The Big Combo

The Big Combo 1955 U.S. Allied Artists (84 minutes) directed by Joseph H. Lewis, written by Philip Yordan, cinematography by John Alton, lighting by Harry Sundby, music by David Raksin, Robert S. Eisen, editor.

This is a cockamamie cock-and-bull crime story with lots of improbable moving parts, shot in infinite shades of gray in that film noir homeland that was mid-century midtown Manhattan.

The opening credits roll against Manhattan’s neon and motor vehicle headlights seen from the window of a low-flying airplane after dark. At a big boxing event, a young woman flees the arena, chased by two men through the ill-lit, empty and cavernous innards of the structure. At a police station, a dour cop is dead-set on bringing an all but untouchable mob boss to justice.

The cock is the preening mob boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte). Brown, a former prison guard, has ‘worked his way up’ through the organization known to police as ‘The Combination’—the ‘Big Combo’ of the title. Brown heads Bolemac Corporation, the mob’s legitimate front, which operates out of its Bolemac Hotel. He took over Bolemac from a certain Grazzi, who ‘returned to Sicily.’

The bull is Lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) of the New York Police Department’s 93rd Precinct. Diamond is an uncompromising gumshoe bent on bringing down the ruthless and slippery Brown. His ‘sworn duty is to push too hard.’

The cock’s current hen is Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace). Lowell is an upper crust, classically-trained musician in her twenties whom the story line characterizes as drawn to Brown’s animal magnetism while slumming in the clubs in defiance of her parents—Grace Kelly’s bad sister. In an early scene in a restaurant Lowell spots a middle-aged family acquaintance who asks if she still plays the piano.

‘The only thing I play now, Mr. Audubon, is stud poker,’ Lowell replies, shortly before she passes out from too many pills. Mae West would have banked that line.

Brown’s gang includes Joe McClure (Brian Donlevy), his former superior in the Grazzi organization, a middle-aged man with a hearing aid. Brown also has a pair of gunzels, Fante (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl Holliman).

‘First is first, and second is nobody,’ Brown lectures his henchmen, belittling McClure, who once owned the hotel, shouting in McClure’s hearing aid for emphasis. (Brown subsequently uses the device to torture Diamond; and then later he turns it off to soften a blow out of a kind of ‘consideration.’)

Brown speaks self-consciously, as though looking in a mirror, often with his back to his interlocutor. He likes the serrated cut of his wit and the sound of his own voice. At outset he looks into the camera, for instance, speaking what he wishes to convey to Diamond as though through a third person.

At the 93rd Precinct police station, Captain Peterson (Robert Middleton) takes Diamond to task over the $18,600 Diamond has spent in six months of investigating Brown—some of which out of his own pocket (in 2014 dollars this would be roughly $161,750). This investigation has included trips to Las Vegas and Cuba at Diamond’s own expense—and on the $96.50 a week that Brown keeps taunting Diamond he makes as a policeman.

Diamond insists to his captain that he is only a treasurer away from nailing Brown. Peterson suspects that Diamond has a thing for the moll and, reminding Diamond that there are ‘17,000 laws on the books to be enforced,’ tells his lieutenant to get his priorities straight.

And the bull does have a thing for the ‘wayward girl.’ Across a table from Lowell in a nightclub, Diamond tries to convince her help him get evidence on Brown to convict him:

‘Do you think this is mink, Miss Lowell? Do you think these are the skins of little animals sewn together for your pleasure? You're mistaken. These are skins of human beings, Miss Lowell, the skins of people who have been beaten, sold, robbed, doped and murdered by Mr. Brown,’ Diamond tells her.

At the same time, Diamond has an on-off relationship with Rita (Helene Stanton), a burlesque queen. A sign near the strip club where Diamond goes to see Rita reads in large letters: ‘Easy terms.’

“Hoodlum, detective: a woman doesn't care how a guy makes a living, just how he makes love,” Rita says.

The plot convolutes as Diamond inevitably winds closer his quarry. The memorable denouement takes place in the Casablancan fog of a small airfield hangar at night, and likewise portends to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The unsung stars of this picture are John Alton’s cinematography and Harry Sundby’s lighting. The film’s gray tones are remarkable. If possible, one should see this picture projected on a big screen in a movie theater.

Mystery Street

Mystery Street 1950 U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (93 minutes) directed by John Sturges; screenplay by Sydney Boehm and Richard Brooks; story by Leonard Spielgass; Ferris Webster, editor; John Alton, cinematographer.

This is a beautifully shot, ensemble B picture: a scientific police procedural shot in Boston with a ‘minority’ star, a diverse and interesting group of women actors, a dark sense of ribald humor, and lots of kitschy visual details.

The story gets off to a pulp splash: a voluptuous blonde with great legs appears in a black negligee at the top of a dark Victorian stair and descends pulling on a light-colored silk robe to answer a communal hall telephone ringing on the first floor.

