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Category Archives: 1955

The Big Combo (1955)

Posted on January 24, 2016 | Leave a comment

The Big Combo
Directed by Joseph H. Lewis
Written by Philip Yordan
1955/USA
Security Pictures/Theodora Pictures
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime

[box] Mr. Brown: Diamond, the only trouble with you is, you’d like to be me. You’d like to have my organization, my influence, my fix. You can’t, it’s impossible. You think it’s money. It’s not. It’s personality. You haven’t got it. You’re a cop. Slow. Steady. Intelligent. With a bad temper and a gun under your arm. With a big yen for a girl you can’t have. First is first and second is nobody.[/box]

As far as I am concerned, this is up there with Out of the Past in epitomizing all that is film noir.

Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) runs a crime syndicate. He ruthlessly took it over from a former crime lord and his own immediate boss Joe McClure (Brian Donlevy). Despite a decided lack of success so far, he is being doggedly pursued by detective Leonard Diamond. It seems that it is almost impossible to pin anything on Mr. Brown and Diamond’s own boss warns him off the case. But Diamond carries on, not least because he is in love with Brown’s blonde girlfriend Susan (Jean Wallace). For her part, Susan’s life disgusts her so much that she attempts suicide as the story opens.

Mr. Brown is fascinating in his sophisticated evil-doing and keeps getting away with murder while he takes revenge against Diamond in numerous ways. But Diamond is equally stubborn, if not more so.

This movie has everything. John Alton’s low-key cinematography is perfection. The acting, particularly Conti’s, is excellent and the dialogue is about as hard-boiled as you can get. We also get memorable performances by Earl Holiman and Lee Van Cleef as two hit men who are just a bit too fond of each other. This is a gritty and violent film that may even surpass Lewis’s other film noir classic, Gun Crazy. Highly recommended and currently available on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUK7B4ip_9Q

Clip

The Desperate Hours (1955)

Posted on July 5, 2014 | 3 comments

The Desperate Hours
Directed by William Wyler
Written by Joseph Hayes from his novel and play
1955/USA
Paramount Pictures
First viewing/Warner Bros. Home Video DVD

[box] Glenn Griffin: I got my guts full of you shiny-shoed wise guys with handkerchiefs in their pockets![/box]

Bogie comes full circle from a career-making performance as hostage-taker Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936) to a similar role in The Desperate Hours, one of his final films.

Banker Dan C. Hillyard (Fredric March) lives an idyllic upper-middle class life with his Norman Rockwell perfect wife Ellie (Martha Scott) and two children, twenty-something Cindy and 10-year-old Ralphie. Drawn by the bicycle lying on the lawn, prison-escapees Glenn Griffin (Bogart), his brother Hal and dim-witted tough guy Kobish terrorize the family into giving them haven until Griffin’s girlfriend can deliver the cash necessary to get the trio to Mexico.

Hours stretch into days when the delivery is delayed and fraying nerves threaten to convert the uneasy truce between Griffin and the family into a bloodbath. The normally forceful Hillyard must use every bit of restraint at his command to keep the situation under control. With Gig Young as Cindy’s boyfriend and Arthur Kennedy as the town Deputy Sheriff.

It was a joy to see two of our greatest cinema actors, March and Bogart, go at it in this gripping story. Both were superlative. Bogie had reached the point in his life where there was a deep and moving sadness in his eyes that belied the tough guy surface. Wyler keeps the suspense high and the action moving in what could be a claustrophobic setting. There are few traces left of the story’s stage play origins. Recommended.