Noirsville Clip of the Week

 Raw Deal 1948 with new updated review here.

Raw Deal (re Blogged from Down These Mean Streets) (1948)

Raw Deal (1948)

Musings of a Noir Dame - Margot Shelby

None Shall Escape

“I want to breathe. That’s why I want out of this place. So I can                                take a deep   breath again.” Joe Sullivan

Anthony Mann’s reputation today is primarily based on his                                    Westerns of the 1950s. Yet before Mann reinvented the                                          Western as a psychological landscape as much as a physical
one, he honed his skill and  dark vision on Poverty Row,
stamping his mark on the Noir universe and directing little
cheapo gems that rose way above their B-movie limitations
thanks to the brilliance of their director
and a wizard of a DP.

When Mann left Dark City to light out for the territories he took his Noir             sensibilities with him and brought a hard-edged realism to the genre, steering                  it into bitter and neurotic territory. All his Westerns are essentially Noir on the         

Range and he  created in Jimmy Stewart a Western protagonist who was not only morally ambiguous 
but near-psychotic, just one step away from being an out and  out villain. The psychologically troubled 
Mann “hero” is always in danger of becoming what he already closely resembles, the Mann villain. 
This very interesting polarity has its  roots in Mann's Noir of the 40s.

John Alton, master of bargain basement brilliance on a buck fifty budget, was the Director of 
Photography and he  could have made any hack director look good. Fortunately he didn’t have to as he 
worked with Mann. Mann and  Alton pooled their resources six times between 1947 and 1950 and to this 
day are one of the best dirrector-cinematographer dream teams in cinema with style to burn. 
They naturally went together, like guns  and ammo. Raw Deal oozes moody Noir atmosphere conjured 
up with a 40-Watt lightbulb. Thanks to the cinematography, the strange theremin music and Claire Trevor’s 
voice-over the entire movie has a hallucinatory and hypnotic quality about it. The characters move 
through a hazy dreamscape as if they’re in a cold-sweat nightmare. To say Alton illuminated the dark 
crevices of the human psyche would be misleading, but he revealed them. He once remarked that he 
wasn’t afraid of the dark, but he could certainly make his  audience  afraid of it.

Both Mann and Alton had learned how to work a tight budget toiling at perpetually underfunded PR outfits. Economy was second nature for them. We do get the occasional matte backdrop and miniature sets but so what? Alton had the special gift to dress up a little cheapo to resemble a major production with cinematic sleight of hand.

His beautiful Chiaroscuro photography is used as a smokescreen to hide the paltry budget. The result is poetry caught on celluloid. Alton creates a dreamlike twilight world of pure imagination, drawn from stacks of dog-eared pulp fiction magazines, “a nocturnal fantasia of pure pulp…which drew on two decades of fermented hard-boiled tropes”. (Eddie Muller, Noir Alley)

Raw Deal is a love letter to Noir and every time I watch it I’m in awe. It’s an absolute masterpiece, on every             level. Eagle-Lion’s finest hour.

All Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe), in the big house for robbery, wants is to smell fresh air again and collect                  the 50G owed to him by gangster Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr), the guy Joe took the rap for. After that it’s         destination Panama. Rick has greased some palms to bust him out but of course there’s a double cross. Never        give a sucker an even break. Rick wants Joe dead so Joe won’t squeal into the DA’s ear and Rick doesn’t have            to cough up all that lovely money. Rick is a bit touchy when it comes to having his plans ruined and figured Joe      would have a thousand to one shot at success escaping, given the odds. So many things can go wrong during             a  prison break. Stray bullets have a nasty habit of hitting people. It’s mathematically solid thinking but the fall                guy, lamentably alive, gets further than he’s supposed to, dragnet or not, with the help of his girl Pat Cameron       (Claire Trevor) and his case worker and semi-hostage Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt). Rick knows loose ends must           be snipped and sends his twitchy in-house torpedo Fantail (John Ireland) to take care of matters. Now Joe has            a  score to settle…

Twinkle

Raw Deal has an unusual voice-over narration by                Claire Trevor, to my knowledge the only Noir (besides       Mildred Pierce) with a female voice-over. It sets itself           apart  from  the regular male voice-over by forgoing any 

kind of      stentorian declarations. Trevor has a            wonderfully husky,  low-pitched and well-modulated              voice. Her melancholy   interior monologue esembles a                 resigned-to-her-fate confessional.     Hauntingly        disillusioned, almost catatonic, with  a world of hurt and desperation in it, her narration puts a spell on  the          audience.

