To celebrate the release of our new 4K edition of The Big Combo, we asked several acclaimed crime writers from New York and New Jersey to reflect on director Joseph H. Lewis and the enduring legacy of one of film noir's greatest classics. Here's what they had to say.

"Joseph Lewis understood the assignment. His poverty row projects allowed no money and no time, but he manipulated light and shadow to make some of the defining images of midcentury film—any online search for 'noir' will yield that indelible image of Cornel Wilde and Jean Wallace from the last frames of The Big Combo: a man and a woman reduced to silhouette, their identities and relationship obscured by fog. Lewis's real stock in trade was desperate, addictive love that often warped into murderous hate. Few of the relationships in his best known films are rendered in any familiar way—the only devoted couple in The Big Combo are the hitmen Fante and Mingo, who alone in the film touch each other with real affection. Gun Crazy's Bart and Annie are so miserably, obsessively in love their only path forward is toward death. Lewis's fierce creativity elevated his material and broke out of his narrow commercial space to images and tropes you can still see in any one of dozens of films influenced by his work."

— Dennis Tafoya, author of Dope Thief

"Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy and The Big Combo are two of the best American films ever made, perfect noirs that haunt me and bounce around my imagination nonstop. Morally complex, sharp-edged, and sophisticated, they're the blueprint for a whole generation of crime writers. They burn hot, mean, and dark. I, like so many others, turn to their darkness (and magic light) often for inspiration, to see the rot and yearning at the heart of everything explored so beautifully."

— William Boyle, author of Saint of the Narrows Street

"No filmmaker was better at taking a low budget and using that limitation to his advantage. Put a camera in the back of the bank robbers' car to let us feel the thrill of the mad lovers' flight (Gun Crazy), create fog and shadows so dense, the images take on an austere but menacing beauty (The Big Combo), make a Hollywood-set Cornish estate a claustrophobic place of terror and confinement (My Name Is Julia Ross): Joseph H. Lewis throughout his career turned out inventive gems while working with very little money, a prime example of a director who found great freedom in his B movie shackles."

— Scott Adlerberg, author of Jungle Horses

"The single dream collaboration between Lewis and Alton turned the restrictions of the Hays Code and limitations of the budget into expressive amplifiers, with so much meaning packed in between the lines and negative spaces of the frame, making The Big Combo an easy pick to teach anyone the stylistic virtues of film noir."

— Jedidiah Ayres, author of Peckerwood

The Big Combo is now available from Ignite Films.