Rent Raw Deal (1948)

Road Noir. - Raw Deal review by Steve

This incredibly gloomy road noir is the best of the low budget crime pictures Anthony Mann made after the war. It's a love triangle. Joe (Dennis O'Keefe) escapes from prison and flees with a reluctant member of his legal team (the excellent Marsha Hunt), and his jealous moll (Claire Trevor) who loves him submissively and unconditionally.

The narrative is related by Trevor like a sombre dream, accompanied by the joyless drone of a theremin. Her introspective reverie is ethereal, like she is already dead. The real star of the film is the cinematographer (John Alton) who fills the screen with looming squares of inky darkness which have the oppressive expressionist dread of a Mark Rothko painting.  

The fugitive searches for the gangsters who sent him down with the promise of a financial sweetener. Only they have decided not to pay up. Raymond Burr and John Ireland are hugely intimidating as the hit men who try to rub out their former partner while the police chase him down to Mexico.

Luckless Joe is another poor sucker lost on the dark roads of film noir. It is a powerful, melancholy film, with its compromised, cursed figures always moving in and out of the enfolding shadows. The familiar story is slim but its heavy, clinging fatalism has a way of staying in the memory.

When Prison is the Easy Part - Raw Deal review by griggs

Plenty of noirs go hard-boiled; this one goes scorched. Raw Deal isn’t just a title—it’s a mission statement. Dennis O’Keefe’s jailbreak antihero seethes with menace, flanked by two women who aren’t so much femme fatales as moral foils: one smouldering with regret, the other smirking at the chaos. Claire Trevor narrates with a voice like burnt caramel, while Raymond Burr chews scenery and sets it alight.

Anthony Mann keeps things tight, nasty, and visually punchy—every shadow has a shiv in it. At times, the plot runs on noir autopilot (double-crosses, prison breaks, flaming cocktails…), but it’s the mood that makes it stick. There’s a gnawing fatalism here that hits harder than the fists.

It also dares to let its female characters drive the emotional gear shifts—rare in a genre that usually keeps them decorative or doomed. If the ending feels bleak, it’s because it earns it. No illusions, no redemption. Just grit, smoke, and a raw deal, all round.

A Hood and Hoods - Raw Deal review by CH

A prison escape is always risky. Life outside brings perils worse than the monotony of the cell. So Dennis O'Keefe finds in Raw Deal (1948). Written by Leopold Atlas and John Higgins, from a story by others, this strong script was bolstered by Anthony Mann's directing which, in turn, owed so much to the cinematography of John Alton: he, literally, brought out the best in a cast whose features glow and fade in scenes which range from automobiles to forests - and that essential part of almost any noir: a dubious night club.

The curved hood of the automobile which, variously pursued, is as much a star of all this as those within. Alongside O'Keefe are not only his erstwhile, dodgy girlfriend Claire Trevor but also a woman from the legal firm which is certain that he has been framed: Marsha Hunt. He is smitten with both, that is clear. All of which brings a further frisson – female lips' edge sparring – to a situation which has a towering Mr. Big, Raymond Burr, who is as determined to see off O'Keefe as the police, for he is unwilling to give the fugitive the $50,000 which he is owed for taking the rap.

That is, as it were, the sum of it, and one almost suspects that the film were made for less. No matter. Such privation had all those as much on their toes as those depeicted within. One scene flows into the next – and, as for the final ones, I am too much of a gentleman to say more. Treat yourself to a great night in.