From the very first second doom, hopelessness and          despair resonate strongly in that heart-broken voice.        “Today’s  the day. Today’s the day. The last day I have to      drive up to  these gates”. Pat’s voice should be joyous, after        all it’s the      day she tells Joe that his escape is set. But      instinct tells           her they’re in existential free-fall already. We see Pat visiting  Joe in prison wearing all black          with a veil over her face. It looks like she’s going to a funeral. She is, she just    doesn’t know it yet.

Pat is, if not the moral center, certainly the heart and anchor of the story even though she’s a gangster moll.            She’s  gone through the hard-knocks school of life. Tough-talking and street-wise, with a bruised heart and dearly           paid-for wisdom, she had the bad luck to fall in love with the wrong guy. But underneath that brassy exterior                 is a  lonely, beaten down and scared woman who’s only ever wanted one thing in her life, Joe’s love.                “Waiting,  waiting, all  my life it seems as if I’ve have been waiting for Joe.” She’d wait till hell freezes over. 

Pat loves Joe unconditionally to the point of desperation. “I want whatever he wants, up or down, make or            break.”  That’s the trolley car she’d ride till the end of the line, even if it goes off the yellow brick road into the abyss.          Tammy Wynette would be proud of her.

Her blind love for Joe literally entraps her though she’s clear-sighted enough to realize it’s built on quicksand.          “He’s never really told me he loves me”. Ann is getting under Joe's skin. No desperate devotion on Pat’s side             can dampen the sparks that fly between Ann and Joe. It is quite telling that Joe calls Pat his "partner” to Ann’s        face,   not his girl or his ladylove, and frankly treats her more like a buddy than a lover.

Into the bargain Pat is saddled with another handicap. She’s a tad shopworn and knows her time is running out. Mann and Alton come precariously close to belaboring the point of a race against time. One of Noir’s favorite fetish items, ticking clocks, are everywhere in the movie. Time is precious, it doesn't stop for anyone and most of all time will run out in the end. There is a wonderful scene where Trevor's face is reflected on that of a clock.

While we can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a femme fatale in Noir, sexy and brooding Dennis O’Keefe is one of Noir’s rarer breeds, the homme fatal.

Joe is a bit light in the ethics department. Hard-nosed and brutal, he has no compunction about taking advantage of both women’s desire for him. He’s like Typhoid Mary. What he has is catching. But all’s fair in love and Noir. This time he miscalculated his own emotions though. He falls for Ann as she falls for him. But lust and larceny are a volatile highly combustible combination.

It’s not too often that Noir renders us with a backstory on one of the protagonists, but we get one here.                Growing up  poor and in orphanages, Joe is the kind of kid who was born with an eight-ball in his cradle. When            he was young  he saved other children from a burning house for which he earned a medal. Ann wants                           to know where that heroic   kid went off the rails. 

“If you want to know what happened to that kid with the medal, he had to hock it at sixteen. He got hungry.” 

Joe turned in his boy-scout badge. He saw that no-one can live on good deeds alone. They don’t pay the bills.

“I am from under a rock, a whole pile of ‘em; Corkscrew Alley, Dean’s Orphanage, the famous rock that hits you in the back of the head after you’ve tried to help someone, not to mention that heap I busted out of called the State Pen.” 

It is worth noting that the movie starts and ends on Corkscrew Alley, a metaphor so obvious it risks accusations            of banality. It’s the hardscrabble place where life puts you through the meat grinder and you buy your one-way 

ticket    to hell. But as we’ll see there’s just enough humanity in Joe to keep us rooting for him. If Noir doesn’t          make us root  for the morally corrupt outright, it at least makes us care about the person w ho’s morally      compromised.

