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.
Kansas City Confidential(Phil Karlson, 1952) One of director Phil Karlson's 1950's movies, the crime expose The Phenix City Story (released in 1956) was just put into the National Film Registry. You know the one where they vote in 25 films every year for films that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Karlson was another of those "maverick" directors, he could work in any genre, but spent a long time as an assistant director and quit that job so he could direct at bargain basement studios, where he could make movies the way he wanted to with little interference as long as he could keep the finances down. One gets the impression from watching his movies, that he'd just as soon throw a movie camera into the audience's face as do something fancy to get your attention. He made movies that were cynical, had no interest in authority, and where one could feel the grit right underneath the emulsion. It's why Desi Arnaz hired him to direct the pilot of the TV-show "The Untouchables," he wanted a low budget 20's-30's noir-equivalent. His most famous movies are the sequel to Willard called Ben, and the movie where he made his fortune, the original version of Walking Tall with Joe Don Baker. But, Quentin Tarantino's seen his movies. Watch Kansas City Confidential (and you can below—it's public domain on the Interwebs, although M-G-M retains the broadcast/movie rights to it) and you see where his Reservoir Dogs came from. Only Kansas City Confidential isn't so cute with the dialog or the cultural references.
It begins with a hand-drawn map, a clock on the wall and a notebook filled with the names of low-life's. "Mr. Big" (we'll call him, as played by Preston Foster) notes the activities of the bank across the way at opening time. He notes the activity—a regular one by Western Wholesale Florists to the flower shop next door, the arrival of the early-birds to do bank-business, and the arrival of an armored car a few minutes later. He carefully checks off the routine. Then, he makes phone-calls to numbers in that notebook.
The instructions to the three men on the other side of the phone-calls are the same. There's a job. Meet him at Room 302. Baker Street Hotel. There will be a big pay-off. First on the list is Pete Harris (Jack Elam), the proverbial nervous little man in a shabby room. He chain-smokes, has gambling debts—craps is his vice. He will be the King of Spades. When Harris comes to the door, he comes armed, but the man in Room 302 makes quick work of dis-arming him and slapping Harris to attention. Harris is shocked by the man in Room 302; he is masked, gives no name, no details, but promises a pay-out of $300,000 to start a new life in another country.
Next on the list is Tony Romano (Lee Van Cleef), a sharpie with creases in his suit as sharp as his cheek-bones. He likes the dames and he likes poker, but he isn't so lucky. He's smarter than Harris and a bit too sure of himself, but 300k, he'll play along. He'll be the King of Clubs. Finally, there's the cop-killer Boyd Kane (Neville Brand) who chews bubble-gum nice and slow, doesn't talk much but sweats a lot, and he's such a high-risk that he takes the job.
It's a typical day at the bank. Western Wholesale Florists shows up to make the delivery. Driver Joe Rolfe (John Payne—sorta Robert Mitchum without the sleepy eyes) has the misfortune of nearly running over a bank customer who says "Why doncha watch where yer goin'?" He's going to not make that mistake again the whole movie. He makes the delivery and takes off, none the wiser, as the armored car parallels up. Then, while the guards are in the bank, another truck with the same Western Wholesale logo slides up behind it. When the guards with the money-bag come out, the Florist truck pulls up alongside, two men in masks jump out the back, cudgel the guards and throw the bag to a third man waiting in the back. They pile in and squeal off, leaving the too-late, too-old bank-guard to fire at their long-gone retreat.
The delivery van speeds to a waiting moving van, and it ramps into the hold. The crooks, still in their masks, want their pay-out, but Mr. Big tells them to shut up and keep their masks on—they're too "hot" and the money is, too. Nobody knows anybody's name, making them all "cop-proof and stool-pigeon proof." "Big" hands each man a stipend for them to travel to Tijuana and await instructions and half-a-playing card to serve as I.D. at their rendezvous in the future. Then, one by one, they jump out of the moving van—it's up to them to make it to Tijuana, to wait for a cable-gram for what's next.
Good day for them. Bad day for Rolfe, who gets pulled over in his delivery van during his work-day and gets man-handled by the police, and his afternoon-deliveries get ransacked looking for the stolen dough. Hauled in for questioning, he gets roughed up and accused—what was he doing in that van? His job that he got from his parole officer after a stretch on gambling charges. Rolfe is a good suspect. Never finished college to be an industrial engineer, did a stretch in the service earning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star ("Try buyin' a cup o' coffee with 'em," he snarls), and is trying to earn money to go back to school. Well, tough luck, kid. He just lost his job—he should understand says his boss—Western's clients are "very conservative people, you know how it is."
