The Big Combo (1955)

This a really stylish gangster movie noir!

Shadowy figures in fedoras and trenchcoats looming out of the fog … because it’s foggy every night in these movies!

Here is a really interesting backgrounder from TCM.

The actual movie listing on IDMB:

In case you’re not ready enough, there’s this:

The movie

• Big time boxing match in the city:
• Susan tries to run away.
  • Susan is a hot blond.
    • She doesn’t do a lot for me, but you can tell that for the purposes of this movie she is the drop-dead gorgeous woman that drives every man she sees MAD with desire. 🙂
      • (Gotta have one of these in this kind of movie!)
    • [That said, she does look awfully good in the image I just uploaded.]
  • She is stopped from leaving the fight by the bodyguards.
    • Both bodyguards (who apparently work for a Mr Brown) are actors who became pretty famous:
      – Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman
    • When they release her she slugs Earl Holliman, which set a nice tone for the movie!
  • She’s being tailed by someone else.
• Shift to the police station. We find that Police Lieutenant Diamond has a thing for Susan. Everybody knows it….
• Shift back to Susan. She makes the bodyguards take her to dinner.
  • She passes out for some reason.
• Now we meet Mr. Brown in the back room at the boxing match.
  • He turns out to be a titanic asshole. All about hate and domination.
• Susan’s in the Emergeny Room. She’s tried to kill herself.
  • We find out that the other person tailing her was a cop.
    • He picked up her purse back at the restaurant.
• So both of the characters we’ve come to are about are obsessed with Susan:
  • Lieutenant Diamond (Cornell Wilde) and
  • Mr Brown (Richard Conte)
• They face off at the hospital. Not much happens.
• The Lieutenant sure is intense about this girl.

Next we meet a funny, charming showgirl named Rita.

I guess I’m out of touch on 50’s mores, because Lieutenant Diamond, the big hero, treats her like a pile of crap, and I don’t see any reason for it except she’s not white, and I don’t like it!

He shows up at her stage door. We find that he had a pretty intense thing with her 7 months aqo, and now he shows up out of the blue wanting to be with her just to make himself feel better about Susan.

50’s men pretty dependably act like jerks and assholes in these movies when it comes to women.

• The episode turned out kind of sweet!
  • First of all I really like Rita, unlike Susan who seems pretty boring to me.
  • She is actress Helene Stanton. Check her out online … she’s smokin fine!
  • She reads Cornell Wilde like an open book. She is not into his lovesick routine, so she just goes home. Good for her!!
  • Cornell Wilde shoulda totally stuck with Rita.

Oh bummer! In the last third of the movie Rita gets killed! (in my exegisis, she was TOO GOOD TO LIVE 🙂

Diamond and Mr Brown are still playing mind games about Susan, and Diamond pisses off Mr Brown enough that he orders him killed.

But as luck would have it, Rita had gone to Diamond’s to wait, so she got the burst of submachine fine, not him. The only really sympathetic person in the whole movie and she gets killed!

After that things start going downhill for Mr Brown. There are double crosses on top of double crosses. Finally Brown’s ex-wife (long story) rats him out as to where he plans to catch a plane to blow the country with Susan, and the cops sweep in and actually arrest him after he runs out of bullets.

Susan and Liertenant Diamond walk off into the fog together.

• Not holding hands, since they’re not yet a thing, but you can see it coming.
• I guess this is why Rita had to get killed, so Diamond can lust after Susan with a pure heart … although those 50’s dude’s didn’t seem to worry about that stuff too much.

That’s the movie!