Ostensibly the films seems to set up the classic dichotomy between the good girl and the bad girl, the Madonna and the whore, who battle it out for the soul of the homme fatal. Before she meets Joe, Ann is “Miss Law and Order”, leading a life of clear-cut simplicity. Good is good and bad is bad. It’s a viewpoint that simplifies life. 

But this is as far as the standard good girl-bad girl dynamic goes. Lines get blurred pretty quickly. Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes has to figure out quite fast that her steadfast principles are on shaky moral ground because her attraction to her rehabilitation project makes her willing to walk on the wild side and explore the darker aspects of her character. She may like to delude herself, and Joe, that her interest in him is purely professional, but the innocent act isn’t too convincing. It’s just another way of        saying she the hots for the bad boy who poses a serious threat which excites her. The strong undercurrent of        sexual desire between the two is there from the first second.

To help Joe she eventually shoots a man in the back. The shot was not fatal but she’s horrified by what she’s         done. Now she has to live with the knowledge that she too has a capacity for violence.

Pat may have a checkered past but her only reason for living a life of crime is utter devotion and she’s always          there when the spam hits the fan. All she ever wanted was normality. In a way she’s a lot like perpetually             pickled  ex-moll Gaye Dawn. Pat is no lush but she has the exact same tendency to masochistic self-destruction. 

She too  grew up on Corkscrew Alley and it’s beaten all the fight out of her. Yet despite their animosity Pat is        capable of feeling sympathy for Ann: “She, too, is just a dame in love with Joe. And she’s lost.”

For once the doomed love triangle between Joe, Pat and Ann does not hamper the movie. Their three-way         dynamic it is the dramatic and emotional core of the movie. Nominally Raw Deal may be a gangsters 

on the lam/revenge tale but what the movie is really about is the fundamentals: the very nature of love,                   loyalty and betrayal, and  making profound moral (or immoral) decisions. It lends the film an unusual emotional 

depth.

Both Pat and Ann personify two different facets of Joe’s          world and more importantly two diametrically opposed 

forces in his character. Hard-boiled Joe, the tough gangster 

who  answers to nobody, vs. over-easy Joe, the man who      could still  find redemption and turn his life around.

Pat personifies Joe’s past. Ann is the promise of a fresh          start. It is Ann who brings out Joe’s softer side, not                    Pat. Ann sparks a yearning for his own lost innocence. Ann 

figures all he needs is the love of a good woman to bring 

out that heart of gold. Oh dear, that hoary old chestnut 

again. Women should know better by now. Well, to be 

honest, we probably do but when did that ever deter us? 

Girls are silly things.

Ann is able to break through Joe’s defenses when she tells 

him that life dealt her a lousy hand too, though she may not look it. 

“Just because I own a car and a tailored suit and my nails are clean, you think I’ve never had to fight?”

It is a turning point in their relationship just as an incident that’s seemingly unconnected to the movie's plot yet 

central  to its vision. While hiding out in a farmhouse Joe helps a fellow man, another escaped criminal, to evade 

the police.  It is an act of mercy. But it is an axiom of Noir that the second the Noir hero gets sentimental, 

or maybe just human, he gets slapped down hard with cold reality. Humanity is a luxury he can’t afford. Going 

soft is for suckers. Another act of mercy will be Joe’s undoing in the end.

Joe’s main reason for breaking out of jail is his desire to breathe fresh air again, something that was 

a rare  commodity in prison. His longing for a better life has become a relentlessly tormenting nightmare. 

(There’s also the matter of 50G owed to him by Rick, but it is a secondary reason.)  After the escape Joe 

believes he’s finally free,  but Ann sees what he can’t see himself. The cops would never stop breathing down 

his neck. Joe is still  shackled because the most confining prison cell will always be his shady past, his                    mine-field of a future and the legacy of Corkscrew Alley. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. To quote another 

Noir: “If you want fresh air, don’t look for it in this town”. You can’t escape Dark City.

Derail...