There the details stop for you. But, you get the gist—innocent man, desperate and hard-boiled, and with just enough brains to make him dangerous, especially to thieves with no honor and no idea who their "friends" are. But, once they all settle for that meeting in a Mexican resort town, they all—how did Raymond Chandler metaphor it?—"stand out like a tarantula on an angel-food cake."
Karlson was not a subtle director (remember what I said about throwing the camera?). There's a lot of casual violence, where people slap each other around with little provocation other than things are moving a little too slow—good thing the film's black and white, there'd be a lot of bruising make-up to apply—and even though the location's supposed to be Mexico, there's a lot of sweat going around. When the film's "good girl" (Colleen Gray) interrupts Rolfe getting a good beating, everybody starts to act "un-chalant" and saying they're just talking, to which she replies "...must have been a warm discussion." Nice. It's also tough to keep track of the fire-arms in Kansas City Confidential. Everybody's got a gat and they flash them a lot...or get caught reaching into their jacket-pockets. What was Bogart's line? My, my, so many guns, so few brains."
Except the one behind the camera. There are a couple fluff's here and there, not every "i" is dotted, not every double crossed, but Karlson makes sure Kansas City Confidential has the bad good's and it's a solid film noir where the world is so much against you that swapping it for the business-end of a gun actually feels pretty good. It may be "Take Out the Trash" day here, but every so often you find a nugget buried. Got 90 minutes to kill? This one will keep it a misdemeanor.
Other than that, the story's an original—and it was truly original back in 1952, when it was produced—about atomic testing unthawing a prehistoric creature from the ice, which swims down the coast of North America, and decides to chew on The Big Apple—"Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to be squished there." Yeah, yeah, there have been dozens of variations on the theme from dozens of countries of origin, but this one was the first, and hewed very close to the "Atomic dangers" theme that the movie used as a metaphor for the unnatural terror of The Bomb.
Atomic testing above the Arctic Circle, leads one of the scientists, Professor Tom Nesbitt (Paul Christian), a "nuclear physicist from New York"*to literally stumble upon a prehistoric lizard (designed, sculpted and animated by the brilliant Ray Harryhausen). When he's found, babbling about "b-b-b-big lizard!" he's laughed off by the Army (represented by Kenneth Tobey, who would take on The Thing years later) and the scientific community, including Dr. Thurgood Ellston (a bubbly Cecil Kellaway, quite different from his malevolent warlock in I Married a Witch). Only after a witness to a boat attack further down the North Atlantic Coast, corroborates the phylum of the critter do the pipe-smokers take an interest. Vindicated, Nesbitt takes an interest in Ellston's lovely assistant (Paula Raymond), who sports wide lapels and even broader gestures—"Très dramatique!" Nesbitt must think.
Ellston concludes that the Beast must be making its way down the coast, given the flotsam and jetsam (and a distinct lack of witnesses) heading for the States. Anticipating the Beast's arrival, he volunteers to take a diving bell to make observations, but, just before he can make measurements of the Creature's incisors, he becomes a victim of them.
Good thing we have a French physicist in the cast, who decides that if he can get an Army sharp-shooter ("I've got a plan! Let the Americans do it!") with a grenade launcher and toss some fissionable material into the grenade, they can fire it into the open neck-wound and microwave the thing from the inside (Sounds safe to me!). And just because its blundered into Coney Island and is trapped inside the giant flammable roller-coaster near high-intensity electrical lines, it seems like the perfect time to take one of the cars to the highest part of the coaster.
It's like anything; it's never easy.
Man, it's silly. But it isn't pretentious—all the atomic speechifying is done at the beginning, saving the ending for roaring, roller-coasters and roasting rhedosaurs. "The End" comes up so fast you don't have time to wonder if there's a garbage-strike on so they can pick the thing up on Tuesday. And Harryhausen's stop-motion work is still amazing even in this age of CGI manipulation—it still amazes that he's got the dinosaur surrounded by roller-coaster at the same time he's combined it with live action footage—where does "it" stop and the film begin? I know I'm "old school," but, man, I buy this Harryhausen labor of love (done one frame at a time) over the most complexly rendered computer kerfluffle. I'll take 20,000 Fathoms over 20,000 pixels any day.
Lighthouse Envy—The image inspired by Ray Bradbury's story
*Although judging from his accent, apparently New York has a "French Quarter."
