The Big Combo

The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955) A girl (Jean Wallace) runs away in the dark. Down murky corridors and naked open spaces where she can't hide, she runs through a stadium promenade and nobody notices her because their eyes are on a boxing match, where every light of the facility seems to be focused. But, she's not the only one running, as she's followed closely by two goons, Fante (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl Holliman), who have split up and are trying to catch her in a pincer move. That's their job tonight, to look after the girl, Susan Lowell, who's the girl of Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), who's attending the fight—it's a business matter for him—and Mr. Brown wants her to see it. But, she's run out in Round 3 and he's mad about it. When Mr. Brown gets mad, that's when Fante and Mingo enter the picture and they finally catch up to her and try to man-handle her back to the fight. But, she decides she's hungry and although Mingo wants to drag her back to the fight-crowd, Fante tells Mingo to hail down a cab. "Mr Brown says to keep her happy." Fat chance.

Down at the 93rd precinct, they're not happy, either. There's an ongoing investigation into Mr. Brown that's been going on for too much of a time and two people are frustrated by it: the first is Capt. Peterson (Robert Middleton) who's mad at all the tax-payers' money he's been laying out for no results; and then there's Detective Lt. Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) who's been spending all that money and who's come up with bupkis except for frustration and the captain breathing down his neck. Diamond wants to turn the heat up on Brown, but the boss has his job on the line, too, and he wants to drop the whole shooting match. Plus, he thinks there might be something more to this for Diamond—he reminds him that he's been tailing Susan Lowell wherever she goes and when Diamond gripes that he paid those expenses himself, the Captain brings the hammer down: "But, I'm not in love with her! You are!" The Captain is starting to think it's all personal and a wild-skirt chase.

But, it's more than that. It's a grudge match. Find a crime in town and it eventually snakes up to Brown. Take down Brown and the 93rd gets a lot quieter. Then, when Susan shows up in the hospital for swallowing pills, Diamond thinks he has something: Susan keeps talking about an "Alicia" from Brown's past and when Diamond hauls in every Brown flunky for questioning and puts Brown under a lie detector, "Alicia" makes the needle jump the Richter scale but there's no answers from the big man. Just more patter from the mutual contempt society. "A righteous man" Brown scoffs to the old boss (Brian Donlevy) he took over the gang from. "Makes $96.50 a week—the bellboys at my hotels make more than that!" But, Diamond does get some respect, if you call taking the trouble to put him on a hit-list respectable.

The Big Combo may not be the best noir-mystery of the genre, there are no stars with bright futures of note (unless you count Van Cleef), the sets are cheap—heck, the director didn't know he was working on it until a week before shooting—but, it skirts the edges of acceptability for its time with an unsympathetic authority figure, a flashy villain (Conte is brilliant in it, rattling off dialog with a no-cares contemptuous smile), some nice hard-nosed dialog, and an artist's touch with the lighting. And, it suggests a lot more than it shows—like Susan's codependent sexual kink for Brown, the "longtime companionship" of Fante and Mingo, and some brutal violence that usually happens off-screen, but comes front-and-center in a scene that features torture-by-hearing-aid (they should have had Wilde's Diamond character shouting his dialog for the rest of the movie). The movie takes chances, at a point when many film-noir tropes were already played out.

But, the star of the show is cinematographer John Alton, who worked shadowy wonders for cash-strapped studios like Republic Pictures and eye-popping color scenes for the extravagant M-G-M, and brought rich dark spaces pierced by shimmering light to whatever set-up he touched. Born in Hungary, Alton began his camera work in the silent era and worked all the way up to 1960's Elmer Gantry. He was quick, economical, and created stunning images that arrest the eye and catch the breath. The Big Combo, for all its outlandishness, becomes more centered because of Alton's photography. You take it more seriously and things matter a bit more. Things "hit" harder because of the look of the thing.

Since 2007, The Big Combo has been in the public domain and, for that reason, we're featuring it in this post below.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944) In the perpetual mating dance that writer-director Preston Sturges did around the blue-noses of the Breen Office, there was never a more sassy tango than The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, as sonorous a razz-berry, as flagrant a nose-thumbing as any director has done to his oppressive censors. 

Censors. It may seem odd in this "anything goes" era of film-making—where even dismemberment gets a pass for 13 year olds (but bare breasts get an "R"), where the foulest of epithets are uttered from the mouths of babes and fart jokes are de rigueur in kids' movies—that at the time this movie was made, you couldn't say the word "pregnant," or "virgin," men and women could not appear in the same bed, the subject of sex was merely metaphorical (as opposed to mythical in a teen movie) and represented by a camera pan to crashing ocean waves, burning fires, or shattered mirrors.

