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

As the noir movement entered the late forties and early fifties, many of the styles
and strategies of the earlier productions were absorbed by mainstream filmmakers, and
Joseph H. Lewis was certainly one of them, starting to work for the smaller studios on
miniscule budgets (Gun Crazy, for example, was shot on a negligible budget for the
famous King Brothers, who focused on producing low-budget tales of violence).
Downbeat crime films, such as The Big Combo, indeed embrace a visual style that is more
aggressive when compared to other earlier noirs.
In the case of Joseph H. Lewis, this section has tried to demonstrate that his noir
work is extreme, among the strongest in its appeal to violence and sex in noir filmmaking.
Lewis displayed them in a rather unique manner, when compared to other filmmakers, and
this was particularly visible from the audience’s acceptance of his films. The viewer
becomes almost a virtual accomplice in the crimes of Gun Crazy, and this effect is
obtained by Lewis’s unusual long takes and speed. The four-minute uninterrupted take in
which Annie Laurie and Bart rob a small-town bank stands as an invigorating example.
The staging of this and other similar scenes in The Big Combo are also evidence of Lewis’s
artistic talent as a director. In this regard, critic Eddie Muller considers that:
Joseph H. Lewis’s direction is propulsive, possessed of a confident, vigorous
simplicity that all the frantic editing and visual pyrotechnics of the filmmaking
progeny never quite surpassed. (Muller 1998:168)
While Lewis’s Gun Crazy is a film that eroticises speed and violence behind the
wheel of a car or the sensuous power that holding a gun might have, The Big Combo also
suggests the same obvious sense of fatalism and perverse sexuality, when Mr Brown
tortures Lt Diamond and progressively eliminates his confederates, or, as the sequence
described above, when Susan Lowell utterly abandons herself to what is certainly an act of
oral sex performed by her boyfriend, Mr Brown.
From Double Indemnity in 1944 to The Big Combo in 1955 film noir maintained a
critique of mainstream affirmative film art, in which political and social disaffection is
rendered in striking aesthetic terms. Lewis’s films are a final throw of the “B” movie
aesthetic dice, a final outcrop of outrageous sexuality and brutality. When compared with
“A” films and their subject matter in Hollywood major productions, it is possible to say
that the exhilarating combination of sex and violence found in Lewis’s films, mixed with
more serious themes around organised crime and corporate corruption, constituted an
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