The Big Combo

Joseph H. Lewis' masterpiece, The Big Combo, stands alongside Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour and Fritz Lang's The Big Heat as one of the truly great film noir classics. This dark film is an unrelenting and tormented catalogue of savage violence, grotesquely black irony and dangerously obsessed sexuality.

Police detective Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) has two dangerous obsessions. He's on a reckless, hell-bent crusade to bring down smooth and sadistic gangster, Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) and wracked by insatiable desire for good-girl-gone-wrong Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), Brown's captive lover. In mortal terror, Susan is helpless to escape from the lust-filled nightmare of her life. Meanwhile, Brown's lieutenant-in-crime, McClure (Brian Donlevy) plots with cruel hoods Fante (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl Holliman) to overthrow their boss. In Brown's unforgiving world, however, defection and disloyalty are punishable by cruel and unusual death.

Photographed by legendary master of sinister shadows, John Alton (I, the Jury; He Walked By Night; The Lady and the Monster), The Big Combo is shocking and hard-boiled Hollywood noir, and not for the faint of heart.

• drama