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

and knowing they are both surrounded, Bart declares his love for Annie and gives her one
final kiss.
Having similar endings, with the same signifiers, both films work powerfully
towards this idea of mystery. In The Big Combo the finale might not be so dramatic, as we
do not know what the future holds for both protagonists, whereas in Gun Crazy the
dizzying narrative style (forward and back and round again) culminates in a mercy killing
by Bart set in a savage and poetic landscape. The only murder he commits in the entire
film is that of Annie, finally adopting her own brutal modus operandi. He kills her
somewhat out of love and thus silences her deadly ability to go on killing. In the meantime,
the police arrive and mistakenly believing that Bart has fired the gun at one of them, he is
cut down by police gunfire. Their bodies fall together in a final, lifeless embrace.
Finally, the other aspect common to both films is their female protagonists. Susan is
a mysterious woman: she might be the femme fatale for Diamond (she feels his obsession
for her), and yet she is in thrall to her crime-lord boyfriend Mr Brown because of his
ability to bring her to new levels (made implicit for censorship reasons) of sexual arousal,
as I have described above. It is precisely the exploitative elements, the overt and implied
expressions of sex and violence that give The Big Combo its ductile and distinctly
contemporary appeal. Concerning Annie, she is a carnival performer whose sexual makeup
is never wholly made clear, but it has to do with an excessive attachment to and
excitement in the use of guns. In any case, both women are sexually defined by their
attraction to violence.
Having said that, our involvement (and, in a sense, our complicity) with the
narrative is indicative of the fact that we want to know what makes Annie act as the
aggressive partner or understand Susan’s culpability in associating Brown. Yet, while in
the noirs of the forties the spectator discovers the crime puzzle when the criminal is
identified (and the law is served), in the noirs of the fifties, specifically in these two films,
the storytelling changes and tortured psychology become more stressed and so they do not
conscript viewer sympathy to the same extent as, for example, Double Indemnity does.
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