019t raise his voice; his delivery is cold and rapid-fire, and by draining the easy indicators of emotion, he raises the narrative stakes to high heavens. There doesn\u2019t seem to be anything he\u2019s incapable of, which is pretty electrifying in a crime picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That scene also gives us the first unexpected use of a seemingly innocuous prop. Mr. Brown\u2019s right-hand man \u2013 and the man who was passed over for his top spot \u2013 is Joe McClure (Brian Donlevy), who uses a hearing aid. It\u2019s appropriate to the era, with an amplification device running to an earpiece, so Mr. Brown reappropriates it as a torture device, attempting to deafen the cop. The scene is clever, but just a warm-up for the device\u2019s later use, a moment so jaw-dropping I wouldn\u2019t dream of giving it away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet that touch is also a simple one, a bit of low-budget inventiveness on par with Lewis\u2019s celebrated solution for staging a bank robbery without a location or extras in Gun Crazy <\/em>(he keeps the camera in the car, as the moll waits tensely for their getaway). Moments like those are what made Lewis such a special filmmaker \u2013 one who understood that the one thing you didn\u2019t need a blank check or studio backing to procure was, simply, a great idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Big Combo\u201d is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel<\/a>, Amazon Prime Video<\/a>, and Kanopy<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our “Noirvember” celebration continues with Joseph H. Lewis\u2019s 1955 masterpiece, the story of an obsessed cop\u2019s pursuit of a ruthless gangster (and the collateral damage along the way): <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":15364,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1431,1422],"class_list":["post-15363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15363\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/big-combo1-1024x576.jpg\")
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