The Big Combo

“The Most Startling Story The Screen Has Ever Dared Reveal!”

Lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) is a police detective who has spent too long trying to bring down Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), a well-connected gangster with a taste for cruelty. He can't leave Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), Brown's girlfriend, out of it either, and the case starts to feel like his own. Joseph H. Lewis and cinematographer John Alton shoot the city in hard shadow, with faces half-lit and the dark pressing in from every edge.