Desperate

Raymond Burr is the main feature as the crime boss desperately trying to save his younger brother from a date with the electric chair. Directed by Anthony Mann, the pace picks up as the hour approaches for the execution, and the final minutes of the film are quite exciting, with Burr, the clock ticking down to midnight, and the police closing in. The implausible ending may have given the film more appeal but watered down the impact it was building up. Before Burr went into television, he made a believable impression as a criminal, as here, and the film loses momentum whenever he's not in it. Steve Brodie, as an unwitting small time trucker with a new wife, doesn't really convey the dramatic impact to counter Burr.

... in this "B" crime drama from RKO and director Anthony Mann. A hapless truck driver named Steve (Steve Brodie) gets unwittingly caught up in a robbery that leads to a cop's death and the arrest of the little brother of chief crook Walt Radak (Raymond Burr). Radak wants revenge on Steve for his brother's situation, and the gangster threatens Steve's pregnant wife Anne (Audrey Long). Steve and Anne hit the road to try and escape, and their circumstances continue to get worse.

There are a lot of rough edges on this crime picture, but I liked it anyway. The first half of the story could have been subtitled "A series of increasingly poor decision making" on the part of Steve. Things settle down for the second half, where things become a bit more brooding and almost nihilistic before snapping out of it.

Brodie and Long are both likable leads, even if they aren't the most gifted actors. Burr is terrific as the menacing brute Radak, even before he packed on the pounds as Perry Mason. And this may be the best role that I've seen Jason Robards Sr in. After a career stretching way back into the silents. He plays the cold-blooded, cynical police detective on the case with just the right angle to his smirk. There are a lot of reprehensible characters filling out the background, from Douglas Fowley as an oily P. I., to Cy Kendall as a loathsome used car salesman.

This film, and others like it from that era, has something which has long been missing from suspense/crime movies of today: a slow-to-build menace. Things develop almost leisurely, and then--Burr, that menace personified, pounces like a rabid dog hounding Steve Brodie. The pay-off is so much more effective when a director takes the time to build the foundation of suspense. The characters are well-developed, Detective Ferrari in particular. He starts out as an antagonist and ends up, reluctantly, on the side of truth and justice. Brodie's backstory hints at a checkered past. The ending, as Steve faces death at midnight, the clock ticking away, is played out in what seems to be real-time. It was truly a nail-biter. Satisfying and captivating all the way.

This 40s noir B-movie has quite a solid reputation, but its plot is strictly second-rate. Steve Brodie plays an average joe, a truck driver not long out of the army and recently married to a lush wife who bakes cakes to celebrate the fact that she is pregnant. Sadly, hubby never gets to taste her culinary skills because he accepts a last minute lucrative driving job that turns out to be crooked. Raymond Burr's gang of crooks haven't got their own vehicle so, bizarrely, they decide to hire one to carry out a warehouse theft and, one dead cop later, Brodie finds himself on the run as a cop-killer.

Mann's direction is better than the plot. He wasn't scared to try something different every now and then. At one point we're even given a blurry POV close-up of Burr's retreating fist after it has connected with Brodie's face. Burr plays the heavy here, as he usually did in his early career. He was a big man even before he put a few pounds on, but looks swarthy here as well, almost Mediterranean. He's certainly the most interesting character in the film, a gangster out to save his brother from the electric chair and endeavouring to have our relatively bland hero take his place.

The main weakness in the storyline is the hero's poor decision-making. He practically panics each time danger is at hand, and yet delays contacting the police for an inordinate length of time so that the villains can more or less pursue him at their leisure.

This is undoubtedly better than its modest production values would suggest, but it isn't a classic by any measure.

Hot on the heels of RKO's beeping radio tower astride the globe, `Desperate' flashes on the screen, ragged letters smeared along a rising diagonal. In 1947, that was all audiences needed to alert them that one of the short, swift and stylish products of a new division of the film industry (not yet termed film noir) was about to unspool.

Teamster Steve Brodie takes a call to do a night hauling job; since it's his four-month anniversary, he demurs at first, but the pay is too good to pass up. He should have, for the indispensably creepy Raymond Burr and his gang are using him and his truck in a warehouse heist. When Brodie catches on, his attempts to thwart the burglary result in the capture of Burr's kid brother, who has just shot a policeman. Roughed up by Burr, Brodie must convince the police that he's the killer – or his bride (Audrey Long) will suffer Burr's wrath; Burr brandishes a jagged bottle to cinch the threat. But Brodie makes a break for it.

What follows is a protracted cat-and-mouse game played out from Chicago to Minnesota farm country, with Burr in pursuit of the newlyweds. It's the classic story of just plain folks caught up in a sinister web of circumstances, and its director is Anthony Mann, working up to his legendary collaboration with John Alton (his able cinematographer here is George Diskant).

In the basement where Burr works Brodie over, a wildly swinging ceiling lamp floods the action with a harsh glare then plunges it into darkness, adding immeasurably to the dread. Near the end, when Burr plans to kill Brodie at the stroke of midnight – the precise moment when his own brother will die in the electric chair – a montage of faces and eyes ratchets up the tension as the seconds tick by. Mann shows his native talent for the film medium in every frame, and he's abetted by Brodie, Burr and that old pro Jason Robards (Sr.) as a police detective. There are flashier and more resonant films in the noir cycle, but for rough, bare-bones entertainment, Desperate is hard to beat.