Wonderful character development!

Good concept, poorly executed.

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Dennis O'Keefe is perfect in this very dark drama of a hopeless escape of a convict into a sea of trouble in which he can only get drowned, in spite of being assisted by two women at the same time. They appear from the very beginning and immediately embark on a quiet cold war between themselves to get him in the end, and the question is who is the real winner. As a relationship drama it is of immense human interest, and the ladies' manoeuvres are sustained in their fascinating innovations throughout to the bitter end. To this comes the outstanding eerie music by Paul Sawtell, the splendid direction by Anthony Mann leaving no second without suspense and the additional acting by the scoundrels John Ireland and Raymond Burr. The latter made quite a number of awesome monster bandits before he became Perry Mason. Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt are both excellent enough, and you understand too well Dennis' constantly shifting feelings for them both. Anthony Mann in his younger years made a string of extremely efficient dark movies, and this is one of the darkest and most efficient.

RAW DEAL – 1948Director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John are both firing on all cylinders in this hard hitting film-noir. The top flight cast includes Dennis O'Keefe, Claire Trevor, John Ireland, Marsha Hunt, Regis Toomey and Raymond Burr. Raymond Burr, in one of his best villain bits, is a crime boss who arranges for former employee, Dennis O'Keefe to break out of prison. O'Keefe took the rap for a big time robbery and kept his mouth shut about Burr's involvement. O'Keefe wants to collect his end of the heist, 50,000 in long green. Burr has sent Miss Trevor to fill in O'Keefe on the escape. Trevor has the hots for O'Keefe and wants him for her man. The real reason for the prison break is that Burr figures it has a 1000 to 1 shot of success. Burr sees O'Keefe as a loose end that needs to be eliminated. Besides, why share the robbery take.O'Keefe however beats the odds and makes good his getaway. O'Keefe and Trevor are soon on the road looking for a place to lay low. O'Keefe picks the apartment of a social worker he knows, Marsha Hunt. O'Keefe happens to like Miss Hunt, which annoys Trevor no end. O'Keefe really does not see that Trevor is hot for him. The Police though are soon on the trail and O'Keefe grabs Hunt to bring along with him and Trevor. Meanwhile, Burr is not the least amused that O'Keefe made good his escape. When O'Keefe calls to arrange a place to collect up his 50 large, Burr sends hit-man Ireland to deal with him. The attempt fails and O'Keefe realizes that Burr has no intention of paying up. O'Keefe now decides to get even and heads to Burr's for some pay back. This one is a real keeper with excellent work from the entire cast and crew. I would swear that cinematographer John Alton could light a film with the reflection of a lit cigar off a quarter. The man is a genius. Director Mann keeps everything hopping during the entire 79 minute runtime. Raymond Burr, who made a film career out of playing villains, is particularly chilling here. The bit where he throws a flaming drink into a woman's face is quite something. Of note, as well, is the use of Claire Trevor to do the voice over narration. I'm not really a fan of the narration gimmick, but it works very well here. Well worth seeing if you are a fan of film-noir.

The pulp fictions of the late 1940s and early 1950s always had a limited shelf life: the best survived as B-movie classics while the others, like this stale crime potboiler, simply grew old and disappeared. The highlight here is a scene showing pyromaniac villain Raymond Burr losing his cool and thrusting a flaming shish-kebob into the face of a careless associate, providing an all-too brief moment of startling color in an otherwise routine and predictable melodrama. The script should have devoted more attention to Burr's menacing character, instead of to the foreground story of an escaped convict and his moll, who kidnap an innocent, wholesome social worker and "take it on the lam". Whatever novelty the film once might have had is pretty much dated by now.

Another five-dollar lighting bill for classic noir. But then the cameraman is John Alton and the director Anthony Mann, so you know grotesque shadows will dominate. And scope out that nightmare forest where Smoky Bear wouldn't tread without a shotgun. It's a twilight world that Joe (O'Keefe) moves in. But that's as it should be since he's drawn in two directions—toward the conventional Ann (Hunt) and light, and toward obsessive revenge and the dark. And somewhere in between is poor Pat (Trevor) who's dead stuck on Joe whatever he does. Seems these women have old Joe twisted around in more directions than the Corkscrew Alley he's trying to get to.But I don't blame him. Seems the sleekly decadent Rick (Burr) has double-crossed Joe into prison, so now Joe's broken out and heck bent on getting to the Alley and the double- dealing Rick. Meantime, he and his lady-loves have to get past those two colorful torpedoes, Fantail and Spider, that Rick has deployed. Now if Joe could just straighten out his love life, things would be simpler but then so would the movie. The plot develops reasonably except for that weird intrusion into the lodge hideout. Why one escapee (Bissell) should blunder by chance into another's (Joe's) hole-up gets no points for believability. Then too, exactly how this advances the plot is as unclear as the foggy streets. Anyhow, it's compelling noir from the classic period even if it does lack the iconic spider woman. In fact, in an odd turnabout, it's Joe, the man, who plays the spider, luring the women to their maybe doom. So who says gender equality is a 60's invention.