Moments later a police car pulls up on the scene fast, Diamond driving, his speed and wreckless driving showing the degree of his frustration with Brown and his desperation to catch him. Brown looks into the thick mass of dark fog, possibly represrenting all that he can see ahead of him metaphorically in his life, nothing but darkness as he knows there is no way out, and retreats, his attempt to escape what he can envisage happening to him after looking into the fog, sliding into a tall corrugated tin wall. The wall signifying Brown’s feeling of being totally trapped and boxed in; a wall is one thing that Brown cannot sweep aside, just like his nemesis Diamond. Like many of the scenes in The Big Combo, the character is pictured alone in a big space. This space is an interior, and often surrounds the characters with emptiness, leaving the audience with purely what the characters are doing and saying to concentrate on. At the concert, for instance, the heroine Susan, seems to be entirely along, except for the performer on stage. The scene seems to reflect the inner feelings of the characters. This may simply be because of low budget filming, but it still has an important emotional effect on screen. For example the interrogations all seem to take place in rooms in which there is lots of empty, unoccupied space. The characters are often at the centre of this, instead of near a wall showing their confidence. The hero, Diamond, is often pictured framed against an arched window in his office, its unusual non rectangular shape suggesting a troubling lack of support for him, he is not backed up by the lines and angles of architecture anywhere.
The simplest arhcetypal style shows one character in the front plane of the picture, then another character receded much deeper into the shot. These two characters are often on a rought diagonal, receding either to the left or the right of the frame, isolating the two characters from one another. At the end of the film however, there is a striking variation on this style of character positioning. First of all the heroine, Susan, is standing, with Diamond standing further out, just as we have seen countless other seperated characters throughout the film. But then we see her move forward to draw abreast of Diamond. They walk together from this moment on. The reason for positioning them together for once is probably to add to the detective yarn of the story and show that even though it is film noir there can be a romance and a happy ending other than the good guy catching the bad guy.
Meanwhile, whilst Brown is up against the corrugated wall the camera pans over to Susan, who is watching Brown, her eyes seemingly sizing him up as she asseses him before pouncing in his moment of weakness. However she still looks, to an extent, astonished to see Brown so small and trapped, as are the audience. Brown’s moment of weakness does come as we hear the disembodied voice of Diamond, suggesting Diamond could be anywhere and is therefore all around Brown, and that there is no escape for him, or perhaps simply an effect to emphasise Diamond’s new lease of power. It booms ‘C’mon out Brown’. Brown panics when he hears this and fires shots into the darkness. The camerawork makes sure the audience sees the shots fly aimlessly into the darkness, possibly a symbol that nothing he does now will work and get him out of what is, by now, inevitable. Susan seizes her chance and adjusts the searchlight on Diamond’s car and shines it on to Brown. This is prefect visual logic. Susan is, at heart, the sole pillar of goodness and light in the film, this quality is however overpowered and shrouded in darkness by Brown so it is therefore the only logical outcome that it is she who resolves the films conclusion by pointing out (literally and metaphorically) the worst of the two rivals with an extremely bright spotlight on an extremely dark airfield. This is symbolic that the light has finally overcome the darkness and good has triumphed over evil, a moral value very rarely seen in the miserable world of film noir.
Susan seizes control of the mise-en-scence and displaces all her guilt onto Brown. He is now totally undercut. Through a series of eyeline matches we see that he is unable to see anything apart from fog, darkness and one bright, glaring beam of light. He no longer has control and no longer order the universe. Impotent, he fires at the beam but Susan continues to keep it shining. This is emblematic demonstrating that he no longer possesses her or has any power over what she does.
The framing, a high angle shot showing dominance over him, and the lighting, render Brown completely powerless, and Susan, although cleansing her guilt by displacing it to Brown, remains somewhat passive moving from one man to another. She watches Brown empty his gun and Diamond emerge, towering over the now ‘little man’. Diamond grabs him; ‘lets go hoodlum’ are his words showing he no longer has any respect for Brown as he no longer calls him by a respectable name, and he sends him sliding towards two police officers. The sliding effect signifying the strength advantage and power advantage Diamond now has over Brown.
We then see Diamond lingering in the hanger, his back to the camera, poignantly silhouetted, and Susan walks towards him. Back lit they stand together, side by side, and as the love theme swells into action the couple exit into the swirling fog leaving the audience contemplating a haunting image of sentimental toughness. We are left with a warm feeling knowing that perhaps there is a hope after all, even in the world we know as film noir.