Once out of prison, the trio take Noir from the city out on the open road, to crooked byways, lost highways and blind corners. The open road promises unobstructed flight but turns travelers into homeless, transient strangers and desperate fugitives. Unbeknownst to themselves our threesome are on the road to nowhere already because Noir is a world of roadblocks and dead-end alleys. 
It is what all sinners on the lam have to understand in the end. Being an outlaw means being an outcast. It means everlasting exile from your fellow men. Always running, always hiding, never being able to go home again. There is no refuge in Wilderness. It may be beautiful and unspoiled but it is as unforgiving and corrosive as the confined prison cell they have fled.

In his Westerns Mann wasn’t interested in showing how the West was won so much as in how the landscapes of the West with their vastness and their harshness psychologically affected his protagonists.

We already get that here. Noir doesn’t need the psychological and aesthetic framework of the city to function. In       non-urban noirs, emptiness replaces the claustrophobic and encroaching spaces associated with urban noir.        People are stranded in vacant hostile places where life is distilled to the primitive and one law counts: Live and let die.

For a while in the late 40s/early 50s Burr had the field to himself when it came to playing psychos. His           intimidating, hulking figure was a staple in Noirs. Rick is almost always photographed from below which makes his   burly figure even more frightening. Burr made a career out of playing psychos before he became Perry Mason and  kept his nose clean. After changing sides Burr never drifted back to the dark side again, but pre-Mason Burr will    always be fondly remembered by any Noir lover as a creep, a sadist, a deviant, a nutjob. You know, all the                finer qualities a man can possess.

He wasn’t merely bad, he was despicability personified. Whenever one of his psychos walks into a scene, the          other characters and the audience shrink back in instinctive loathing.

There’s something distinctly gardenia-scented about Rick, he likes to live soft and surround himself with luxury          (the floral dressing gown, the long cigarette holder, the posh jewelry he wears). A physical coward, he’s the guy        who never fights his own fights if he can send out some underling to do his dirty work for him. “You always                  get somebody else to pull the trigger for you,” remarks Fantail to him.

Rick has strong pyromanic tendencies. He not only knows his    way around a Camel or a Lucky, he puts lighters to more    creative uses, like singeing the earlobe of his henchman            just because the guy annoyed him. 

But most of all Raw Deal is notable for a flame-throwing      incident before Lee Marvin became famous for it in The Big Heat. One dipso dame has to learn the hard way that hurling        burning cherry jubilees in her face is Rick’s idea of a fun evening. Of course, in accord with Chekhov's dictum that a rifle produced  in Act One must be fired by Act Three, Rick comes to a            very satisfying end himself.

Raw Deal has many devastating moments in it, but the second     to last scene in the cabin of the ship waiting to leave for        South America must be one of the saddest. Joe and Pat          have secured a passage and Joe is saying all the right things       to Pat in a cheerless voice about making a better life for themselves in South America, but Pat knows that “every      time he kisses me, he’d be kissing Ann”. She knows what Joe doesn’t, that Rick has kidnapped Ann. In the end         Pat must face realities. She can’t go off to South America with Joe. Her life with him would be a sham as she’s lost    his love, if she ever had it in the first place. And she’s not bad enough to let her rival suffer in the clammy clutches        of Rick. So she lets Joe go off to save Ann. The classic lose-lose situation of Noir. Damned if you do, damned if         you don’t. 

The finale is beautifully staged and shot. In a haze of fog and gun fire, doomed figures dance to their ultimate fate.There is no happy ending for anybody in this film. Joe kills Rick and saves Ann but luck and Joe never had much of a track record. He gets shot for his troubles and dies on the sidewalk, in Ann’s arms. It’s OK with him though. “I got my breath of fresh air. You….”  The Noir hero is always just one lucky break away from hitting it big time, and only one unlucky break away from losing it all.

For Pat it’s utter defeat in the end: 

“There’s my Joe in her arms. A kind of happiness on his face. In my heart I know that this is right for Joe. This is what he wanted.” 

