Raw Deal (1948)

Did you people see the same film I saw?

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Raymond Burr is most famous as the invincible Perry Mason, but in Rear Window we saw him as the villain. In this movie, he has a much bigger villain part, as Rick, and makes much more impression as such. His towering presence is well used, and we hear him presenting his evil plan in a very elegant manner, packaging his plan in the most perfect "nice" expressions.Burr makes my favorite quote from the movie, landed with perfect timing:"He was screaming he wanted out. When a man screams, I don't like it. Especially a friend. He might scream loud enough for the D.A. to hear. I don't want to hurt the D.A's ears.... He's sensitive."On top of this, we have the overall gray and "noir" mood of the picture, about a man with very bad odds (Joe Sullivan/O'Keefe), and two women, one of them his loyal accomplice Pat (Claire Trevor), who is also narrator of the story, and Ann (Marsha Hunt) who is forced to join them. Joe's feelings for the two is the constant worry of Pat, hopelessly in love with Joe. All three do their parts well.A weakness of the movie, showing its age, is that the action scenes are pretty primitive. We have to live with that for movies this old.

I like my film noir dark and gritty, and it helps if there's some credibility built into the story. What's with the character of social worker Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt)? She falls for a common street thug like Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe), has a bleeding heart for a wife killer who crashes Oscar's Tavern, and then turns around and shoots one of the henchmen sent by big Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr) to put Sullivan away. Who by the way, pulled off a one in a million getaway from a prison break while his own gang was conspiring to have him fail.Boy, I don't know. There seems to be a whole lot of fans for this flick in the reviews section, but the most I'll grant it is the slick John Alton cinematography. And say, what gives with Oscar's Tavern? I didn't seen any bar or liquor in the joint, it looked like someone's living room when you came through the front door.For this viewer, the entire story had a disjointed feel to it with Pat Cameron's (Claire Trevor) pining over a guy she can't have, and treated like a yo-yo when it looks like Sullivan's romance with Ann Martin falls through. In fact, the most believable thing about the whole story was the five gallons of gas for a buck at the Union Oil station. I've been around long enough, so that's something I could relate to.

An early Anthony Mann-directed movie before he hooked up with James Stewart for some fine Westerns in the early 50's, this is a fine noir thriller with a twist or three along the way. Other posters here have commented on the usual device of a voice-over by a female rather than male character and yes, that "Twilight Zone"-type soundtrack does take a bit of getting used to, I kept expecting some flying saucer or other to fall out of the sky any minute.Mind you the sky certainly falls in on main character escaped con Joe Cameron, played by Dennis O'Keefe, not only double-crossed into jail by his onetime partner played by Raymond Burr, but then deliberately sprung by the latter in the hope he'll get gunned down in the attempt. Of course that doesn't happen and so he finds himself on the run with two vying women in tow, the first, his long-standing, long-suffering girl-friend played by Claire Trevor, the second, his lawyer's clean-living secretary, Ann, played by Marsha Hunt whom he inveigles into his getaway against her will, but who falls for him anyway as things play out.It all ends on a dark, misty night (naturally) with O'Keefe confronting Burr and a fiery, violent and naturally pessimistic ending, with nobody winning, in true noir style. Gloomy and cynical as you'd expect, it's firstly a treat for the eyes, almost every scene shot in dull light, with unusual camera perspectives employed for the interiors and the device of shooting Burr from below to accentuate his bulk and menace. There's sharp dialogue too and some nice in-plotting, particularly Burr's relationship with his lippy almost insubordinate henchman Fantail, played by John Ireland. There are individual memorable scenes too, most notably Burr throwing a flambé straight at the camera to ruthlessly maim an innocent girl who accidentally bumps into him after he's received some bad news and his later demise, suitably in flames, backwards out of a window, but there are other gems strewn about too, for instance Trevor's face superimposed on an anxiously watched clock and her full-profile, veil-covered face when she answers a telephone in the foreground delivering, wouldn't you know it, some bad news.The only mistake really is when another movie about a runaway wife-killer gate-crashes the narrative, but after that it settles down again onto its relentless course to its fiery finish. The acting is fine by all, O'Keefe's lack of star status helping his "ordinary Joe" persona, Trevor is very good as the self-deluding girlfriend and Burr too as the heavyweight gangster still twitchy about O'Keefe catching up with him.This is a fine noir-thriller which can be enjoyed as sheer entertainment or as a fine study of the genre in microcosm.

Another five-dollar lighting bill for classic noir. But then the cameraman is John Alton and the director Anthony Mann, so you know grotesque shadows will dominate. And scope out that nightmare forest where Smoky Bear wouldn't tread without a shotgun. It's a twilight world that Joe (O'Keefe) moves in. But that's as it should be since he's drawn in two directions—toward the conventional Ann (Hunt) and light, and toward obsessive revenge and the dark. And somewhere in between is poor Pat (Trevor) who's dead stuck on Joe whatever he does. Seems these women have old Joe twisted around in more directions than the Corkscrew Alley he's trying to get to.But I don't blame him. Seems the sleekly decadent Rick (Burr) has double-crossed Joe into prison, so now Joe's broken out and heck bent on getting to the Alley and the double- dealing Rick. Meantime, he and his lady-loves have to get past those two colorful torpedoes, Fantail and Spider, that Rick has deployed. Now if Joe could just straighten out his love life, things would be simpler but then so would the movie. The plot develops reasonably except for that weird intrusion into the lodge hideout. Why one escapee (Bissell) should blunder by chance into another's (Joe's) hole-up gets no points for believability. Then too, exactly how this advances the plot is as unclear as the foggy streets. Anyhow, it's compelling noir from the classic period even if it does lack the iconic spider woman. In fact, in an odd turnabout, it's Joe, the man, who plays the spider, luring the women to their maybe doom. So who says gender equality is a 60's invention.