Yes, kids, we were Amish back then. At least, actresses weren't asked to wear veils...unless they were over 40 and the vaseline on the lens didn't hide the crow's feet.*

In this the script is an intricate little puzzle of studio "issues" that interlock to form a script that should have raised so many red-flags (and did), but take any of them out of the story and it would look like you were unpatriotic, immoral, or a perfect candidate for ex-communication. 

Of course, it's a comedy. Set and produced during war-time. And the sacred subjects of that war—God, Country, and The Troops—are all given a jaundiced eye that would come from living with a bellyful of bromides while just trying to eke out a living. Though clear-eyed and sentimental in the right places, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek can look at a manufactured convenience and still call it "bologna," and then acknowledge that, sometimes, bologna'll do the job. Even the movie poster has a conspiratorial wink in it. Like any good love story.  

Poor Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken). He's been in love with Gertrude Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) since they were kids, and he's got it bad. "I wish you were in a lot of trouble, Trudy, so I can help you."

Note to Norval: You, uh...you've REALLY got to be careful what you want. Especially when it comes to Trudy. She's only got eyes for the servicemen going overseas. She wants to do her part for our "fine and clean young men" and to give 'em a good time before they go off to war, over the objections of her constable father (Sturges pillar William Demarest). He forbids her to go to the USO dance on Tuesday, because as a veteran of The War to End All Wars, he knows servicemen have their minds on only one thing. "Oh no," says Trudy. "They're not like that any more! These are good boys, noble boys." But Pappy is unconvinced. So she conspires with Norval to take her to the movies, and once there, she dumps him, takes his car, and does a pub-crawl with the "nice boys," telling Norvel she'll meet him back at the flicks at 1:15. 

She doesn't make it back until 8:00 am, with the car in tatters, her memory a little shaky, and Norval in the Kockenlocker gun-sights to take the blame when they get her home. With legitimate reasons. 

Or even illegitimate ones.

Evidently, she did more than her part for the troops. Trudy doesn't remember a lot about what happened that night, it's kind of a blur. She thinks she might have gotten married, but she's not sure—she can't remember the guy's name. So, she keeps it to herself—the boys are shipping out, who'll know? Then, there's the little matter of her being pregnant. So, there's a double puzzle: she can't tell anybody she's married without a husband, but she's pregnant without ever having been married. Maybe. What to do, what to do? 

It's a scandal. The kind that small towns hush up and don't talk about; but what fun would that be? There's a way out of the problem—don't even go there—but it can't go smoothly, and before the solution can be found, it has to get more complicated—at the top of its lungs. It even turns political, with guest appearances by The Great McGinty (Brian Donlevy) and "The Boss" (Akim Tamiroff), from Sturges' directorial debut. 

 

I've never liked Betty Hutton. I've always found her loud and grating and usually playing scatter-brained simps. Well, her Trudy Kockenlocker is a scatter-brained simp, but Hutton makes her sympathetic and funny, with a perpetual look of comic confusion, exhausted with dis-belief. She's all too willing to do physical comedy in an extremely unladylike fashion (one of which involves her getting clocked by one of those mirror-globes at an out-of-control jitterbug dance). She's a complete joy in this movie, whether by herself, matching stammers with the brilliant Bracken (who moves so fast in this movie, I'm surprised he's not a perpetual blur), or sharing sisterly woes with her wise-acre sister (the nifty Diana Lynn), who is the Horatio to her densley populated Hamlet. Never has a movie had such fun in being irreverent about such American ideals as The War Effort, and even Motherhood. 

In 2001, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was selected for the National Film Registry. This American classic is also #54 on the AFI's "100 Years...100 Laughs" list of the funniest movies ever made. And it's somewhere near the top of the most boldly audacious movies ever created in a climate of repression. Add the caveat of taking such subversive gleefulness in its presentation, and it would be #1.

 

* It should be noted that once the Breen Office died the death of a thousand indignities in the late '50's and 60's, and subject matter was freed up for public consumption, There have been waves of motion picture permissiveness—we approach a line of the verboten and then back off, a few years later we creep up to the line and slink back in a cycle that seems more like evolution than revolution. There is still censorship, but the censor is the marketplace, and a film-maker must consider the box-office potential of his choices, as filtered by the specious and contrary dictates of the MPAA. Except for the screw-balls at the Ratings Board, it seems a more fair system: "Yeah, you can do that...but it's gonna cost ya."