Joe got his redemption, if only in death. Ann has the satisfaction of knowing that Joe dusted up his rusty                    boy-scout badge to do the right thing. Only Pat is left with absolutely nothing. The world keeps on spinning at              the fadeout, she doesn’t end up under a sheet in the morgue but it’s a constant in Noir that even if you survive,          you never really win. That's the way life crumbles, cookie-wise. Sometimes surviving means you have to go on       living, without hope and in misery. It's the eternal torment of the survivor.

Raw Deal (1948)

Directed by Anthony Mann (Desperate, Railroaded, T-Men, Reign of Terror, Border Incident, Side Street). 

Written by Leopold Atlas and John C. Higgins and suggested by a story by Arnold B. Armstrong

and Audrey Ashley

Cinematography by John Alton. Music by Paul Sawtell

The film stars Dennis O'Keefe as Joseph Emmett (Joe) Sullivan, Claire Trevor as Pat Cameron, Marsha Hunt as Ann Martin, John Ireland as Fantail, Raymond Burr as Rick Coyle, Curt Conway as Spider, Chili Williams (Chill Wills) as Marcy, Regis Toomey as Police Capt. Fields, and Whit Bissell as  Murderer.

Re-watched this today, entertaining with great cinematography by John Alton 

Story

It only takes a minute and fifteen seconds to get to the end of the credits all basically title cards. At the end our first view is of a prison gate a sign directs to . It's a state prison somewhere in the mountains. It should have been Walla Walla (to make any sense) but its San Quentin State Prison, San Quentin, California, filling in. (See image of Walla Walla State Penn from roughly same time period.)

San Quentin

(Later se see a map of the West Coast and the marked prison site looks like the Southern Washington Northern Oregon area. Story and geography wise it doesn't wash, plus the escape route is to San Francisco. (Maybe originally the screenplay was all set in Washington State and Portland? Who knows without doing a lot of digging. Anyway the distance between San Quentin and San Francisco was only a little over 20 miles). 

Walla Walla State Penitentiary in the 1940's

Back to the film.

Here is where we first hear the theremin leitmotif for a Pat Regan V.O.'s that punctuate the film.

BTW the theremin, the first electronic instrument, was also used in The Lost Weekend (1945) and Spellbound (1945), and would become more associated with 50's sci-fi and horror movies, some of which like The Day The Earth Stood Still, and The Thing From Another World (1951) are also great examples of Sci-Fi Noir.

Here is also one of the few Classic Noir with a female V.O.  

It starts while she approaches the prison office entrance and then cuts to her coming down the all the the visiting room guard.

Pat Regan [V.O.]: This is the day. This is the day. The last time I'll have to drive up to these gates. These Iron bars who keep the man I love locked away from me. This night he breaks out of these walls. Its all set, 11:30, that's the word I'm bringing him. I don't know which sounds louder my heels or my heart, its always this way when I go to see...

Pat Regan [to the guard]: Joe Sullivan. 

The guard hands her a pass but as she turns to go he tells her that she'll have to wait, he's already has a visitor.

We cut to the visiting room and see Ann Martin and Joe Sullivan conversing between the wire barrier.

Ann works in the law office of his defense attorney and is updating him on his case. Joe is wondering why she is so interested in him. He spars with her a bit, and asks her, if as a woman would she wait for him three years. Ann gives Joe her address, if he needs anything. As Ann is leaving Joe stops her.

Joe Sullivan: Next time you come up, don't wear that perfume.

Ann Martin: Why not?

Joe Sullivan: It doesn't help a guy's good behavior.

So when Ann comes out Pat of course notices. When she gets into the visiting room, they call Joe back in and he and Pat occupy the same seats that Ann and Joe did. 

Of course Pat makes a comment about Ann to Joe, and how she was practically sitting in his lap during the trial. Joe replies her green light is showing.

Pat tells him that Rick's got it all set up for 11:30 tonight.  

Joe Sullivan: I want to breathe. That's why I want out of this place... so I can take a deep breath again.

I want out of this place... so I can take a deep breath again.

Pat tells him that Rick's got it all set up for 11:30 tonight.  

Joe Sullivan: I want to breathe. That's why I want out of this place... so I can take a deep breath again.

