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

of most noir films including The Big Combo, insofar as the tradition of the femme fatale is
concerned.
At this point, I wish to reference the new cycle that film noir went through and
which stresses how much it is indebted to the gangster film. Inspired by the Kefauver
Commission on organised crime, 103 this cycle adapts the psychological approach of noirs
of the forties but now with an emphasis on the corrupted American towns and cities. Many
exposé noir gangster films were produced during this decade, with films such as Bretaigne
Windust / Raoul Walsh’s The Enforcer, with the opening narration voiced by Estes
Kefauver (who was heading a Senate investigation into organised crime at that time);
Robert Wise’s The Captive City (1952), in which Senator Kefauver appears in the film as
himself; Fred Sears’s Chicago Syndicate, portraying a public accountant, Barry
Amsterdam (Dennis O’Keefe), who again single-handedly tries to bring down a powerful
mobster; or Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story, a drama that describes the real-life 1954
assassination of Alabama attorney general Albert Patterson, all these three films from
1955. In noir films of the fifties, the mob seems to have influential social ties, and to be
well-established. Although The Big Combo does not put so much emphasis on the social
corruption found in The Racket or The Big Heat, its mobsters seem as open and
untouchable as in these films. In fact, Mr Brown and the Combo he controls seem
indestructible. The film literally refers to the mob here, and various critics also point out to
certain political undertones that the film wants to convey: the world had been threatened by
totalitarian dictators and the character of Mr Brown reflected some of their psychotic overconfidence.
Another reason for my selection of The Big Combo at this point has to do with the
link the film has with noir semi-documentaries. The semi-documentary phase of film noir
during the fifties meant an essential detachment and objectivity of the form in which we
see police investigators taken from the real world (see p. 214). The milieu of these stories
is no longer the enclosed and fictional one of Hammett or Chandler narratives, but rather
true-life settings taken from the files of the FBI and newspaper headlines. As Foster Hirsch
summarises:
103 Carey Estes Kefauver was an American politician, renown nationwide for his position as the chairman of
the senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce in the early 1950s.
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