Kiss of Death (1947)

Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947) Another of Henry Hathaway's neo-realist film noir's that aped the post-war Italian film penchant for shooting dark themes in real locations without glamour and emphasizing the grit.  This one, about the rise and fall and rise of heist-criminal Nick Bianco (Victor Mature), starts out in the sky-scrapers, jail-houses, and police offices that reverberate with the realistic sound that you can't acquire in a sound-baffled soundstage, but once the mayhem starts, the film scurries back to the safety of studio sets.  It's rough in the mean streets of noir. Safer to make your own.

Bianco is an ex-con who can't find a job, and with a wife and two kids to support, he decides to make his own work—robbing a jewelry business in downtown Manhattan.  The job goes South and he ends up on the street with a police bullet in his leg and a stretch awaiting him at the gray-bar hotel.  He's offered a chance by assistant D.A. Louis D'Angelo (Brian Donlevy) to supply evidence on his cronies, but Bianco sticks to the criminal code—he won't squeal, sing, or rat, even when D'Angelo offers him an early parole so he can see his kids.  But Bianco won't bend.  His family is being "taken care of" by his sheister of a lawyer (Taylor Holmes), who visits him in prison to keep tabs on Bianco's loyalty.

But, in prison, Bianco gets wind that things aren't going so well.  And a visit to the prison library newspaper galleys tells him his wife has committed suicide, his kids are now orphans, and his silence has bought him nothing.

Hathaway's direction is no-nonsense throughout, but stylistic, anyway, and the scenes in the initial robbery, in the D.A.'s office and the lock-up have a drab, utilitarian look to them—the robbery has a nice touch in it, as the crooks' target is on the 44th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, and the post stick-up elevator ride (with plenty of stops) provides a particularly teasing kind of tension.  Mature is fine, Donlevy's abilities aren't taken advantage of, and there are bit parts by Karl Malden and one of my character actors, the short-lived Millard Mitchell (who played Gene Kelly's producer buddy in Singin' in the Rain).

But Kiss of Death is also the feature debut of Richard Widmark, who plays the cheap gangster killer Tommy Udo.  You don't see him kill too many people, but one of them is indelible in its cruelty and vicious enthusiasm.  Widmark's performance is amazing, looking like a wire-thin Dan Duryea, with Cagney's ability to hold the eye in every scene he's in.  His dialogue isn't the greatest (even though the script is by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) and limited, and repeated over and over, but Widmark punctuates it with a goonish laugh that implies a sarcastic inner amusement that he knows he's stringing you along. 

Hathaway, knowing what he was getting from the young actor, pulled out all the stops for his performance. There's one scene where someone's waiting for udo, who's holding court in a curtained-off restaurant back-room. Hathaway holds on the curtain, elongating the wait, then cuts to a close shot of the part in the curtains, where all you can see is the glint in Udo's eye before he gets up and makes his way to the camera. It's an amazing shot and one that shows the director's confidence in his young actor's ability to hold an audience's attention, even when he isn't actually seen.

It's curtains for Widmark's Tommy Udo

Hangmen Also Die!

Hangmen Also Die! (Fritz Lang, 1943)  We've talked about Anthropoid and Hitler's Madman, but another film is inspired by the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and its subsequent murderous reprisals. It is an original story written by German playwright Bertolt Brecht (he of "The Threepenny Opera" and "The Ballad of Mack the Knife") and another German expatriate, director Fritz Lang. 

The Czech plot to kill Heydrich makes up a very small part of Hangmen Also Die! and the destruction of Lidice isn't even mentioned, the ramifications of the assassination cast in miniature with the murder of 400 souls as reprisals for keeping the identity of the gunman (only one in Brecht and Lang's screenplay, not the group of four  who carried out the actual killing) a secret from Nazi investigators. The plot hews closer to Lang's world of spies, secret societies, and hiding in plain sight.

Heydrich (played by an overwrought Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), appears in only one opening scene and rides out of the small studio representation of a Czech street never to be seen again*; the attack happens off-camera, in the style of other Lang films where danger lurks just outside the film frame (most of the murders happen out of sight except for the penultimate ones that close the film on a cautionary, mournful note).

