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

In The Big Combo the unconscious truth emerges in the lie detector scene, in which
Mr. Brown’s secrets start to become exposed. Similarly, when Marlowe, in Murder, My
Sweet, agrees to go together with Marriott (Douglas Walton) to a night-time rendezvous,
he finds that Marriott gets beaten to death. Marlowe, meanwhile, gets clubbed from behind
and falls to the ground. This is when his voiceover starts: “I caught the blackjack right
behind my ear. A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived right in. It had no bottom”. The
screen fades to dark until when there is just a point of light at the centre. As the point of
light grows, from someone holding a torch beam, Marlowe interjects, “I felt pretty good.
Like an amputated leg.” Again, this scene bears various iconographical meanings. On the
one hand, the “amputated leg” alludes to castration, similarly to the broken leg of L.B.
Jeffries (James Stewart) in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, or the flowery apron around Chris
Cross’s neck that chastises him in Scarlet Street. On the other hand, in The Big Combo, Joe
McClure’s hearing aid not only constitutes a torture device but, in one of the most brutal
scenes of the film, it also visually depicts the violence that goes unheeded by society.
Towards the end of the film, when Mr. Brown suspects that McClure has sold him out, he
discreetly decides to machine-gun him. McClure begs for his life, and, as an odd touch to
his execution, Brown reassures him out of mock compassion: “I’m gonna fix it, so you
don’t hear the bullets”, ripping the hearing aid off his ear, and shoots him. In this scene
Lewis cuts to the victim’s point of view, and as spectators we see silent machineguns
spitting flames before the merciful fade to black.
Suffice to say that these two sadistic scenes (using the hearing aid) were
particularly graphic in their display of violence and were rare for their time. Again, as read
in a film noir screenings programme, The Big Combo,
(...) like New York Confidential, 106 is an example of the phenomenon of 1950s
American cinema which presented a campaign for J. Edgar Hoover-ization and the
F.B.I.’s long arm of the law into local government. These Hollywood pieces of
entertainment played double duty in filling a vacuum of what was perceived as an
inability of local government to handle organized crime because of corruption.
While “payola” was certainly a factor in the daily business of urban crime gangs, in
retrospect, publicity for the F.B.I. with Hoover as head may have been like putting
the fox in charge of the chicken coop. Edgar never admitted that a “Mafia” existed
106 New York Confidential is a noir production directed by Russell Rouse and, similarly to The Big Combo,
was also released in 1955. Featuring noir protagonist Richard Conte in the role of Nick Magellan, a Chicago
low-level hoodlum, the film is a further example of the American dream achieved through crime and
corruption.
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