(1948)

Starring Dennis O’Keefe, Claire Trevor, Marsha Hunt, John Ireland, Raymond Burr; dir: Anthony Mann

Raw Deal is an unheralded masterpiece because it is not only killer noir but much, much more. It is a film of extreme visceral toughness. This quality feeds and strengthens an unexpected Romantic strand which together fuse into the extraordinary emotional resonance it packs.

Much of this is by design. Several fundamental noir /’B’ movie tropes are inverted, turning their conventional associations inside out. First of these is using a female voice-over narration, in the sublimely world-weary Claire Trevor. No stranger to noir roles, she invested each of hers with a distinct artistry, setting this one apart from the brittle femme fatale of Born To Kill (‘47) just as strongly as from Key Largo, the Oscar-winning role for which she is best remembered.

A classic Romantic triangle suffuses the thriller plot of Raw Deal but in a further inversion, the duality of good/evil, straight life and underworld are embodied not in the usual cuckolded husband and noir anti-hero but in the two women whose favour our man passes between. This renders the man, Mann/Alton regular Dennis O’Keefe as escaped con Joe, a quasi-homme fatale. But Joe is more than a mere 1940s chick magnet. He has his own emotional struggle of equally titanic proportions between polarities of – you guessed it – good/evil, that are represented by the two women - Ann (the righteous, uptight social worker from white-picket-fence- land) and Trevor’s gangland moll Pat, who waited stoically while he was inside and maintains her accommodating posture after they’re on the run.

As if this isn’t enough, we have the eminence-sleaze of Raymond Burr off to one side pulling the strings (or so he thinks) as a sadistic pyromaniacal gang boss luring Joe into a fatal trap, goaded along by the needling presence of sardonic sidekick John Ireland in a wonderfully rat-faced supporting role.

It’s amazing how seamlessly the two stories – their shifting emotional sands and the doomed showdown – merge, especially considering Trevor’s voiceover is not omniscient and doesn’t see Burr and his cronies.

Raw Deal’‘s haunting emotional impact commences with its female narration but is reinforced by a brilliant sonic device by B-film maestro Paul Sawtell who utilises the eerie strains of a theremin (yes!) to underpin Trevor's voiceovers. Further dramatic impact is derived when her character occasionally shifts from voiceover to actual dialogue, jolting us from our reverie but strengthening our link to her point of view.

The classically noir fatalism of doom preordained is established from the outset when we hear Pat’s narration anticipating Joe’s breakout from prison, not with the exultation you’d expect but with a world-weary foreboding. As we see events through her eyes and the narration is in real time we recognise this dread is internal, rather than a retrospective look on the tragedy to come, but it colors our expectations nonetheless.

Design-wise, cinematographer and serial Mann collaborator John Alton plays a major part in the film’s brilliance. Besides the expected dramatic shadowing (see below), there’s a beautifully composed montage of lonely coast roads the cars of hunter/hunted pass through, underlining the stark inevitability of their fate.

All these build a real poignancy unusual in a thriller. Raw Deal’‘s climax is its emotional peak, and precedes its plot resolution. This is the magnificently photographed shot where the ticking clock counters Pat’s profile chiseled by shadows as she struggles with her conscience between suppressing the knowledge from Joe of the endangerment of her rival Ann and her long-delayed emotional fulfillment (winning him). The thread of moral integrity running through the whole emotional line of the movie is seen to reside in Pat (not exclusively, however) with her self-sacrifice expressed in a sensational verbal duet between voiceover and voice: "The lyrics are his" she thinks, "but the music is Ann’s… Ann… Ann…", until… "Ann!" she bursts out, propelling him out of her arms to a noble rescue attempt. It’s an incredible moment, a total culmination exploding all the dark accumulating tension of things unsaid that’s been building from the opening scene.

In the end of course Joe finds his redemption even as he’s unable to escape his origins (a street sign for his wrong-side-of-the-tracks birthplace ‘Corkscrew Alley’ looms unsubtly over the final scene). But Joe’s catharsis is Pat’s tragedy. Through her pain we can feel his loss more acutely than if it had been expressed through his own first person awareness. Ironically it adds up to a uniquely male Romantic drama – making Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal a classic in a class of its own.