Desperate (RKO, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning’s (Sunday, July 30) presentation on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies was of a film I’d seen before at San Francisco State University in a class on movies made during 1947: Desperate, directed by Anthony Mann for the “B” unit at RKO with a four-person committee-written script: Mann himself and Dorothy Atlas took credit for the “original” story and Harry Essex for the script, with future producer Martin Rackin getting an “additional dialogue” credit. I hadn’t seen it since, though, and I remembered very little of it. Desperate is often listed as Anthony Mann’s first film noir, both by The Film Noir Encyclopedia and by Eddie Muller in his intro, but it isn’t: two years before Mann had made his actual first film noir, The Great Flamarion, at Republic, and though Desperate is a quite good movie I like The Great Flamarion even better, mainly due to a stronger cast. The principal actors in Desperate are Steve Brodie, Audrey Long, Raymond Burr and Douglas Fowley; the leads in The Great Flamarion are Erich von Stroheim, Dan Duryea and the awesome Mary Beth Hughes, whose performance as the femme fatale who ruins Stroheim rivals Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage’s in Detour.

Desperate centers around Steve Randall (Steve Brodie, a friend and former roommate of Robert Mitchum – and the connection between them is apparent from the opening scene, in which Brodie finishes a cigarette and flicks it away from his mouth with his fingers as Mitchum often did in his films) and his wife of four months, Anne (Audrey Long, whose performance is so spectacularly incompetent one wonders whom she was having sex with to get the part; a pity Mann couldn’t have got Mary Beth Hughes for the role, since in other films she’d shown herself as adept at playing “good girls” as she was as the “bad girl” in The Great Flamarion). They’re celebrating their four-month anniversary and Anne is trying to bake them a cake (their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Roberts – played by Carol Forman – helps her out by explaining that the recipe calls for six tablespoons of sugar and a pinch of salt, not the other way around, and when Steve rings the doorbell and poses as a meter reader Anne puts the cake as well as the pans to bake it in inside the oven, so we’re surprised when the cake is seen later, apparently actually edible) and has got four big-ass candles, one for each side. Only Steve, an independent truck driver who owns his own “rig,” gets a mysterious call from an old high-school buddy, Walt Radak (Raymond Burr, in his fourth film; apparently Steve Brodie was a friend of his and insisted on the studio giving him the part). Walt’s offering him $50 to drive a load of perishables from a warehouse to an unspecified destination, but soon we learn that Walt is actually the leader of a gang of crooks. They need Steve because their usual driver has attracted the attention of the police, who have his truck under surveillance, and Walt figures Steve is naïve enough he won’t realize he’s being used to commit a robbery until it’s too late for him to back out.

Walt yields to the entreaties of his younger brother Al (Larry Nunn) to be included on the job even though Walt had wanted to keep Al out of crime altogether, only Al blurts out while they’re in the warehouse that there’s a bundle of furs inside along with whatever they were planning to steal. This makes Steve realize that he and his truck are being used to commit a crime, and when the crooks won’t yield to his demand that they put all the stolen goods back in the warehouse, he flashes his lights to alert an on-duty cop. Unfortunately, the cop tries to stop the in-progress robbery with his gun, and Al Radak shoots back and kills him, then gets busted by other police officers, is tried and ultimately sentenced to death. Walt hits on the idea of forcing Steve to go to the police and confess that he shot the cop so Al will be off the hook, and when Steve refuses to do this voluntarily Walt and his thugs beat him to within an inch of his life in a surprisingly violent and graphic scene for a 1947 movie. Then one of the thugs breaks a glass bottle and threatens to use it to scar Anne permanently if Steve doesn’t go to the cops and tell them what Walt and the other crooks want him to say. Steve decides to tell Anne to take a train out of town and flee to hide in a safe place until whatever’s going to happen blows over. The newspapers get hold of the story and publish Steve’s photo, saying he’s wanted by the police – the picture they have of him is in his Army uniform (Steve was a World War II veteran trying as best he could to make a living post-war) – and while he and Anne are together on a train Steve notices a man staring at him and decides he’s recognized them and will turn them in. So Steve and Anne abruptly leave the train – and then the film cuts back to the man and his wife, who thought they were honeymooners just besotted with love for each other.

