Raw Deal (1948)

Directed by Anthony Mann; produced by Edward Small

Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe) is facing another two or three years in prison before he’s eligible for parole; unable to stand such incarceration, he breaks out, with the active help of Pat Regan (Claire Trevor), a woman long in love with him, and the promised assistance of his old partner in crime, Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr). But the escape doesn’t go as planned, and Joe and Pat have to hide out with Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt), who had worked on Joe’s case and remained interested in him. But a police dragnet and an unwilling hostage aren’t Joe’s only problems: Rick doesn’t want to share the proceeds of their joint crime, and intends to eliminate his old friend.

Raw Deal has some good things going for it, but it is, after all, a pretty standard crime movie. The prison-break is not shown in detail, only Joe’s actual escape, so no thought is expended on that aspect.

Neither is there any explanation of the crime for which he is sentenced to jail; even his original length of imprisonment is not noted. The protagonist is caught in a love triangle, and double-crossed by his former partner; both expected developments in the plot.

None of this unoriginality is necessarily bad; there are only so many plots and crises to be had in film noir. But few of these features are handled differently than in other movies. Joe Sullivan is a tough guy, cynical and quick to violence, but decent when it comes down to it; something we’ve seen in a hundred previous movies.

Burr plays a good villain, but early in his career, he filled such roles as a matter of routine - and would anyone realistically trust this guy Coyle? (I recall seeing only one movie in which Burr portrayed a good guy, Please Murder Me, from 1956, filmed perhaps not coincidentally shortly before he became one of tv’s famous good guys, Perry Mason.) Burr’s Coyle, who has a thing for fire, does anticipate Lee Marvin’s famous viciousness in 1953’s The Big Heat, but his sadism, while effective, is not unusual.

The action too is nothing extraordinary, with some gunplay and fisticuffs, though how John Ireland’s character, the interestingly named Fantail, not only survives, but is practically unaffected by, a .45 calibre bullet wound at close-range, I don’t know.

While the script provides lacklustre action and plot, it does much better in terms of character. Joe, though his attributes are the routine traits of a middle-level criminal and betrayed convict, has depth to him that is mildly intriguing. The women in the movie fare better, both being three-dimensional portrayals, though Trevor’s voice-over narration, nonetheless doing something for her role, seems out of place in a story with so many points of view.

The acting is good: O’Keefe’s work convincingly different than his nice-guy role in Cover Up, reviewed in December, and, as befits their characters, Trevor and Hunt do very well. The direction is also satisfactory, though Mann would go on to do much better.

Of interest in a few ways, Raw Deal is nothing that stands out from the large collection of film noir movies of its era. An adequate time-filler, it is enjoyable but forgettable.