The Best Mann

(4 of 7)

There's a long, slow middle passage, where Steve hides out with Anne's sturdy, Czech-American parents out in the heartland. But the movie smartly yanks itself back down into the murk, and ends with a sensational shot, in which the camera peers down a four-story stairwell, and Walt falls from the top flight, his body hitting and caroming off each railing. (Give a little wow of appreciation for the stunt crew.)

In noir terms, the problem with Desperate was that it had a hero. Mann's next film, Railroaded!, corrects that lapse into sentimentality. It tells a story similar to Desperate's, but from the bad guy's point of view. Gangsters pull off a heist, it goes wrong, and they blame it on the innocent guy whose truck they used. But the movie quickly shifts its focus from the decent victim, Steve (bland Ed Kelly), to the psycho, Duke Martin (strutting John Ireland), who has a dandy's affectations — he uses perfumed bullets — and promiscuous trigger finger. In the film's 72 mins. he kills four people, most of them witnesses to the crime Steve has been framed for.

Railroaded! is full of scurvy characters who, when they're not plugging one another, pass the time by making stabbing insults. There's the foppish crime boss who snootily tells a moll, "'Women should be struck regularly, like gongs.' That's from Oscar Wilde." And the moll snarls, "Give it back to him." The moll is Clara (Jane Randolph), one of those diamond-hard dames who, in the noir universe, are there to dish out abuse verbally and take it physically. Toward the end, when Clara gets drunk, Ireland takes her bottle away and gives her a severe slap: "Just when you oughta keep your head, you start picklin' it."

The following year Mann made Raw Deal, which dispensing with heroes altogether. There are only victims and villains, and it's often not easy to tell them apart. A guy named Joe (Dennis O'Keefe) has been wrongly imprisoned, fingered by his old pals. He breaks out of prison and goes on the run with two gals, a nice social worker, Ann (Marsha Hunt), whom he takes as a hostage, and a tough gal, Pat (Claire Trevor), who helped spring him from stir. Both are doomed to be in love with him.

Joe may be innocent of the crime he did time for, but that doesn't make him likable, as Ann must find out for herself. She is the pivotal figure and the audience's surrogate. First she's repulsed by Joe, then feels drawn into his macho orbit, then pulls herself together and out of her entanglement. Joe, in turn, is attracted to her attraction for him. "If I had a gun I'd stop you," she says in the early going; and he, acknowledging a woman's power over a man, replies, "You don't need a gun." Later, teary and sexy, she cuddles up to Joe, who mutters, "I'm not worth it." "Oh yes you are," she whispers intensely. (But O'Keefe is right: he doesn't deserve to share a two-shot with the classy, sensual Hunt.) At the end Ann sees the light, and switches from kisses to the big kiss-off: "I may have romanticized you before, but now I know you. You're something from under a rock."