Steve tries to buy a car and offers the dealer, Ace Morgan (the marvelously slimy Cy Kendall), $90 for a 1929 Ford that barely runs – but once Steve fixes the car with his skills as a mechanic, Morgan reneges on the deal and keeps Steve’s money, saying that now that the car is fixed he can get $300 for it. Steve returns to Morgan’s lot and steals the car, but it breaks down again in the middle of nowhere. He and Anne are rescued by a man named Hat Lewis (Dick Elliott), who offers them a ride to the nearest garage where Steve can buy a distributor to get his car running again, only midway through the ride Hat, who turns out to be a local sheriff’s deputy, recognizes Steve, realizes he’s wanted and turns the car around to take him in to the police. Steve and Hat fight over the wheel of the car and ultimately it crashes, leaving Hat unconscious (though still alive), and Steve and Anne leave the out-of-it Hat by the roadside and drive off in Hat’s car. They’re on their way to the home of Anne’s aunt and uncle, Klara (Ilsa Grüning) and Jan (Paul E. Burns), to hide out and get some of that country air that will hopefully get them back to rights with God, the Production Code and the overall country-good, city-bad ideology of most American films of that era. Only Pete (Douglas Fowley in one of his best performances – though the acme of his career was his superb role as the executioner boyfriend of Jean Parker in PRC’s great 1944 thriller, Lady in the Death House, and he got at least one role in a major movie as the film director in Singin’ in the Rain), a disgraced and de-licensed private detective, has found out where Jan and Klara live by stealing a letter they wrote the Randalls inviting them to come over.

Walt and his gang come to the small rural community where Jan and Klara live, but Steve spots one of them in town and he and Anne flee again – even though Anne is pregnant with their first child and all this running around isn’t good for her own or the baby’s health. They get out just before the bad guys arrive at Jan’s and Klara’s farm and threaten them, though Walt is able to talk one of his henchmen out of shooting an innocent bystander who comes upon them and Walt is himself wounded and the illegal “doctor” who treats him tells him he needs two months’ bed rest. With the announcement of Walt’s brother Al’s execution date, that’s about the last thing on Walt’s mind; instead, he’s single-mindedly set on revenge and to that end he and his gang break into Steve’s and Anne’s apartment and hold them hostage. Walt insists that he will shoot Steve precisely at midnight – the same time Al is scheduled to be executed – though in the end the police, led by Lieutenant Ferrari (Jason Robards, Sr.), arrive in the nick of time and Walt gets a spectacular death scene, falling down the center hole of a winding staircase in an apartment building (a shot almost certainly done with a dummy for Raymond Burr, but still quite convincing).

Desperate is an unusual film noir; a lot of films in the genre feature leads who are whirled out of their comfortable (or not-so-comfortable) urban or suburban existence into the noir underworld, but few are as relentless as this one in whipsawing them back and forth between the normal and noir worlds. It’s also a film of great individual scenes more than a coherent plot; I especially liked the scene between Steve and Captain Ferrari in which Steve tells him his story and Ferrari flatly says he thinks Steve is lying his head off and is really part of Walt’s gang, and when he lets Steve leave the police station rather than putting him in custody Ferrari tells his surprised assistant that he’s only letting Steve go to draw in the other members of the gang. Ferrari changes his tune and decides Steve is innocent after all thanks to a deathbed confession from one of the actual gang members after a police shootout, and he tells Steve about his change of heart just after Steve mails his wife (he’s sent her on to California to buy them a gas station they intend to settle down and run) a life insurance policy he’s bought from a pestering agent. This guy was being obnoxious towards Steve for much of the movie, until Steve hit on the idea of buying a policy in case the gang picks him off; at least the $5,000 will provide his wife and their daughter (the baby has been born in the meantime and we know it’s a she) an income. Though I think The Great Flamarion is an even better movie than Desperate, Desperate is quite good in its own way and a hallmark of the films noir Mann would make later – Railroaded!, T-Men, Raw Deal, He Walked by Night, Reign of Terror (a quite good historical melodrama that uses the iconography of film noir to tell the story of the French Revolution) and Mann’s breakthrough film, Winchester .73, a film noir in Western drag.