The Big Combo · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Mr. Brown reaches over and lifts the hearing aid out of Joe McClure's ear before the guns come up. It almost looks like a kindness. Then the machine guns fire and the soundtrack leaves with the earpiece — flash, no report — and we are put inside a deaf man's experience of his own murder. Joseph H. Lewis had a few sets, an Allied Artists schedule, and John Alton. He spent them on that.

Keep the gesture. The whole film is in it. Someone decides what another person is permitted to receive, and the movie stands at the switch. Alton's camera does the same thing to your eye for ninety minutes.

Deleuze's first move on cinema is to stop treating the frame as a window and start treating it as a system of information, which can be rich or poor. A Griffith crowd is saturated: every corner earning, too much to take in. Rarefaction is the opposite operation, where the frame is stripped down to one object or an emptiness, and the picture begins to mean by what it has removed. The Big Combo is about as poor a frame as the studio system ever exposed. Alton builds interiors around a single practical — a desk lamp, an overhead in an interrogation room — and lets everything past its throw go to unrecoverable black. Not dim. Gone. He had argued for exactly this in Painting With Light, the first book on cinematography by a working Hollywood DP: fewer lamps, harder shadows, large regions surrendered. He rehearsed it on T-Men, where the steam-room killing is played at the black floor of the emulsion. Here he stops hedging. Faces arrive half-lit. Actors become silhouettes against a slightly paler plane. Heavy unlit objects sit in the foreground, so we are always watching from inside something.

Naming that rarefaction pays off, because the plot is the same operation. The police procedure at the center of this film is an effort to get information out of the black, and Lewis keeps Diamond and us on identical rations. Characters are unreadable because they are unlit.

Set that against the other realism of the period. The semi-documentary noirs of the late forties took their crews into real streets, and Bazin's case for realism runs on precisely that: leave the world in the shot, let it stay ambiguous because it stays whole. Lewis retreats into abstraction and gets his ambiguity by subtraction instead. Rudi Feld's sets are a catalogue of near-empty rooms: back corridors of a boxing arena, an antique dealer's gallery, a rented room, a hotel bathroom. Deleuze calls spaces like these any-space-whatever, and the term earns its keep over "atmospheric": a space becomes any-space-whatever when it quits functioning as a setting for action and starts registering as raw feeling. The local variety is disconnection. Light cuts each room into pools that never add up to a floor plan. You cannot map the antique gallery. You can only feel it.

Underneath the stylization runs a very old engine, and Deleuze names both of its versions. In the large form, a situation presses on someone until they act and change it; that is the Western's shape. In the small form, the act comes first and discloses a situation that had been hidden — you start from a gesture and back into the world it implies. Detective pictures live in the small form, and this is a pure specimen: the middle of the film is Cornel Wilde's Diamond chasing a name, "Alicia," with no idea what it opens.

Deleuze calls the small form's basic unit an index, and its sharpest kind an index of lack: a gesture whose situation is missing, so the gesture has to be read. The Big Combo holds the most notorious one in Code-era Hollywood. Brown kisses Susan Lowell, and the camera follows him down and out of the bottom of the frame while she stays in it. Nothing is shown. Everything is understood. Lewis was a director who solved scenes with staging rather than cutting — the single-take back-seat bank robbery in Gun Crazy is the famous case — so this one is solved by a move, not a splice, and elsewhere the film's censorship-driven ellipses work the same way, where the cut away from an action is the action's whole meaning. The Production Code set out to prevent a scene and instead taught the film its grammar: withhold the situation, keep the gesture, let the audience finish it.

What stays in the frame is Jean Wallace's face. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up, a feeling that has registered and has nowhere to discharge, and he splits it in two. There is the reflecting face, still, holding one quality. And there is the intensive face, where small movements climb toward a threshold. Susan's is the second kind, and it carries the entire event because it is the only part of the event we are given. The most explicit moment in the picture is an affection-image. That isn't a dodge; it's better than showing.

