Movie Review: The Big Combo (1955)

Genre: Police Procedural Noir  

Director: Joseph H. Lewis  

Starring: Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte, Jean Wallace, Brian Donlevy, Lee Van Cleef, Earl Holliman 

Running Time: 88 minutes  

Synopsis: Police Lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) is determined to arrest arrogant criminal Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), a key financier in the Combination syndicate. Brown's crew consists of aging second-in-command Joe (Brian Donlevy) and henchmen Fante and Mingo (Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman). Diamond enjoys the company of showgirl Rita (Helene Stanton), but secretly has a crush on Brown's girlfriend Susan (Jean Wallace). She reveals Brown may have something to hide about a woman called Alicia, accelerating Diamond's investigation and resulting in a mounting body count.

What Works Well: This is a gritty and uncompromising noir, featuring clashing personalities, ambition, jealousy, multiple doomed romances, and complex relationships. Once he senses his opponent's weakness, Diamond is a dog with a bone, pursuing the details of a long-ago incident to unearth crucial evidence. Brown is equally tenacious in protecting his power and methodically attempts to rub-out inconvenient witnesses. The shifty dynamics swirling between his underlings Joe, Fante, and Mingo add enjoyable texture, including a couple of innovative - and quite mean - misuses of Joe's hearing aid device.

What Does Not Work As Well: When he is not eloquently philosophizing about his intelligence, Brown is quite careless in his words and actions.  

Conclusion: A hard-hitting duel between dogged detective and debonair desperado.



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Movie Review: Cry Of The City (1948)

Genre: Noir Crime Drama  

Director: Robert Siodmak  

Starring: Victor Mature, Richard Conte, Shelley Winters, Debra Paget  

Running Time: 95 minutes  

Synopsis: Criminal Martin Rome (Richard Conte) is badly wounded and in police custody after killing a cop in a botched robbery. Police Lieutenant Vittorio Candella (Victor Mature) was Martin's childhood friend, and now questions him about another heist involving precious jewelry. Slimy lawyer Niles (Berry Kroeger) wants Martin to confess to the jewelry theft, which would implicate Martin's lover Teena Ricante (Debra Paget). She becomes the target of a police hunt, and Martin plots an escape to reveal the truth. 

What Works Well: A textured script (by Richard Murphy and Ben Hecht) is full of ambiguous motivation layers supplementing director Robert Siodmak's investment in doomed noir fundamentals. Martin Rome is identified early as a cop killer destined for the electric chair, but emerges as a complex protagonist driven by an unlikely love and willing to do the dirty work for others. Shady characters lurk in every corner, including Niles the lawyer, Brenda (Shelley Winters) the midnight lady, a shifty prison trusty (Walter Baldwin), a foreign doctor (Konstantin Shayne) providing questionable services, and Martin's impressionable younger brother Tony (Tommy Cook). Towering over them all is a giant masseuse (Hope Emerson) who redefines "handful". Emotional ties are woven through a friendship-from-childhood between Lieutenant Candella and Martin's family, adding nuance to some gorgeously filmed New York nighttime streetscapes.

What Does Not Work As Well: The characters just keep on coming - late into the third act, Siodmak is still finding new people and new places to introduce. And in a packed agenda, the editing and pacing demonstrate a tendency to overemphasize minor points.

Conclusion: The city's cry echoes with dazzling desperation.



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Movie Review: Highway Dragnet (1954)

A man-on-the-run thriller, Highway Dragnet delivers decent dusty action but is constrained by an ultra low budget.

While unwinding at a Las Vegas bar, Korean War veteran James Henry (Richard Conte) tangles with floozy Terry Smith (Mary Beth Hughes), a former fashion model. As he attempts to head out of town the next day, James is arrested and accused of Terry's murder. Protesting his innocence, he escapes from the clutches of Detective Joe White Eagle (Reed Hadley) and goes on the run, intent on clearing his name.

