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

y taking it “from the outside.” The subjective image is quite different from this
supposed representation of memory. (Mitry 1997:53)
The last film to be discussed is The Big Combo (1955) by Joseph H. Lewis.
Unjustly forgotten by many film critics, this film is to me one of the finest of noir, with
powerful symbolic elements, an impressive cast and some memorable dialogues. This time
not only do I focus on visual symbols, but also on the use of double-entendres, by
delimiting and detailing some individual scenes. Teamed with the renowned
cinematographer John Alton, Lewis’s direction points up crude sexual innuendo
throughout the film. I will explore the photographic images, the dialogues and encrypted
symbols that place The Big Combo’s characters in a dark, insular universe of tacit
repression and graphic violence. Some reference to Lewis’s previous film, Gun Crazy
(1950), will also be made since there is a consistent stylisation of both films in terms of the
rendering of violent crime and sexual excitement.
With regard to symbols, I start my analysis of the movie with the opening scene in
which we see Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace) being chased by two hit men and trying to run
away through tunnels in oblique shadows. These tunnels already represent the different
tracks of a crazed pursuit that the main characters engage in, redolent of the maze that I
referred to above. Susan actually uses the word herself in her first confession: “I live in a
maze, Mr Diamond [Cornel Wilde]. A strange blind and blackened maze and all of the
little twisting paths lead back to Mr Brown [Richard Conte].”
The other reason I selected this film is because it is very much imbued with the noir
concerns of guilt and obsession, linked, however, with other (symbolic) “transgressions”,
namely at the sexual level, featuring evidence of the changing times. In this respect, I want
to challenge what James Naremore stated about the film: “the Lewis picture [The Big
Combo], which was impressively photographed by John Alton, has subsequently acquired
a cult reputation because of its skillful treatment of repressed, sadomasochistic
relationships; nevertheless, it remains a studioish throwback to the kind of thing
Hollywood was doing five years earlier, and it looked dated even when it was released”
(Naremore 1998:156). I refute Naremore with a semiotic analysis of the symbols, showing
that the themes of (homoerotic) love are of no false sentimentality, blended as they are
with overt yet dissimulated sexuality and explicit violence. I present my argument in the
light of what Foster Hirsch stated, when describing the gangster role in many films, but
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