We cut to a cityscape at night. Then pan down to a streetlamp and below, a street sign Jane Street & Corkscrew Alley. A car pulls down the street towards a blinking bulb-can Hotel sign. We fade from the street and into the Hotel suite of "Pyro" Rick Coyle. Rick is also a sadist. 

We fade into a conversation between Big Rick and his hoods, Spider, Fantail, and gal pal Marcy. Spider is questioning why Rick is springing Joe. Pyro Rick comes up behind Spider and puts a lighter to his ear. 

Rick looks at Fantail to see if he has anything to say. Fantail tells Rick he's not asking any questions. 

Rick then goes into a Q&A about the odds of Rick making it out of his cell, out of the ward, and over the wall, then of those of him getting through all the roadblocks the 1000 miles back to San Francisco. 

Rick explains to Spider that he's greased the cell and the prison ward parts of the plan, but not the rest. The chance is slim to almost none. No Joe, means no splitting the take from the Spokane Mill Job that he and Rick pulled. Fantail admiring 

Fantail admires Rick's plan, tells him you even got the cops working for you. 

So if the robbery was in Spokane the prison is the Walla Walla State Penn which jives with the map.

So we cut to a shot of a tower clock at 11:25PM. Pat is sitting outside the prison in a '46 Dodge De Lux, and we get more of Pat's V.O. and the theremin music. She looks at her watch.

11:30 comes and the prison alarms go off and Joe comes over the wall in a hail of gunshots. He hops in the Dodge back seat and starts changing out of his prison clothes for civvies. 

Here is also where we see the map with the escape route marked out with San Francisco circled. 

However the planned escape is already screwed up because the prison guards got lucky and put some holes in the De Lux's gas tank. The car sputters and Pat pulls over to the curb.

Here we cut to Pat and Joe in a cab pulling up to a stop by a house. The cabbie is incapacitated in the back seat with Joe. 

(So there was a whole sequence cut out here or never filmed, and we have to assume they flagged down the cab. This is how Hollywood streamlined these "B" Noirs. Also, pause a moment here for a bit of head scratching.  So, this is the address that Ann gave Joe back in the prison visiting room. Ann told us that she worked for Joe's lawyer and was at Joe's trial every day, which implies, Spokane, Washington, in the state where the crime was committed. Her address should be there and not in the prison town of Walla Walla, no?  lol).

So Joe has Pat stay in the cab while Joe sneaks into Ann's bedroom though an open window. He wakes Ann by kissing her. 

He tells her that he told her that she shouldn't have worn that perfume. Of Course she wants him to give himself up. 

Joe is wondering why she cares and she tells a story about reading about a kid who was awarded a medal for saving a bunch of folks and that that is the Joe she cares for. Joe replies that that kid had to hock that medal when he got hungary. 

Joe Sullivan: What do you know about anything? You probably had your bread buttered on both sides since the day you were born. Safe. Safe on first, second, third, and home.

Ann Martin: That's what you think? Just because I own a car and a tailored suit and my nails are clean, you think I've never had to fight? I got an education, sure. I suppose that means I was born with a silver spoon, doesn't it? My father was a schoolteacher. He died in the war of The Depression. Only he didn't get any medals. Or any bands. Or any bonus. He left three children. You think *you* had to fight? The only way you know how to fight is that stupid way with a gun. Well, there's another way you probably never even heard of. It's the daily fight that everyone has. To get food and an education, to land a job and keep it. And some self-respect. 'Safe'? I never asked for anything safe. All I want is... just a little decency, that's all.

He tells her he's and his partner are going to use her place for a hideout. Ann tells him she'll get dressed. While Joe is signaling to Pat from the window, Ann grabs her phone, takes it into another room and calls the police. 

Joe catches her, grabs the phone away, and asks if she has a car. She tells him no, but Joe checks her purse and finds car keys. Pat arrives and Joe tells her to make sure Ann gets dressed quick they got to spit the cops are on the way. 

They head out the back way, just as a patrol car shows up and pulls up alongside the taxi. Now we segue into a Road Picture

 

Cut to Joe, Pat, and Ann in her 1946 Dodge Custom cruising out of town. They are supposed to be going through the Blue Mountains, we get this bit of info from the police manhunt sequence. 