** The incident isn't referenced in On the Waterfront.
China Gate(Samuel Fuller, 1957) "...still fighting for her life, 100 miles from the China Gate is the dying village of San Toi, the last hold-out in the North. Her supplies have been ambushed, her ammunition depleted. But she fights, as she starves. Her only chance for survival is the American food air-drop from the South. The year, 1954. The day, Thursday. The time, 10 o'clock in the morning. All animals have been eaten. All but one." That one animal is a dog in the care of a small, semi-cross-eyed boy (William Hsieh), clever enough to avoid the citizens who might want to make a meal of the puppy. He probably gets it from his mother, Lia (Angie Dickinson, improbably), also known as "Lucky Legs", who has made an existence out of the rubble running a bar in VietNam—"Lucky's Bar," ironically, given the circumstances of French occupation and attacks from communist forces in the North and from China—and distributing liquor, mostly cognac, among the troops on both sides.
But, "Lucky" wants out. She wants a better life for herself, but, most especially, for her boy. It's why, when approached by French Legionnaires under Col. De Sars (Maurice Marsac) for a tough job—to take mercenaries on her floating delivery system up the river to the communist headquarters at the China Gate with the intention of blowing up their ammo dump embedded in the tunnels. For this, they offer her $5,000 and a new bar, but "Lucky" changes the terms. She'll do it if the French guarantees the boy's passage to America.
She's skeptical, of course; it's a dangerous mission and the China Gate is overseen by a Major Cham (Lee Van Cleef), who is in love with "Lucky." But, there's an added down-side—one that makes her refuse the job—the munitions expert charged with blowing up the stockpile is Sergeant John Brock (Gene Barry), "Lucky's" former husband and father of her child. He walked out on her when the boy was born, ashamed that the child looked so "asian." Brock appeals to Father Paul (the wonderful Marcel Dalio of Le Grande Illusion and The Rules of the Game...and Casablanca and To Have and Have Not and Catch-22 and so many others), who offers no assistance, blaming Brock for "Lucky's" falling on hard times after his rejection.
Brock must "man up" and appeal to "Lucky" to put aside her animosity towards him and take on the mission, if only for the child's sake. She relents and she joins the motley crew of mercenaries: French Captain Caumont (Paul Dubov); Brock and Goldie (Nat "King" Cole, who also sings the title song by Harold Adamson and Victor Young—his last score, completed by "his old friend" Max Steiner), both Korean War vets; Private Jaszi (Sasha Harden), a Czech anti-communist suffering from PTSD; Pvt. Andreadas (Gerald Milton) a Greek freedom fighter; and a combination of French and Vietnamese troops—including Charlie (the seemingly immortal James Hong).
The friction between Brock and "Lucky" is all too obvious to the band, leading to some division in the ranks—Goldie, in particular, resents Brock, despite their history together, as Goldie and his wife could never have kids and Brock's rejection of his own child due to racism and his treatment of "Lucky" is particularly galling. On the practical side, Brock divides up the primers for their explosives between the two of them, should something happen to him along the way.
There's plenty that goes wrong, with Jaszi's nightmares, night-time firefights and mined roads, while Brock struggles with his feelings and "Lucky" struggles with the duties of distracting the guards, while around her, men are dying and Brock is unrelenting—he still has feelings for her, but, with so much going around, his focus must be on the mission. He doesn't give himself a chance for thinking about the future. Goldie steps up and vows to "Lucky" that he will get her son back to the United States.
The tenor of things change when "Lucky" gets to the China Gate. She finds Cham there and he tells her that he loves her and will be happy to take her and her son to Moscow when his position there is done. She reminds Cham that he once hated the Communists and war, but he counters that, now that he has some power and a future with the Communists, things have changed. He shows her the ammo dump, housed in one of the tunnels and vows to take him with her to Moscow once victory is secured.
She reports back to Brock that she knows where the cache of explosives is, and finds that he's had a change of heart—he will take her and her son to the U.S. once the mission is over. Plans are made to infiltrate the tunnels and destroy them once darkness falls. All "Lucky" has to do is distract the guards, giving Brock and the men enough to plant the charges.
Fuller has always been one to chase the headlines, given his reporter background, and just as he made the first Korean war film at the time of the conflict, he anticipated the struggles in Vietnam before the U.S. became engaged. Filmed in Cinemascope and returning to black and white (color might have been fine for something like The House of Bamboo and its exoticism, but for the war-torn Vietnam and the preponderance of night-scenes, monochrome is far more dramatic), he also tackles the subject of race and prejudice—as he would again in later films—while it still simmered in the background of public consciousness.