Why is Diamond doing any of this? The film is unusually frank for 1955: he is burning department money and his own sanity on Brown because Brown possesses Susan and he does not. Deleuze's naturalism describes worlds where a respectable social surface turns out to be the crust over pure appetite — he calls that surface the derived milieu — and where behavior reads as a symptom of a drive rather than as a decision. Diamond's expense reports are symptoms. So is the syndicate's corporate manner. Brown talks like a manager, in the register Abraham Polonsky invented for Force of Evil when he had racketeers discuss margins and consolidation, and "first is first and second is nobody" is a promotion policy. The org chart is the derived milieu. Underneath it is a man who wants to own a woman and cannot tolerate a second-place rival. Brian Donlevy, who once headlined Beau Geste, plays the deposed boss now running errands, and that casting puts the whole downward slope in a face.

Twice, Lewis stops the machine. In the torture, Brown's men jam McClure's hearing aid into Diamond's ear and drive David Raksin's score through it at volume: the film's own music, the thing that had been outside the story commenting on it, forced inside a man's skull as an instrument of pain. Then the killing, where the aid comes out and the sound goes with it.

These are the film's two openings onto something Deleuze only found in quantity after the war, in Italy: the pure optical and sound situation, where a character can no longer act on what they perceive and can only take it. His word for such a person is a seer. Diamond strapped down with music poured into him is nothing but an ear. McClure, deafened, is nothing but an eye. Neither can do a thing, and in those stretches time stops measuring an action and becomes something you simply have to sit through. In a 1955 crime programmer that is an extraordinary object to have built, and Lewis built it out of a prop: the body-worn aid with its cord and earpiece, the standard consumer unit of the early fifties, treated as an interface that can be attacked.

Which also makes it what Deleuze calls a demark. Objects arrive with habits attached, and a demark is one yanked out of its customary chain so that it has to be interpreted. A hearing aid means help, frailty, an old man's dignity. This one is a torture device and an off switch for a life. And the silent execution is a lectosign, an image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and must be deciphered: guns fire, nothing reaches your ears, so you read the picture instead of feeling it. The film motivates the effect from inside the story, which is exactly how a genre picture smuggles a modernist device in fifteen years early.

The debts are worth naming precisely. Lang's M made sound the sole carrier of identity — Lorre's Grieg whistle, a blind balloon seller's ear used as the detecting instrument — and Lewis runs that point-of-audition device backwards, making deafness the event. The Maltese Falcon had set the method for encoding what could not be spoken, putting it in a perfumed calling card and a piece of slang, and Fante and Mingo finish that sentence by sharing one bedroom. Raksin had already written Laura, a theme that works as the object of a character's fixation; for Lewis he retools it into a brass-forward small-combo attack, and Lewis then turns its playback into a weapon. Alton's flashlight cones raking fog and wet concrete in the storm drains of He Walked by Night come back as the searchlight in the airfield hangar.

That ending, two figures in fog under a beam, quotes the airport farewell of Casablanca with the romance drained out, and was staged in fog partly because fog is cheaper than a set. It has become one of the most reproduced images in all of noir. The afterlife is strange: the picture lapsed into the public domain and circulated for decades in wretched prints, so a generation met a formal decision as damage. It survived that, and the sound experiments are still the first thing anyone cites.

What did it do to the art? It proved a program picture could carry nearly all its meaning in what it refused to deliver: the unlit half of the room, the bottom of the frame, the missing track. Narrative stopped needing to be shown to be told. By 1955 the idiom was old enough to know its own moves, and this film stands with Kiss Me Deadly among those that turned the conventions up until the image nearly broke — and found the break expressive.

So watch it again for the subtractions. Count what you are not shown, notice how little you miss it, and then ask the question the film keeps asking about its detective: when getting information out of the dark is this pleasurable, what exactly is the pleasure?