Railroaded, Detour,
Caught, I Wake Up Screaming, Private Hell 36. . . Raw
Deal,and so on and so on: the titles of film noir often offer harsh
tales of dismal entrapment and victimization, and it is tempting to wonder what
audiences made of these harrowing, even unpleasurable, thrillers of inevitable male
degradation. Did these sometimes nasty films put the lie to the golden glow of
films that celebrated the American dream? Or did they confirm the seeming
possibility of that dream by allowing viewers to feel superior to the doomed
characters in these films? Placed on the double bill with generally respectable
and even uplifting “A” pictures, these programmers or downright “B”-films speak
with a cynicism and despair that might perhaps have stood in complex relation
to the positive yearnings of the Hollywood dream factory. At a tight 79-minutes,
Raw Deal is the tautest of the taut – a sharp exercise in futility and
fatalism. It excels through the sharp cinematography of the great noir
cameraman John Alton: deep focus scenes composed around diagonals from way in
the back to looming objects or bodies or faces in the foreground; low angles; and
above all, what film historian Jeremy Arnold in his rich commentary for this
Bu-ray edition of Raw Deal terms “tons of darkness with little pools of
light” (sometimes, in fact, not even pools but just a gleam or glitter
furtively trying to stick out in the inky black). Raw Deal stands apart
moreover by employment of a female voice-over (deadpan, often present-tense,
bleakness from the criminal protagonist’s world-weary moll, Pat, played by
Claire Trevor), rare in films noirs of the times. Pat’s narration shows her to
be jaded yet devoted to loser anti-hero Joe (Dennis O’Keefe) who breaks out of
the pen to get money owed him by the most evil of evil gangsters (a so-menacing
Raymond Burr). But Joe falls for the innocent Ann (Marsha Hunt), his lawyer’s
assistant whom he takes hostage, and by the film’s set of final confrontations,
both action-oriented, and romantic, all bets are off as to what moral position
will win out and who indeed will survive between venality and redemption. Pushing
violence to an extreme (especially, a fire thrown into a female face, years
before the coffee-to-the-kisser shock in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat), Raw
Deal packs a series of dramatic and emotional wallops as overpowering as
the punches in a darkened room fight that comes virtually mid-way through the
film.
In addition to the
aforementioned commentary track by Jeremy Arnold, very insightful about the
film’s employment of expressive techniques and noir visual style to convey a
narrative of inevitable entrapment, this new Classicflix Blu-ray edition of Raw
Deal includes short featurettes on the film’s making and on actor Dennis
O’Keefe that are not very deep in historical exploration but are short enough
to be consumed easily quickly as one gives greater attention to richer
materials on the Blu-ray : that commentary track (which manages to cram in lots
of facts about the stars and extras even as it tells us so much about visual –
and also musical – style) and a nice booklet by Mann scholar Max Alvarez. There’s
an image gallery which perhaps devotes a little too much time to images from
the film itself (which, after all, is what most purchasers of the Blu-ray will
attend to, rather than just stills) although it nicely includes some of the
various poster and color ads that promoted Raw Deal.
Like so many other films,
though, and especially in the case of this one, where one might wonder what the
Hays Office might have made of the movie’s severe level of violence and
corporeal threat (as in an antler on an stuffed animal that one criminal tries
to impale another’s eye on), it is easy to lament that the extras didn’t
include Production Code files or other production documents. Jeremy Arnold and
Max Alvarez do provide valuable background in their scholarly contributions,
though, and confirm just how much Raw Deal merits close study and just
how much the downbeat world of noir overall commands our emotional and
intellectual attention as an striking and critical mode of American popular
culture.