It's Made Up of Elements We've All Seen Before
This weekend's review: The Big Combo.
The Big Combo is a solid noir title, punchy and hinting at some sort of violence or action. It’s not quite as eyecatching as something like Double Indemnity or The Big Heat, but if you’re a noir fan, it’s the sort of thing you want to see or maybe even actively seek out. Alas, the movie underneath the title isn’t very good.
After an introduction involving a girl (Jean Wallace) trying to run away from two thugs (Earl Holliman and a young Lee Van Cleef) only to get caught, we cut to the police station. There, we learn that a Lieutenant called Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) has spent the last six months or more trying to bring down a crime syndicate known as The Combination, led by a man known only as Mr. Brown (Richard Conte). While Diamond is genuinely trying to clean up the city, some of his coworkers suspect it’s also because he’s got feelings for Brown’s girl Susan, the one we saw in the opening. Shortly after this chunk of exposition, we learn that Susan attempted suicide by taking pills, and she’s rushed to the hospital. Brown uses some legal trickery to get her out, but not before Susan mentions the name “Alicia”, which gives Diamond something to work with. Some investigative work eventually reveals that Alicia was the name of Brown’s wife, and that she died under mysterious circumstances. Diamond hopes learning the truth will be enough to either bring Brown down or rattle him enough that he starts getting careless. He also starts gently leaning on Susan, hoping to parlay her increasing dislike for Brown into having an inside man, so to speak. This being a noir under the Hays Code, you can probably guess how it all ends, though there are a fair few unusual elements brought in along the way.
My problem with the movie is that it winds up feeling very dull, even though there are all sorts of reasons why it shouldn’t. There are things I didn’t even touch on in the summary that are new or at least different (a bit involving torture and a hearing aid springs to mind), and there’s a few unexpected plot twists. And yet I couldn’t help but feel that I’d seen it all before, or at least very similar ideas. The bad guys kidnap and torture the hero; the bad guys accidentally kill the wrong person, spurring the hero to work even harder to defeat them; one bad guy tries to double cross the big bad and is punished for it; the criminal evades justice and gloats about it to the hero…if you could make some sort of noir bingo card, this movie would tick off a lot of spaces. Some of the individual moments are effective and the acting is overall solid, but on the whole, the movie feels a lot longer than ninety minutes, which is never a good thing.
It’s definitely not worth seeking the movie out. Between the somewhat familiar plot, the other plot elements that do tie in to the main story but make it feel overstuffed when you take a step back, the deus ex machinas and the moments where characters act like idiots, the movie won’t engage you, regardless of if you’re familiar with all the noir tropes or not. Fortunately, there’s a lot of other noirs out there that cover similar topics, so it’s not like this is the only game in town. Though I'm guessing a lot of them don't have titles as punchy as this one.
The Big Combo is a solid noir title, punchy and hinting at some sort of violence or action. It’s not quite as eyecatching as something like Double Indemnity or The Big Heat, but if you’re a noir fan, it’s the sort of thing you want to see or maybe even actively seek out. Alas, the movie underneath the title isn’t very good.
After an introduction involving a girl (Jean Wallace) trying to run away from two thugs (Earl Holliman and a young Lee Van Cleef) only to get caught, we cut to the police station. There, we learn that a Lieutenant called Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) has spent the last six months or more trying to bring down a crime syndicate known as The Combination, led by a man known only as Mr. Brown (Richard Conte). While Diamond is genuinely trying to clean up the city, some of his coworkers suspect it’s also because he’s got feelings for Brown’s girl Susan, the one we saw in the opening. Shortly after this chunk of exposition, we learn that Susan attempted suicide by taking pills, and she’s rushed to the hospital. Brown uses some legal trickery to get her out, but not before Susan mentions the name “Alicia”, which gives Diamond something to work with. Some investigative work eventually reveals that Alicia was the name of Brown’s wife, and that she died under mysterious circumstances. Diamond hopes learning the truth will be enough to either bring Brown down or rattle him enough that he starts getting careless. He also starts gently leaning on Susan, hoping to parlay her increasing dislike for Brown into having an inside man, so to speak. This being a noir under the Hays Code, you can probably guess how it all ends, though there are a fair few unusual elements brought in along the way.
My problem with the movie is that it winds up feeling very dull, even though there are all sorts of reasons why it shouldn’t. There are things I didn’t even touch on in the summary that are new or at least different (a bit involving torture and a hearing aid springs to mind), and there’s a few unexpected plot twists. And yet I couldn’t help but feel that I’d seen it all before, or at least very similar ideas. The bad guys kidnap and torture the hero; the bad guys accidentally kill the wrong person, spurring the hero to work even harder to defeat them; one bad guy tries to double cross the big bad and is punished for it; the criminal evades justice and gloats about it to the hero…if you could make some sort of noir bingo card, this movie would tick off a lot of spaces. Some of the individual moments are effective and the acting is overall solid, but on the whole, the movie feels a lot longer than ninety minutes, which is never a good thing.
It’s definitely not worth seeking the movie out. Between the somewhat familiar plot, the other plot elements that do tie in to the main story but make it feel overstuffed when you take a step back, the deus ex machinas and the moments where characters act like idiots, the movie won’t engage you, regardless of if you’re familiar with all the noir tropes or not. Fortunately, there’s a lot of other noirs out there that cover similar topics, so it’s not like this is the only game in town. Though I'm guessing a lot of them don't have titles as punchy as this one.