The blonde is Vivian Heldon (Jan Sterling). She is a hostess in a Boston nightclub. We hear Heldon say she is ‘in a jam.’ The ‘jam’ turns out to be that she is pregnant. The father is James Joshua Harkley (Edmon Ryan), a ‘respectable’ married Hyannis yacht builder with teenage daughters. Heldon arranges on the telephone to meet Harkley later that evening at the club where she works, a kitsch little boite called ‘The Grass Skirt.’

Heldon lives in a rooming house on Beacon Hill owned by the prurient and parsimonious Miss Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester). The other boarder, Jacqueline ‘Jackie’ Elcott (Betsy Blair), is a waitress. Jackie is a ‘good girl’ but by no means a goody-goody. In a later scene, she pops a clip out of an Army .45 caliber pistol like a pro. ‘I used to go with an MP,’ she said brightly. ‘What I learned about guns… and the Marines.’

Later in the evening, Heldon sits bored and impatient at a table in The Grass Skirt, stood up by her man and filling an ashtray. A lamp on the table has a ceramic figure of a bare breasted ‘native’ dancer. This kitsch figure has a cheesy ‘grass skirt’ made to undulate suggestively around its waist; it does its herky-jerky rumba to the beat of Cole Porter’s ‘You’d Be So Easy to Love’ playing in the background.

And then opportunity bursts in. A newcomer at the bar who has had too much to drink parked his ‘y‎ellow Ford’ illegally on the curb outside the club. This is Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson), drowning his sorrows because his wife is in the hospital after having lost their first child.

‘That’s the story of my life,’ the young man admits to the barkeep. ‘I’m always where I shouldn't be. I’m also not where I ought to be. Ever since Adam, man’s been crying, “Where am I?”’

Heldon ‘picks up’ Shanway in short order, commandeers him to his car, and drives to the cape to have it out face to face with Harkley.

Shanway is passed out while Heldon tracks down and finally arranges to meet Harkley. She literally ‘turns heads’—three in campy unison—when she goes into a diner to call Harkley. When Shanway wakes up and realizes that she has driven to the cape, Heldon leaves him standing in the road and rushes off to what will be her fatal last meeting.

The saturnine Harkley has panicked. When they finally meet, the worried 24-year-old who shows the world her edge and attitude looks up unguardedly at her experienced older lover. The muzzle of a handgun springs into view. Harkley shoots Heldon, then ‘makes out’ with her limp body to hide his act when a young couple happens by; he buries her, and then gets rid of the yellow Ford in a sinkhole. The stranded Shanway gets back to Boston and reports his car stolen from the hospital parking lot where it should have been.

The police procedural begins six months later when an ornithologist (Walter Burke) comes across the shapely ankle and foot of a skeleton sticking out of a dune. Now it is the authorities’ turn to work out the backstory the audience has just seen.

Lieutenant Peter Moralas [sic] (Ricardo Montalban), a detective in Barnstable, a town near Hyannis in the southern cape where skeleton turned up, gets the case. Moralas’ regular beat evidently is in a ‘Portuguese section.’ This ‘cold case’ is his first murder investigation. Moralas and his partner, Detective Tim Sharkey (Walter Maher), turn for help to Professor McAdoo (Bruce Bennett), a forensic pathologist at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Legal Medicine.

Moralas does the shoe-leather police work as McAdoo provides clues from the forensic evidence. Modern science conquers the macabre when Moralas and McAdoo succeed in identifying the newspaper headlines’ ‘skeleton girl’ by matching a photo image of the victim’s skull superimposed on a series of photographs of missing women.

Heldon’s last known address takes Moralas back to where we first saw her. Moralas meets Miss Smerrling and Jackie and he finds ‘a little black book’ filled with names among Heldon’s personal effects.

Smerrling self-consciously hides ‘personal things’ from Moralas’ view as she moves around her apartment, but she is framed in a mirror ringed with pictures of flexing male body builders’ oiled torsos clipped from magazines. 

The trail also leads Moralas to the clueless Henry Shanway and his upright wife Grace (Sally Forrest, Montalban’s co-star). Grace, probably aware of her husband’s weakness but convinced of his innocence, keeps the tough, distrustful police lieutenant pounding pavement.

Smerrling steers the narrative into a diverting subplot after she beats Moralas to Harkley and tries to put the squeeze on him—a classic film noir gambit. This subplot also puts the handgun that killed Heldon back into play as a wildcard.

The film’s exterior scenes were shot on Beacon Hill in Boston, in Hyannis, at Harvard Yard and the Square, and at the university medical school in Roxbury. The melodramatic film noir denouement unfolds at Boston’s Trinity Station and across the adjacent rail yard. Incidentally, the director John Sturges is not related to Preston Sturges. 

