The subject matter of The Big Combo, a terrific B-picture from 1955, might have easily been treated within the confines of a late-era crime melodrama or a police procedural —
instead it lurches instantly into the territory of the classic film noir and never leaves it, at least not for long.  It’s something you might expect from its director Joseph H. Lewis, who also directed Gun Crazy, one of the darkest and bleakest of all noirs.

The Big Combo is about a policeman’s attempt to bring down a modern crime lord, Mr. Brown — a man so rich and powerful that he never has to soil his own hands with
the dirty work.  The police don’t have the financial resources to investigate his multifarious organization, the big combo of the film’s title, and Brown has enough friends in high places to put pressure on any cop who does try to go after him.

Cornell Wilde plays the one cop who won’t give up, won’t buckle under the pressure, and his boss thinks he’s lost his mind.  Fighting Brown is fighting the corruption of the whole world — a fool’s errand.  It’s Wilde’s essential loneliness that makes him a classic noir protagonist.  He doesn’t represent the decent forces in society opposed to “respectable” thugs like Brown — those forces simply don’t exist.  This is what distinguishes The Big Combo from a traditional crime melodrama or police procedural.

At the same time, Wilde’s detective is hardly pure himself.  It’s suggested that he secretly admires Brown, is secretly in love with Brown’s moll — that his crusade is motivated more by jealousy and resentment than by morality or a love of justice.  This is what distinguishes the protagonist of this film from the traditional “tarnished knight” hero of traditional hardboiled detective fiction.  The code of honor of the Wilde character is suspect.

At one point the moll, explaining why she can’t leave Brown, says, “I
live in a maze . . . a strange, blind and backward maze, and all the
little twisting paths lead back to Mr. Brown.”  That’s the
predicament of Wilde’s character as well.  By the end of the film,
the view of the world we’ve been given makes it quite irrelevant
whether or not Brown is ever brought to justice.  There’s no sense
that the world will be a better place if he is, because it will still
operate by the same rules — Brown’s rules.

The Wilde character’s fight to extricate himself from the maze is
heroic.  He will save a few lives and avenge a few others along
the way, but his existential dilemma will never be resolved, because
the big combo is the world and it won’t change.  It will stay noir.

The ending of The Big Combo echoes the ending of Casablanca visually.  But what different moral universes the two films inhabit.  In 1942, Casablanca could make idealistic sacrifice look glamorous and sexy.  By 1955, ten years after the end of WWII, the cost of such sacrifice had been measured.  We had defeated the Axis evil, but to do so we had had to summon up reserves of evil within ourselves, and the ghost of it hovered, in the shape of a mushroom cloud, over everything.

The Big Combo has been added to my film noir canon.  Sadly, there isn’t a satisfactory DVD edition of the film, although the Geneon release is watchable and cheap.  The Big Combo deserves better, if only for the wonderfully inventive cinematography of the
great noir master John Alton.

The term film noir was first used in something like its contemporary meaning in 1946 by French film critic Nino Frank.  The occasion was a particular week in which five films made earlier in Hollywood but unavailable to French audiences during the war opened in Paris.
All of them had dark themes and reminded Frank of American pulp fiction from the 30s.

Much of this fiction had been published in France under the Série Noire (“Black Series”) imprint and so Frank, logically enough, labeled the five films films noirs.  [The term film noir had earlier been applied to a series of moody, poetic French films from the 1930s which dealt with the travails of working-class people, but these had little in common with the crime thrillers Frank was talking about.]  Three of the films, Murder, My Sweet (above, at the top of the post), Double Indemnity and The Phantom Lady were in fact based on the work of pulp fiction writers — Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.  The Woman In the Window, below, was more in the line of a Hitchcockian psychological thriller, a form Hitchcock had mastered before the war.  Laura was a fairly standard murder mystery, a form that also predated WWII, though very elegantly executed.

In truth, there was nothing terribly new about the five films Frank called films noirs, though all were perhaps a little darker and edgier in tone than similar Hollywood films from before the war had been.  Because the French had not been able to see the gradual development of this tone during the war years, it came as something of a revelation.

But after 1946 a new film tradition emerged which diverged from the hardboiled detective fiction of the 30s — and from the rancid domestic dramas of Cain and from the
Hitchcockian suspense thriller and from the classic murder mystery.  It was a body of work which specifically addressed post-war, atomic age anxieties.

In this body of work, the underworld of pulp fiction seemed to have become the only world.  Its protagonists were not wisecracking knights errant who ventured onto the wild side of things to solve a crime, nor were they everymen forced to brave an ordeal to become stronger and wiser, nor were they committed criminals, following transgressive urges to an inevitable and cautionary doom, a doom which restored society’s moral norms.  They were men in a state of existential despair, unsure of how the world worked anymore, at the mercy of strong women, morally bewildered.  The doom they often met with solved nothing, restored nothing.  It was, in a sense, an expression of the post-traumatic stress disorder of the generation which had fought WWII and could never again see “normal” life in the same way again — especially not in the enduring shadow of nuclear annihilation.

This new tradition naturally enough inheirited the label film noir, even though it was quite distinct from the kinds of films that inspired Frank’s use of the label, the kinds of films out of which the new tradition emerged.

The imprecision of the term film noir was thus built into its history, so to speak.  Most of the films we now think of as classic films noirs were made after the term was applied by Frank.  They eventually came to constitute a distinct cycle, which flourished for more than a decade before it played itself out toward the end of the 50s.

I think the time has come to consider this cycle apart from the kinds of films that were first called films noirs — and I think the only sensible way to do this is to violate the history of the term film noir and to apply it only to the distinct cycle that emerged, for the most
part, after the term’s invention.  In fact, I would argue that none of the five films that inspired Frank’s application of the term really belong to the tradition of the classic film noir.

In the interest of clarity and a sharper kind of analysis, we need to distinguish film noir
from the various traditions out of which it developed.  [And we certainly need to distinguish it from the poetic proletarian French tragedies that were first called films noirs back in the 30s.]  Pulp fiction, or hardboiled detective fiction, are terms that serve perfectly well to label the sort of films made from the works of writers like Chandler, Woolrich and Cain.  Hitchcockian is a term that serves perfectly well to label the sorts of thrillers he specialized in.  Murder mystery is a term that serves perfectly well to describe a film like Laura.  The cycle of films that emerged after WWII, what might be called the atomic-age crime thriller, was something else again and it needs its own label . . . film noir.