One of the last great films of B-maestro Joseph H. Lewis (My Name is Julia Ross, Gun Crazy) and cinematographic genius John Alton, The Big Combo is a visually dazzling black-and-white fantasy of desire and vengeance, starring Cornel Wilde as a police detective hopelessly in love with the ice-blonde moll of Richard Conte’s deadly gang leader. The Big Combo is equally Alton’s film as he paints with light and shadow to render Lewis’ minimal sets as Expressionist dreamscapes, using his creative lighting and camerawork to stage a brilliant and iconoclastic reinvention of Casablanca’s closing airport sequence.