On the Nevada highways he finds a ride with fashion photographer Mrs. Cummings (Joan Bennett) and her model Susan (Wanda Hendrix). With Mrs. Cummings hiding her own secret, the two ladies start to grow suspicious of James as the police chase intensifies, although Susan also starts to feel attracted to the fugitive. After a stop at a motel, James is forced to take the two women hostage and drives into the desert to avoid the police cordon, but more surprises await.

An Allied Artist production and the first movie to carry a Roger Corman credit (for the story), Highway Dragnet is a quick and dirty 71 minutes of straight ahead chase action. Richard Conte and Joan Bennett both finds themselves mired in material well beneath their talent, but go along for the ride as director Nathan Juran points the camera and shoots, plastic acting and single takes holding hands regardless of the howling wind obscuring the dialogue and no budget for dubbing.

The on-location filming in the stark and sun-drenched desert straddling the border between Nevada and California provides points of interest, the sturdy motor vehicles munch through the terrain with satisfying grunt, and the climax at the flooded Salton Sea offers further unique vistas. But the final act is also the setting for the movie's absolute low point, one character panicking in shallow water to laughable effect.

In terms of plot, this is standard fare wrongly-accused-man-on-the-run stuff, the police acting as incompetently as possible to stretch out proceedings, and romance blossoming despite the triple mortal dangers of starvation, dehydration, and a killer on the loose. The plot twist, if it was ever intended as a twist, is telegraphed in bold letters two or three times, just to make sure the steam from overheated radiators does not obscure the real villain.

Highway Dragnet roars through the desert, well short on dollars but enjoying high revs all the same.



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Movie Review: Bengazi (1955)

A clunky treasure hunt for buried gold combined with a romantic triangle all set in a desert milieu, Bengazi is derivative bottom-of-the-barrel adventurism.

In the Libyan town of Bengazi, surrounded by desert, Inspector Levering (Richard Carlson) represents law and order. He starts to investigate the mysterious theft of a heavy duty transport lorry equipped with a machine gun from a British Army compound, and his suspicions rest on John Gillmore (Richard Conte), a shady businessman and the partner of the jovial Robert Donovan (Victor McLaglan) in running the local canteena.

Gillmore intends to join forces with hardhead ex-convict Selby (Richard Erdman), who claims to know the whereabouts of a gold treasure buried in the desert. Donovan gets in on the deal, but the treasure hunt plans are threatened by the sudden arrival of Donovan's estranged daughter Aileen (Mala Powers), looking to reconnect with her Dad. Both Levering and Gillmore are quickly entranced by the new arrival and make advances to win her heart.

Driven by greed, Gillmore, Selby and Donovan use the stolen lorry and make their way into the desert towards the ruins of a mosque where the treasure may be buried, but then find themselves besieged by hostile tribesmen.

A no-budget remix of Casablanca and The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre directed by John Brahm for RKO Radio Pictures, Bengazi is beset by bargain basement production values and fails at everything it tries to do. Any ambitions to combine a plot about greed with a sweaty romantic triangle are quickly thwarted by derivative and unimaginative scripting and barely enough ideas to occupy the paltry 79 minutes of running time.

Most of the ponderous action takes place in the desert ruins with the main characters surrounded by unseen enemies. This makeshift compound is undefended on three sides, and all that needs to be said about the dreadful script is that the hostile forces only ever choose to attack from the fourth side which happens to be fortified with a machine gun.

Meanwhile, Richard Conte and Richard Carlson, in addition to looking too similar, struggle mightily on four fronts: crummy material, limited acting talent, undefined characters and unexplained accents. Bengazi never decides on a central character to park its loyalties with, and so Aileen appears to fall in love with both men for no reason and in next to no time, creating a most unconvincing love triangle.

The dead are buried under the stars and love flourishes amidst the corpses, but nothing saves Bengazi from being hopelessly swallowed by the shifting sand dunes.

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