Girl on the run

ID:A 2011 Denmark (104 minutes) directed by Christian E. Christiansen; screenplay by Tine Krull Petersen, from the novel På knivens æg (Eggs on the knife), by Anne Chaplin Hansen; Ian Hansen, cinematographer; Bodil Kjæhauge, editor; Kristian Eidnes Andersen, composer.

What would you do if awoke a little the worse for wear one morning in wet clothes on a riverbank, had no idea who you are or were, and several million Euros and a handgun in a duffle bag?

The viewer first sees a blurry blue background figure framed by a spider’s web in a forked branch. The web fades out of the shot as the focus finds a supine figure juxtaposed with the spider, beached on rocks along the edge of a running stream.

The focus resolves into a woman’s body. The woman (Tuva Novotny) awakens in a wet blue work shirt and dungarees on a riverbank in the country. She looks like hell warmed over and has a gash on her forehead. The first thing she sees is one of the sneakers she was wearing, lodged on downstream rocks.

She picks up the shoe and a nearby duffle bag and makes her way to a town. The viewer has no idea who this woman is, where she is, where she is going or has come from. We soon find out that she knows as much as we do.

The way the woman lumbers across the stream makes one feel the wet, uncomfortable clothes she is in, and the sharp, rocky bottom she is stepping on in feet unused to walking unshod outdoors. A curious detail of this picture is that it gives viewers a sense of what things feel like, as though there were a sensation track following the narrative.

The woman appears to suffer from a trauma-induced amnesia. Rested and cleaned up, she finds out from a television in a bar that a Dutch politician has been brutally murdered in his villa nearby in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. A bar patron disparages the gay victim. She also sees that there was a big bank heist in Holland. The woman’s French is fluent but marks her as a foreigner. She knows that she has an awful lot of someone else’s money, and that thugly white men close at hand are intensely interested in catching up with her.

We learn eventually that the woman’s name is Ida. Evidently the title ID:A is meant as a stylish trope on an acronym of the Danish phrase ‘identitet anonym’—identity unknown.

Director Christian E. Christiansen and screenwriter Tine Krull Petersen have structured their story by piecing together Ida’s identity and former life in the bits and snatches in which it comes back to her as she struggles through her amnesia to figure out what happened to her and what she is involved in. This makes it a tricky movie to discuss without spoiling the effect of what they have has tried to do.

This also may sound done-before gimmicky, but the story is absorbing and the narrative well-paced and well-edited, which helps the viewer suspend disbelief over some of the iffier details. The film*, based on the work of a Danish romance novelist, would come straight from the Alma Reville playbook. And like the work of Reville and her better known partner and husband Alfred Hitchcock, the ‘action’ is so well oiled that it leaves no loose ends and the only things unexplained are metaphysical.

Christiansen puts together a deceptively easy-looking chase sequence on foot in a Copenhagen mall. Ian Hansen’s camera work is sharp, Bodil Kjæhauge’s editing is crisp, and Kristian Eidnes Andersen’s techno soundtrack makes the viewer’s heart race like Ida’s.

A shot sequence later in the film tells an anecdote in pictures as Hitchcock did so well. A man and a woman on the run need a car. They enter a hotel lobby. A concierge at a car rental counter hands a prosperous-looking older man car keys and a newspaper. The man and woman eye one another. The female fugitive sits down next to the older man on a couch in the lobby. The camera finds the car keys on a folded copy of the older man’s European edition Wall Street Journal on the coffee table in front of him. The male fugitive engages the concierge at the counter. The older man sits back to peruse a tourist guide. The concierge sharply slaps the man at the counter across the face, capturing the attention of everyone in the lobby. His accomplice and the car keys are gone when the camera looks back at the older man on the couch.

The cast includes Flemming Enevold, also a tenor who performs ‘E lucevan le stelle’ from Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca and other numbers. Koen Wouterse and Marie-Louise Wille are Ida’s siblings; John Breijsman and Rogier Philipoom are two of the bad guys; Jens Jørn Spottag is HP, a private eye Ida hires; Finn Nielsen is Roni ‘Rosie’ Hansen, Ida’s transvestite guardian angel, and Arnaud Binard is her love interest.

This story would go among the current genre of feminist action-thrillers, particularly in the manner in which violence, especially violence against women, gets its payback, as in the ‘girl with the dragon tattoo’ series. There is no gratuitous violence or t&a here. Neither does Ida ‘kick ass,’ after the current fashion, though she comes through when she has to. The justice is karmic rather than meted out by any single character.

‘Vi krangler má jo stå sammen,’ the sympathetic transvestite Rosie tells Ida, giving Ida men’s clothes to help her out of a jam—‘We girls must stick together.’

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*(The three phrases which appear on the screen in the German trailer are: ‘Wie findet man die Wahrheit/Wenn man nicht weiss/Wem man vertrauen kann?’ How do you find the truth/when you don’t know/whom you can trust?)