Joseph H. Lewis's The Big Combo (1955), one of my favorite film noirs, is now on Netflix Watch Instantly. Between John Alton's cinematography, the homoerotic subtext, the graphic and creative depiction of torture (with a hearing aid!), and hardboiled dialogue, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Here are some notes I took during a research trip at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Margaret Herrick Library from the Production Code Administration (PCA) file and the news clipping files for the film. Note: I was unable to import my footnotes. For those interested, I can either e-mail the below text with footnotes or I can comment on the exact sources below.
Production/Joseph H. Lewis and John Alton
The working title of the film was "The Hoodlum." According to a June 23rd 1954 item in the Los Angeles Times, screenwriter Philip Yordan’s (who also wrote Dillinger and Nicholas Ray’s noir/western Johnny Guitar) screenplay “was in great demand with reported bidders, including United States Productions, Russ-Field, Frank P. Rosenberg, and Edward L. Alperson.” The article states that Yordan claims to have turned down these other offers, which reportedly reached as high as $75,000 plus a percentage of the film’s gross.
Jack Palance was originally cast as “Mr. Brown” but was replaced by Richard Conte after Palance insisted that his wife, Virginia Baker, be cast in the film. The film marked the first production of Theodora Productions, which was owned by actor Cornel Wilde and his wife.
Contrary to Paul Kerr’s assertion that the B film noir is “a negotiated resistance to the realist aesthetic on the one hand and an accommodation to restricted expenditure on the other” thus allowing for a “degree of autonomy,” James Naremore looks at the B noir/Poverty Row films in another light. Naremore argues that, in reality, the majority of film noirs, even those, like The Big Combo that are often deemed B films, are often mid-budget films. Naremore goes on to describe The Big Combo specifically as a “intermediate-level production.”
Chris Hugo explores this spectrum by describing The Big Combo as an A/B hybrid that exploits the sex and violence of the story and the low cost “style” of noir in favor of “a star cast.” While the star power of Cornel Wilde and Brian Donlevy is somewhat debatable, it’s clear that a moderate degree of funds was spent on the acquisition of John Alton and Joseph H. Lewis. Hugo describes the cinematographer as “able to give…a quality gloss even if there was little to photograph” while Lewis “got the maximum impact out of a poorly conceived commercial production package.” He continues by stating that the film is incorrectly touted as being an oppositional text whereas the film was mainly innovative because of its stature as a low budget hybrid.
Watching the finished production, one cannot help but to agree with Hugo’s assertion: Lewis did indeed get the maximum impact out of the production. While David Thomson somewhat crassly notes, “There’s no point in overpraising Lewis. The limitations of the B picture lean on all his films,” he is partially correct. A director of B-Westerns and the noir Gun Crazy, Lewis’s The Big Combo stands out as the strongest of his films and a great majority of its effectiveness lies under the domain of the haunting cinematography of John Alton, who “helped create the look of film noir.” As Alton fittingly remarked “It's not what you light - it's what you don’t light.”
Alton, who won the Academy Award three years earlier for his color photography in An American in Paris, compliments Lewis’s minimal production perfectly and the end result has been touted by some as being the definitive film noir. (Ironically, the film was covered in a Hollywood Reporter article in June 1954 and the film was reported to be photographed in Eastman Color.) As Alton suggests in his guide to cinematography, “Where there is no light, one cannot see; and when one cannot see, his imagination starts to run wild. He begins to suspect that something is about to happen. In the dark there is mystery.” Truly, there is no greater example than his work on The Big Combo.
“Will Shock the Sensibilities and Cause Near-Nausea.”: The PCA and a Shocked Reception
“I'm gonna give you a break. I'm gonna fix it so you don't hear the bullets.”-Mr. Brown
Released on February 13th 1955, most critics noted the film’s excessive violence and incredibly sadistic torture scenes. In his review for Motion Picture Daily, Samuel D. Berns writes that the film is “Strictly adult trade, although its theme is one for mass consumption.” Berns continues, the film is “cut out to order for the…fan who likes his action rough and raw.”
In a more lukewarm review, a critic for Variety expresses a slightly unsettled viewpoint towards the film. The critic writes that the film is “too realistic. One torture scene will shock the sensibilities and cause near-nausea…The moronic fringe of sadists will enjoy this and all the kiddies will be sick to their stomachs.” The Legion of Decency would later award the film a B rating for “excessive brutality” and “low moral tone.”
Despite the film’s violence, which I believe still comes across as especially brutal, the film had little trouble passing through the Production Code. In a memo dated August 13th 1954, Joseph Breen simply wrote that the material “seems acceptable” while producers should make sure that “girls are properly and decently covered with no objectionable exposure” and that a piece of dialogue concerning drug trafficking be removed from the shooting script.
While U.S. censors, despite critical reception, had little problem with the film’s violence, international censors made more objections. In an MPPA memo, Canadian censors requested that producers “shorten sequence of Conte forcibly pouring hair tonic (22% alcohol) down Wilde’s throat” while Australian censors voiced the same objections.
In terms of final thoughts, I find the PCA’s ignorance of the film’s violence rather telling. For instance, in 1946 noir auteur Robert Siodmak helmed The Dark Mirror for International Pictures. Looking at the PCA file for that film, Breen and company had memos of suggestions critiquing the film’s opening murder scene (the knife protruding from the victim’s back was to be limited) and some forensic details included within the dialogue (a line of dialogue regarding the wearing of gloves to prevent fingerprints was eliminated). The Dark Mirror, in comparison with The Big Combo, seems rather tame in terms of violence, yet the PCA took more of an issue with the earlier film.
The dulling awareness on behalf of the PCA can be attributed to a number of factors, mainly due to the fallout of the The Miracle decision and the retirement of Breen. In 1954, Breen retired from the PCA, which lead Variety to note a “marked change” in Code interpretation, “a decided tendency towards a broader, more casual approach.” The PCA had already been weakened by an influx of foreign films, which often dealt with more explicit subject matter and whose international status exempted them from the code. Moreover, 1952 brought the reversal of the Mutual Film ruling which resulted in the protection of film under the 1st amendment.
Despite the rather disturbed reception of The Big Combo, the PCA’s influence was further tested by the release of the Otto Preminger film The Man With the Golden Arm in late 1955 which drew fire over its depiction of drug addiction but nonetheless was released and found itself with three Academy Award nominations. Soon after, the Production Code was revised but by 1960, with the release of Hitchcock’s Psycho, the PCA became nearly powerless as studios began to release films without a seal of approval. On November 1st 1968 the MPAA film rating system went into effect, ending the tenure of the Production Code.
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