The Big Combo

Brown (left) tortures Diamond (right) with a hearing aid

The Big Combo has a big reputation. A regular on the “best film noir” lists, it can’t quite match its rep and is more a solid crime thriller that’s been polished to a stygian gleam by excellent technicians, well chosen actors and some careful snaffles from other sources. The most obvious lift is from 1944’s Laura and its strange plot device of a cop falling in love with the image of a woman rather than the woman herself. That’s also what happens in The Big Combo, when upright and driven Lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) becomes infatuated with a mobster’s gal, Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), even though he’s never met her. Susan is … Read more

Kansas City Confidential

Joe holds a gun to the head of Tony (Lee Van Cleef)

Here’s a film about a perfectly planned heist, so perfect that it hasn’t made it into the city records, Kansas City Confidential announces as it opens, in one of those scrolling on-screen scene-setters that really should be read in an authoritative voice (but isn’t). And then, in the first of many flat illogicalities, the movie turns out to be about a heist that isn’t perfect at all. It goes wrong. Not at first, or not at first by very much. But go wrong it does. The film can take it. On its release in 1952 it was so successful that it spawned a string of other “Confidential” movies. New York. Chicago. Hong Kong. … Read more

The Hard Way

John Connor with rifle

1980’s The Hard Way sounds like the answer to several questions in a quiz with a special round on esoteric movie trivia. What’s the only film that Patrick McGoohan and Lee Van Cleef starred in together? What’s the only screen acting performance of the novelist Edna O’Brien? Michael Dryhurst has directed only one film – what is it called? Other interesting factoids for collectors of arcana include that the director John Boorman is The Hard Way‘s executive producer and that much of it is filmed in Wicklow, Ireland, where Boorman lived at the time. And that Henri Decaë is the cinematographer, the monster talent who did so much work with Jean-Pierre Melville. The … Read more

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Original art for the poster of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 January Lee Van Cleef born, 1925 On this day in 1925, Clarence Leroy Van Cleef Jr was born, in New Jersey, USA. Best known for his portrayal of baddies, Van Cleef served on submarine chasers in the Second World War before becoming a time and motion man after the war ended. Not looking enough like a traditional penpusher to satisfy his colleagues, Lee was persuaded by them, and his friends, to give the stage and film world the benefit of his hawk nose and eyes, each of which was a different colour, thanks to the heterochromia iridium mutation. Van Cleef’s … Read more