Desperate (USA, 1947) 73 min B&W DIR: Anthony Mann. PROD: Michael Kraike. SCR: Harry Essex. STY: Dorothy Atlas, Anthony Mann. MUSIC: Paul Sawtell. DOP: George E. Diskant. CAST: Steve Brodie, Audrey Long, Raymond Burr, Douglas Fowley. (RKO Pictures)
Ex-con Steve Randall (Steve Brodie), now a truck driver, agrees to help Walt Radak (Raymond Burr) unload a shipment one night. At the supposed job site, he learns that he is an accomplice to a robbery, and wants out of the operation. When Radak tells him he’s in whether he likes it or not, Steve tips off the cop on the beat, and before long, the law shoots it out with them. The exchange of gunfire results in the death of a police officer. Radak’s brother Al is apprehended at the scene, and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Therefore, Radak blackmails Steve into turning himself in to the law, saying that he was responsible for the officer’s death, and thus free his brother from execution, or a sorry fate would await his fiancée Anne (Audrey Long).
This early Anthony Mann noir has one scary scene in which Radak and his men beat Steve into a pulp, illuminated solely by a swinging overhead basement light bulb. The sequence is edited almost musically to light and dark as faces blur in and out of blackness. This single lighting is a perfect metaphor for the good and evil in all men, and accentuates the violence of the scene, with the darkness forcing the viewer to imagine what torture Steve Randall is undergoing.
However, Steve decides to grab his fiancé and hit the road, on the run from the law and from Radak. It is a toss-up which is worse. As Randall hides out in various situations (his plight is nearly forgotten in one long scene, as he is welcomed into the homestead of an immigrant family), he soon learns that the police had long ago declared him innocent of any crimes, only they didn’t bother to tell him. They purposely wanted him running around, in order to smoke out the real killers! This theme is integral to a lot of classic noir, in which the law can be as reprehensible as the criminals.
This film presages a similarly spellbinding scene in Mann’s Raw Deal, in which time weighs heavily on a person’s conscience. Randall is eventually captured by Radak, and in a suspenseful scene, the ticking of the clock represents the seconds of time that Al Radak has left on this earth. Even though sometimes the film is too leisurely in documenting the seemingly hopeless situation that Randall is in (perhaps he learns too early that the cops know he is innocent), Desperate is nonetheless a tight little mood piece. The suspense is heightened with a lot of cut-ins, such as when a man on the train keeps eyeing Randall and his fiancée, just after their story hits the newspapers. It turns out the man kept looking at them because he could tell they were newlyweds, still naïve and innocent, and not as henpecked as he!