He gets uniformly good performances out of all involved—even Barry and Dickinson seem to rise above the melodrama—but Fuller took a chance on noted recording artist Cole and was rewarded with a completely lived-in performance devoid of theatricality, but much depth, a risk given his role as the "conscience" of the film.
This would be the last film Fuller would direct for 20th Century Fox. His next, a Western called Run of the Arrow was filmed for RKO, but so impressed Universal that they picked it up for distribution. Fuller would continue his career as an independent film-maker.
When Orson Welles was asked what movies he studied before embarking on directing Citizen Kane he replied, "I studied the Old Masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." Running parallel with our series about Akira Kurosawa ("Walking Kurosawa's Road"), we're running a series of pieces about the closest thing America has to Kurosawa in artistry—director John Ford. Ford rarely made films set in the present day, but (usually) made them about the past...and about America's past, specifically (when he wasn't fulfilling a passion for his Irish roots). In "The History of John Ford" we'll be gazing fondly at the work of this American Master, who started in the Silent Era, learning his craft, refining his director's eye, and continuing to work deep into the 1960's (and his 70's) to produce the greatest body of work of any American "picture-maker," America's storied film-maker, the irascible, painterly, domineering, sentimental puzzle that was John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance(John Ford, 1962) Even the mention of the title invokes a cynical irony for those who have seen it. This crowning glory in the long accomplished (dare one say legendary) career of director John Ford, 68 at the time of its filming, is a bitter pill of a film and a meditation on the inexorable march of time and the brutal boots of history.
It is about "becoming"—not just in the strictest sense of transitioning (although the town of Shinbone, in which it is set, is in the midst of leaving its old West roots behind to take its place as part of the Union of States), but also in the less used sense: of reflecting favorably on the subject to its advantage.
It is also about, as so many of John Ford's films over the years, the taming of a wilderness, and the creation of a society. And the unbecoming truth that to create the veneer of civility, sacrifices must be made, just as sure as Sunday dinner.
Senator Rance Stoddard and his wife Hallie (James Stewart, Vera Miles) return to the town of Shinbone to much hoopla. It is their home-town, of course, but as the Senator now spends all his time in Washington he doesn't get back there much. So the press start nosing around to get the where-fore's of why "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (and rode that acclaim into politics), is there now. The occasion is a funeral for a man nobody knows (or has little regard for), but he's very important to the Stoddards—he is, after all, the man who brought them together. And as Hallie places a cactus on Stoddard's plain pine coffin, Stoddard relates the tale, one that blows away the Senator's folksy bluster with a scouring truth.
Even if it means the death of his way of life. Sacrifices must be made.
By the time the tale of Stoddard and his benefactor/mentor and rival is told, a bloom has, impossibly, appeared on the cactus, because like Stewart's lack of youth in the flash-backs and the old-age make-up for the young actors in the present, Ford is also playing with time, even going to his own past, using a piece of music from 1939's Young Mr. Lincoln (that put a melody to Lincoln's loss of his first love Ann Rutledge) for the scene of Hallie regarding Doniphon's burnt-out homestead. And so, the telling of the tale of a lifetime is enough time to ensure new life in movie terms.
In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford goes so far as to state outright something he'd been alluding to throughout his career as a film-maker, story-teller and chronicler of the United States. Given a choice between printing the unvarnished truth or a myth for the common good, the newspaperman says, "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes truth, print the legend."
There was never a better-stated justification of film-making.
It's a definitive statement of Ford's career directing movies. But Liberty Valance is also a bridge from Ford's early Westerns to the "modern" "oaters" of the 60's as Valance's wormy toadies are portrayed by Lee Van Cleef (of Sergio Leone's "Dollar" trilogy) and Strother Martin (part of Sam Peckinpah's stock company). Those film-makers were inspired by Ford, and in their own revisionist methods of "printing the truth," made their own legends.
And so the film is its own truth, summarizing one director's past as a pioneer and presaging the future of the Western film, on the edge of its demise, both "becoming" even in the depth of their cynicism.
* One of the criticisms of the film is that both Stewart and Wayne are playing young men when the two were both in their 50's. Wayne can get away with it (as he always plays old...and other reasons), but Stewart doesn't come across as a man in his 20's. I have something to say about that towards the end of the review.
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.