Joe figures they'll be looking for Ann's car, so at a filling station, he has the gals scoot over out of the Dodge and into an empty 1948 Willys Jeep Station Wagon on the other side of the pumps. 

While Joe stands guard at the door to deal with the owner if he comes out too soon. Which is just what happens.  

When the Jeeps owner comes out, Joe asks if he's got a light, and the guy sparks him a flame, and when the the owner hears his Jeep start up and reacts, Joe gives him a gut punch. The guy jackknifes and Joe runs to, and hops into, the Jeep with Pat at the wheel.

They take off, soon followed by the Jeeps owner in Ann's car.  

Soon two motorcycle cops spot the Dodge Custom on the two lane, and pull it over, they arrest the guy thinking that he's feeding them a line of bullshit. As a result, all the roadblocks are called off buying more time for Joe, Pat and Ann to put distance between them and the authorities. 

We cut to a campfire scene. Pat's V.O. gives us the details.

Joe, Pat and Ann, have stopped to cook some dinner off on a gravel road under some pines. Their last pitstop, before they make the last push to Oscar's Tavern, a backwoods roadhouse, the hideout arranged by Rick. 

They got the car radio playing tunes for entertainment and to catch any news bulletins about them. We never see what they cooked, probably hot dogs and beans, or spam. 

They hear something approaching, and Joe hides out behind a tree and pulls his gun. It's a ranger.

Ann seeing this makes sure she stands between Joe and the ranger. The ranger rides up on a horse, asks them if they got a camping permit, and after the girls explain that they just stopped for a bite to eat, he tells them to make sure the fire is out before the leave. False alarm. 

At this point it goes Noirsville when we cut back to Pyro Rick's hotel suite. It's Rick's birthday party. Rick is losing at cards playing with Brock and Fantail. 

Fantail is ribbing him. Rick's gal pal Marcy comes in and whines that she wants to dance, and complaining about him playing cards at his own birthday party. 

Rick brushes her off telling her to dance with a waiter or Brock. Brock gets up to dance with Marcy.

Spider comes back to the card game agitated and tries to get Rick's attention but Rick shuts him up as a waiter brings in Rick's cherries jubilee. 

Rick, looks in the bowl and tells the waiter to add more brandy and of course Rick lights it. Rick likes the flames.

Rick: Its beautiful.

Joe what?

Spider [leaning in towards Rick]: Joe! 

Rick [turning towards Spider]: Joe what?

Spider: The word just came through, Joe Sullivan he's in the clear. 

Fantail [laughs at Rick]:  A million to one shot, and you even greased the doors.

Spider: You're supposed to meet him in Crescent City tomorrow night.

Fantail: With fifty grand, this sure is your birthday.

Rick jumps up pissed, and gets bumped into by Marcy and Brock. The drink that Brock is holding gets sloshed over Rick. 

Pyro Rick picks up the flaming cherries jubilee with both hands and tosses it over Marcy. She screams.

Rick: Take her away she should have been more careful. [Looking at Fantail] What's the matter Fantail, you didn't like that? You don't have anything to say? You were having a lot of fun weren't you? This will amuse you. You're to meet Joe for me tomorrow night in Crescent City and I don't want him to meet me ever.

Rick: Take her away she should have been more careful. [Looking at Fantail] What's the matter Fantail, you didn't like that? You don't have anything to say? You were having a lot of fun weren't you? This will amuse you. You're to meet Joe for me tomorrow night in Crescent City and I don't want him to meet me ever.

Noirsville

Anthony Mann and John Alton create a quickly paced Noir that's very entertaining. 

