You may not make a habit of hanging out at IMDB, but you can do a lot worse. Sure, there are errors, confusions, omissions--but there is still that unimaginable, seemingly limitless wealth of movie titles, so many of which, thanks in part to the access to their existence afforded to us here, have been rediscovered and placed on movie screens. And then there are a small coterie of top-notch IMDB reviewers who dig deep into their areas of interest and provide (in a phrase you'll read again in this post) "a touch of poetry" in the chronicles of their ongoing discoveries.

Bill MacVicar (aka "bmacv") was one of the original denizens at the Blackboard, with more than 400 noir titles given elegant and concise descriptions at IMDB. His death in 2006 silenced one of the most eloquent voices ever to write about film noir anywhere, and cheated us from being able to include him in the fledgling publication you now know as the NOIR CITY e-zine. Fortunately, all his IMDB writings are still intact: here's one that isn't quite as concise as usual, but given the film in question it's probably understandable why Bill's word count is higher here...corroborated by the fact that in his 2005 Noir Top 25 ballot, RAW DEAL is in the Top 10. RIP, Bill--and thanks.

What is film noir? An object lesson from Anthony Mann and John Alton
bmacv 17 June 2002
Warning: Spoilers
***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Gunplay is for Westerns (of which Raw Deal's director, Anthony Mann, went on to direct several). Film noir prefers more baroque outbursts of malice, ideally illuminating, however briefly, the dark crevasses of human psychopathology. Crime kingpin Raymond Burr, shot from below to make his bulk loom even more frighteningly, nurses a fascination with fire. His chambers glow with candlelight, and he playfully singes the earlobes of his henchmen with a cigarette lighter. When, displeased with some news he's just heard, a party girl splashes him with some of her drink, he reacts with lightning-quick instinct, hurling a chafing dish of flaming Cherries Jubilee into her face--and, not so incidentally--ours. (This, by the way, five full years before Fritz Lang arranged for Gloria Grahame to get a kisserful of scalding coffee in The Big Heat.) Of course, in accord with Chekhov's dictum that a rifle produced in Act One must be discharged by Act Three, waiting in the wings there's a conflagration with Burr's name on it.

Raw Deal was the second of the collaborations between Mann and cinematographer John Alton, following T-Men. There's scarcely a frame in the film that Alton has not composed, lighted and shot with offhand brilliance, yet the film flows along without the fussy, embalmed look that comes from self-conscious artistry or uncertainty about what to do with it.

A subdued voice-over opens the movie - not the stentorian narration with which so many noirs are saddled (including T-Men) but an almost interior monologue spoken by a woman, Claire Trevor. (Never has she been better - not in Murder, My Sweet, nor Born To Kill, nor Key Largo, which snagged her an Oscar.) A savvy moll of a certain age, she knows time is running out on her, hence her obsession with clocks: wristwatches, clock faces in towers, wall clocks (at one crucial point Alton encloses her anxious face within a dial). She's been carrying a torch for Dennis O'Keefe, in stir after a double-cross by Burr. But a breakout has been arranged, with the codependent Trevor driving the getaway car, her purse holding two tickets to Panama on a freighter leaving in three days time.

But there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip. First, a jam forces them to include in their getaway plans a young social worker (Marsha Hunt) who has taken a professional interest in O'Keefe (much to Trevor's chagrin). Next, Burr has sent one of his deranged torpedoes (John Ireland) in pursuit. Third, O'Keefe is determined to have one last reckoning with Burr. Fourth, Ireland manages to abduct Hunt....

Half the movie takes place in San Francisco, mainly in fog-shrouded Corkscrew Alley. The great outdoors of the Northwest accounts for the rest - with a haunting nocturne in a pine forest, which city-gal Trevor remarks makes her feel `I dunno, both big and small at the same time.' But indoors or out, darkness reigns (and, thanks to Alton, the film's many and intricate shadows all but achieve co-starring stature). It's hard-core noir, to be sure, sinister and brutal, but shot through with a redemptive touch of poetry.