I recently re-watched an excellent, not-too-well-known noir from 1955 called ‘The Big Combo’. It was directed by Joseph Lewis who most film buffs know as the man who directed the famous one-take bank robbery sequence in the 1949 noir ‘Gun Crazy’. In ‘Big Combo’, Lewis takes his limitations–it’s clearly a low-budget item–and turns them into an advantage. The film is spare, austere, almost abstract. Sets are unadorned and many scenes are shot in a single take. Far from making it look or feel cheap, this approach feels very intentional, like a painter working with fewer brush strokes and colors to achieve a stark, barely sketched in mise-en-scene. I rarely post a full movie but I think you’ll dig ‘Big Combo’ and urge you to give it a try. Below I’ve posted the bank robbery scene from ‘Gun Crazy’. There’s a very good interview with Lewis in Peter Bogdanovich’s ‘Who The Devil Made It?’, a book filled with Bogdanovich interviews with great directors of the past and one that’s indispensible for any true film historian.