The only things the film has in common with the real events is that there was a Heydrich, he was killed by Czech partisans, and the Nazi's started a man-hunt that resulted in the execution of civilians in retribution. There is no organized murder and destruction of an entire city in revenge.

Just after Heydrich's assassination a lone figure calling himself Karel Vanek (Brian Donlevy, looking very "chalant"**) runs into the busy city street looking for his getaway vehicle—it (driven by Lionel Stander) has been directed to Gestapo headquarters for leaving the engine running and wasting precious commodities. He asks a woman, Masha Novotny (Anna Lee), if she's seen the vehicle and she tells him the driver was arrested. Vanek scurries off when news of Heydrich's attack hits the streets, steps ahead of Nazi agents looking for him. Masha mis-directs them and he is able to escape. 

But, he finds no shelter after the attack, and in desperation, shows up at the Novotny apartment, where, with only the slimmest of cover-stories, he is invited for dinner and given a bed for the night. Masha's father (Walter Brennan), a history professor recently dismissed from the University for his political views and now tutoring his former students, suspects Vanek of killing Heydrich, yet provides him accommodations in sympathy.

"Someone at the door?"

Before long, the Nazi's come calling, and Novotny is arrested as a suspect in the murder, as well as 400 others to be held in detention until the murderer is found. As an added incentive for the killer to turn himself in (or his whereabouts revealed) the Nazis will kill 40 of the hostages at a time until the case is closed. In desperation, Masha seeks out the man she's deduced has posed as Karel Vanek—distinguished Prague surgeon Dr. Franz Svoboda—and begs him to turn himself in and save her father, something the partisans have forbidden him to do.

"You have it all nicely worked out, haven't you? If I tell them, 
then all my family will be shot! If I keep silent only my father 
will be shot! In other words, your "simple statement of fact" is 
we're all lost because we were generous enough to save your life! 
You're just a cold-blooded coward! You're no better than Heydrich himself! 
Even the Gestapo couldn't be as inhuman as you are!"

It's a moral quandary and Brecht and Lang increase it by making the assassin a doctor, betraying his hippocratic oath even when doing nothing still does harm. Meanwhile, Gestapo inspector Gruber (Alexander Granach) pursues all leads trying to piece together who the culprit is, particularly Masha, who knows that at any time, her father might be killed.

The partisans, meanwhile are working to pin the assassination on another party, a businessman and Nazi partisan who drew up the list of the 400 Czech's to be taken prisoner, Czech partisans seeming to have a overarching sense of irony. But, can they convince the Nazi's in time to prevent the slaughter?

Lang's concern here is in the conspiracy—it frequently is in his films—and how background forces, hiding in plain sight, can influence the orbits of people's lives. The main gist is that the Germans have taken over Czechoslovakia as an occupying force, but the occupied, in turn, can disrupt any machinery, no matter how precise, given enough will and organization. You fight power with power. You fight those seeking information with disinformation, and any search for a lone individual can be neutered by unfocusing it. The Germans do things with uniforms and ceremony. The partisans are masked—even surgeons' masks— and are at their most powerful when they are unknown, ordinary and a part of the landscape—nobodies.

This is not a history lesson, and, if so, only in the broadest strokes. It takes one incident and brings to light the Lang world-view: that the work of collective, coordinated individuals can disrupt the machinery of despots, technology, corporate interests and political systems that oppress them and threaten to crush them in the clock-work gears of their seemingly perpetual motion. But to derail those gears takes resistant bones and iron wills to make them seize up.

There's a telling shot in Hangmen Also Die! where word of Heydrich's assassination begins to be whispered in a darkened theater and applause starts to ripple through the audience. A Nazi lackey calls a halt to the movie and, flush with a power he only thinks he has, demands to know who applauded. "No one applauded." says a voice in the crowd, belying the obvious truth. And before one of the audience members decks the Nazi for being too pushy with his wife, there is a shot that must have been very powerful in the movie theaters—it's a shot of the theater movie-screen, an extension of OUR view of OUR movie screen, like an optical illusion where we see farther than just the projected image into the movie's world. And the movie crowd of Hangmen Also Die! look back at us, safe in our seats, defiantly, almost accusingly, as if to ask "What are YOU going to do?"

It's chilling: that one image unites us with the plight of the Czech movie-goers and challenges us, making us a participant in their situation in a way no 3-D image ever could.

There's genius there.

"Nobody applauded."
The movie stares back at its audience.

* Except for one surreal hospital scene comprised of this shot:

** The opposite of nonchalant.