Saturday night a friend and I watched the 1955 noir film The Big Combo. The film stars Cornel Wilde as Police Lieutenant Diamond who is obsessed with charging and jailing a local organized crime boss, Mr. Brown, played by Richard Conte while having unrequited love for Brown’s mistress Susan Lowell. Combo in the title is a shortening of Combination one of many names assigned to organized along with Commission, and such, when for whatever reasons the title ‘mafia’ is avoided.

The film’s limited budget gives it a decidedly B picture feel and the dialog from time to time to too on-point with characters delivering clumsy exposition, but the twisty narrative delivers nicely with the final reveals of the plot playing out well.

This is a movie where the supporting cast have the most memorable characters and performances. John Hoyt, perhaps best remembered as the Enterprise’s original doctor in Star trek’s first Pilot The Cage, has but a single scene as a retired Swedish Sea Captain but fills his few moments on screen with life and vitality.

However, the support characters that fascinate me the most in The Big Combo are a pair of hitmen, Fante and Mingo, playing to perfection by Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman respectively. The pair are inseparable, traveling together, eating together, and sharing a tiny apartment. Fante is the judicious, calculating and older member of the duo while Mingo’s character is brash, juvenile and more likely to react without considering the consequences.

While the characters are never ‘coded’ as gay by any of the usual traits used by cinema of the period, no lisps, no perchance for extravagance, no perfumed cards or elaborately stylish outfits, the pair’s relationship can clearly and be easily interpreted as a close, bonded pair or lovers. This is even more evident when Fante’s leaves Mingo utterly shattered emotionally so much so that all traces of criminal loyalty vanish. Never is there an overt action that would support the interpretation of the characters as gay but neither are there any of the easily dropped clues such as ogling women or discussing girlfriends and dolls that would have countered such a conclusion. Fante and Mingo live in the liminal space between what is suspected and what is confirmed, shadowy, hidden, a perfect film noir relationship.