Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

woman fleeing from the bowels of a boxing arena, chased by two henchmen. This scene
clearly echoes Robert Aldrich’s apocalyptic and nihilistic Kiss Me Deadly in which we see
a pair of naked feet of an attractive girl, wearing only a white trench coat, stumbling and
running down a lonely country road at night after having escaped from the nearby lunatic
asylum. The fleeing girl in The Big Combo is blonde Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace); she
desperately tries to run away from the boxing match that Mr. Brown is watching. The
viewer soon understands that he is the sinister mob head, and that the plot of the film is the
attempt to pin down his secrets which will allow police Lieutenant Leonard Diamond
(Cornel Wilde) to break his power and send him to prison. This is what the “big combo” of
the film’s title is a reference to: Brown’s obscure Bollemac Corporation which comprises a
network of criminal business interests, and which attracts the attention of detective
Diamond.
The complex plotting of the film conceals a simple mission: Lt Diamond’s search
for evidence against the mob leader which will lead to a conviction. He plays the role of an
isolated but incorruptible cop, and his obsessive quest (which nearly leads him to delirium)
justifies the close surveillance of Susan, with whom he is equally obsessed, as part of his
resolute effort to bring down Brown’s “combo”. In that sense, the overall narrative
structure of the film seems directly derivative of John Cromwell’s The Racket or Fritz
Lang’s The Big Heat, as both films display corruption as an aggregation of all the desires,
ambitions, and negotiations of a city, rather than some kind of abstract force or entity. With
The Racket, the parallelism with The Big Combo is established essentially by the crossfire
that exists between the city’s prosecuting attorney, Welch (Ray Collins), and a police
detective, Turck (William Conrad), who are both crooks and part of a whole set of political
machinations. In the latter, The Big Heat, we have Glenn Ford as Dave Bannion, the ironwilled,
dedicated homicide detective who investigates the trail of a vicious gang he
suspects holds power over the police force. Here again it is the gangster’s spurned
girlfriend Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame) 102 who comes to Bannion’s assistance to bring
down the gangster boss Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby). Both of these films, thus, offer
a searing portrait of American corruption, and as far as style is concerned, they both stand
alongside The Big Combo. Lang’s film, however, inverts the narrative paradigm that is part
102 Gloria Grahame is best known in this film for the facial disfigurement she suffers at the hands of her
sadistic and cold-blooded boyfriend, Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), when he callously flings hot coffee into her
face.
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