Raw Deal (Reliance Pictures, Eagle-Lion, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after Turner Classic Movies showed the fascinating French film Falbalas (“Paris Frills”) from 1945, they showed a U.S. movie from three years later: Raw Deal, a 1948 film directed by Anthony Mann from a script by Leopold Atlas and John C. Higgins based on a novel called Corkscrew Alley by Arnold B. Armstrong and Audrey Ashley. Apparently the original story involved counterfeiters, but the movie doesn’t; instead it starts out with Pat Regan (Claire Trevor, more sympathetic than she was in Murder, My Sweet and oddly restrained) delivering a voice-over as she describes her efforts to help her boyfriend, Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe, surprisingly effective as a noir actor given his background as a comedian – but then Dick Powell made a successful transition from boy crooner to noir icon in Murder, My Sweet), break out of state prison. We’re told that he took the rap for another, nastier criminal, Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr at his oiliest – Mann and cinematographer John Alton copied the trick Orson Welles and Gregg Toland used in Citizen Kane of shooting Burr from low angles consistently so he towers over everyone else in each scene he’s in; Burr’s “heavy” performance, in both senses, marked him as a villain type, and though he occasionally escaped being typecast, notably as the prosecutor in George Stevens’ 1951 film A Place in the Sun, Burr was so totally known as a villain a lot of people were shocked in 1955 when CBS announced he would play Perry Mason on TV!).

We never find out exactly what Joe went to prison for, but it really doesn’t matter; in a story oddly reminiscent of Dark Passage, filmed the previous year at Warner Bros. bu director Delmer Daves with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (their third film together and, since most of it was shot in San Francisco, they took it as an opportunity to have a honeymoon at Warners’ expense), Joe heads to the home of Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt), supposedly the “good girl” to Trevor’s “bad girl” but quite a bit more morally ambiguous than that. The three of them ultimately end up on the run together, and the predictable antagonism between the two women in Joe’s life becomes palpable as they have a series of narrow escapes, including one in which they were trapped in a mountain hideout by cops actually looking for someone else, a man identified in the character list only as “Morderer” (Whit Bissell) who killed his wife for reasons even he can’t explain and who ultimately goes out, brandishing a gun, and commits what would now be called “suicide by cop.” Eventually Ann is captured by Rick and tortured to get the information on Joe, whom Rick wants to see killed by the police because Rick still has the $50,000 loot from whatever it was he and Joe did and he doesn’t want either to share it or to risk Joe ratting him out to the cops in exchange for a pardon. We already know Rick is a bad-news guy because we’ve previously seen him throw a flaming bowl of cherries jubilee at an obnoxious blonde woman who kept hitting on him. (Given what we know about the real Raymond Burr’s sexual orientation, I wished I could go into the screen, take her aside and tell her, “You’re wasting your time – don’t you know he’s Gay?”)

This was one of the scenes in this movie that nearly kept it from being made because Joseph L. Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, said he flat-out wouldn’t approve the story for filming. Mann and his producer, Edward Small, hired Breen’s son as a script consultant, and insisted that the fiery dessert would not be shown landing on its intended victim. Instead they had Burr flip the flaming dish directly at the audience, which is scarier. Raw Deal ends with a scene in which Joe and Pat are ready to take a freighter from San Francisco to Panama, where they hope they can settle in Latin America and start a new, honest life together, much the way Bogart and Bacall did in Dark Passage, only at the last minute Pat tells Joe that Rick is holding Ann as a hostage, and the two leave the boat so Joe can track down Rick – only they end up in a gun battle in which both are killed, an unusually dark ending even for a film noir. Anthony Mann had had an up-and-down career, starting at Republic where he made one of the most unjustly neglected films of all time, The Great Flamarion, with Erich von Stroheim playing a crack shot who’s induced to murder the alcoholic husband (Dasn Duryea) of a femme fatale (Mary Beth Hughes, deiivering one of the finest “bad girl” performance of the film noir era, rivaling Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Claire Trevor in Murder, My Sweet and Ann Savage in Detour).

Two years later he got to make another film noir at RKO’s “B” unit, Dangerous, and then he signed with Eagle-Lion – the former PRC, now purchased by J. Arthur Rank as a distribution outlet for his British productions (the name “Eagle-Lion” was supposed to celebrate the union of American and British movie interests), where he made Railroaded! and then followed it up with T-Men, about the U.S. Secret Service doing its original job of tracking counterfeiters. It was at best a borderline noir both thematically and visually, but it was a huge hit and it was notable as the first film in which the U.S. Treasure Department gave the filmmakers permission to show real money on screen instead of the fake stuff all movies had had to do before that. Raw Deal was Mann’s next film, and while it seems more a compendium of film noir clichés than a coherent story (let’s face it, by 1948 film noir had been around long enough to have a cliché bank screenwriters and directors could draw from), it’s also a quite good movie even though I still think The Great Flamarion is even better. Incidentally, composer Paul Sawtell used the theremin in the film’s score; the theremin had been invented by a Russian expat in France in the 1920’s and the first composer to use it in a film score was Miklós Rósza in two films with mentally discombobulated male leads, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend and Alfred Hitchcock\’s Spellbound, but by now the theremin has become so totally associated with science fiction my first thought when I heard its unmistakable electronic whine was, “Where is the flying saucer landing?”