All our Noir Vet actors now bring cinematic memory and slip into their various parts flawlessly. Denise O'Keefe from The Leopard Man, T-Men, Cover Up, Abandoned, Woman on the Run, Las Vegas Shakedown, and Chicago Syndicate. Claire Trevor from Street of Chance, Murder My Sweet, Johnny Angel, Crack Up, Born To Kill, Key Largo, Borderline, and Hoodlum Empire. Marsha Hunt in Jigsaw, and Mary Ryan, Detective. John Ireland, from Somewhere In The Night, Repeat Performance, Railroaded, The Gangster, All the Kings Men, The Scarf, Party Girl, Transitional Noir era One On Top The Other, Neo Noirs Welcome To Arrow Beach, and Farewell My Lovely. Raymond Burr from Desperate, I Love Trouble, Ruthless, Pitfall, Red-Light, Abandoned, Borderline , M, His Kind of Woman, The Blue Gardenia, Rear Window, and Crime of Passion. Also in the cast are Whit Bissell, Somewhere in the Night, Brute Force, He Walked By Night, Side Street, The Killer That Stalked New York, The Sellout, Shack On 101, and the Neo Noir Psychic Killer, Regis Toomey (played a lot of cops Phantom Lady, Spellbound, The Big Sleep, High Tide, The Tall Target, The Human Jungle)  as Police Capt. Fields, and Chili Williams from Where The Sidewalk Ends and Captive Women.   

If you don't pay too much attention trying to make some of the plot details make sense it's a good watch 7/10.  

 

bmacv from IMDb do the review

What is film noir? An object lesson from Anthony Mann and John Alton, 17 June 2002

Author: bmacv from Western New York

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Gunplay is for Westerns (of which Raw Deal's director, Anthony Mann, went on to direct several). Film noir prefers more baroque outbursts of malice, ideally illuminating, however briefly, the dark crevasses of human psychopathology. Crime kingpin Raymond Burr, shot from below to make his bulk loom even more frighteningly, nurses a fascination with fire. His chambers glow with candlelight, and he playfully singes the earlobes of his henchmen with a cigarette lighter. When, displeased with some news he's just heard, a party girl splashes him with some of her drink, he reacts with lightning-quick instinct, hurling a chafing dish of flaming Cherries Jubilee into her face - and, not so incidentally, ours. (This, by the way, five full years before Fritz Lang arranged for Gloria Grahame to get a kisserful of scalding coffee in The Big Heat.) Of course, in accord with Chekhov's dictum that a rifle produced in Act One must be discharged by Act Three, waiting in the wings there's a conflagration with Burr's name on it.

Raw Deal was the second of the collaborations between Mann and cinematographer John Alton, following T-Men. There's scarcely a frame in the film that Alton has not composed, lighted and shot with offhand brilliance, yet the film flows along without the fussy, embalmed look that comes from self-conscious artistry or uncertainty about what to do with it.

A subdued voice-over opens the movie - not the stentorian narration with which so many noirs are saddled (including T-Men) but an almost interior monologue spoken by a woman, Claire Trevor. (Never has she been better - not in Murder, My Sweet, nor Born To Kill, nor Key Largo, which snagged her an Oscar.) A savvy moll of a certain age, she knows time is running out on her, hence her obsession with clocks: wristwatches, clock faces in towers, wall clocks (at one crucial point Alton encloses her anxious face within a dial). She's been carrying a torch for Dennis O'Keefe, in stir. But a breakout has been arranged, with the codependent Trevor driving the getaway car, her purse holding two tickets to Panama on a freighter leaving in three days time.

But there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip. First, a jam forces them to include in their getaway plans a young social worker (Marsha Hunt) who has taken a professional interest in O'Keefe (much to Trevor's chagrin). Next, Burr has sent one of his deranged torpedoes (John Ireland) in pursuit. Third, O'Keefe is determined to have one last reckoning with Burr. Fourth, Ireland manages to abduct Hunt....

Half the movie takes place in San Francisco, mainly in fog-shrouded Corkscrew Alley. The great outdoors of the Northwest accounts for the rest - with a haunting nocturne in a pine forest, which city-gal Trevor remarks makes her feel `I dunno, both big and small at the same time.' But indoors or out, darkness reigns (and, thAanks to Alton, the film's many and intricate shadows all but achieve co-starring stature). It's hard-core noir, to be sure, sinister and brutal, but shot through with a redemptive touch of poetry.