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Synopsis: Police Lieutenant Louis Diamond (Cornel Wilde) is obsessed with bringing down gangster Mr. Brown (Richard Conte). To this end, he employs every tactic at his disposal, but the calm, sadistic Mr. Brown continues to elude him, until Brown's blonde concubine tries to kill herself on a dancefloor. Interrogating her on her hospital bed, Diamond catches a name that provides the key to bringing down Brown and his "Combination." The trick is to do it before Brown brings Diamond down...

This exceptionally brutal film noir benefits from two strong performances in the lead. As played by Cornel Wilde, Diamond is a cop on the edge, a "righteous man," as Brown calls him. Richard Conte's Mr. Brown is assured and ice cold, always ready with a smile and an insinuation. The emnity between the two is palpable. "The man has a right to be upset. He makes $96.50 a week. The belhops in my hotel make better money," Brown taunts. Diamond replies: "I'm gonna open you up, Brown, and I'm gonna operate. You might not like what I find." The actual plot is almost an afterthought. Oh, it works well enough, but like any really great film noir, The Big Combo is best when it is detailing individual scenes. The confrontations where Diamond and Brown trade threats are the heart of the movie, and the action sequences are the blood that flows from them. There are a couple of remarkable sequences involving a hearing aid--the first as an instrument of torture, and the second as a dazzling piece of cinematic styling. The final confrontation at the end of the movie would be a let-down if it wasn't so impeccably filmed. It's filled with shadowy shapes in the night and fog, almost a living avatar of film noir itself. Best of all, it doesn't end with a corpse, even though both antagonists might wish for that.

The Big Combo is surprisingly violent for its day, but that's nothing new to the films of Joseph Lewis: after all, his Gun Crazy features a remarkable real-time bank heist that is years ahead of its time and has never been equalled. In The Big Combo, he is teamed with the great cinematographer John Alton, who made the darkness of film noir sing like no other. The climax he films is dazzling, almost experimental. The entire film is rich with textured darknesses. Lewis matches Alton's images with a frenetic jazz score by David Raskin. The result is energizing. But perhaps the most striking thing about The Big Combo is how modern it seems. Oh, some elements of the film can't help but seem dated, but it's approach to crime and criminals seems more akin to the crime films of the seventies or nineties than it does to the mainstream of fifties film noir. Its influence on, say Reservoir Dogs, is easy to see. All told, The Big Combo stands as one of the best films of its kind. And given the kind of film that it is, that's high praise indeed...