Desperate

Desperate (Anthony Mann, 1947) The same year Anthony Mann made T-Men, he also made this noir for RKO. Coming from that studio, it is low budget, fast-paced and. due to the sensibility of director Anthony Mann, filled with amazing images that show he was as capable of creating a dynamic image, with or without his cameraman John Alton (Desperate's cameraman is George E. Diskant).

And Desperate is as simple a tale as can be: an ordinary man discovers a dark world he had previously never known existed and must prove himself to save himself and those he loves. It's a plot right out of Hitchcock, but much less ornate, much less witty, and with a palpable sense of danger that seems to linger just out of the corners of the frame. That frame is edged in a terrifying, thick blackness, threatening to envelope and enshroud the poor figures in the frame.

Steve Randall (Steve Brodie) is a common enough guy, newly married and trying to scratch out a life for himself and his wife, Anne (Audrey Long). He's an independent trucker—"Long and Short Hauls"—and is used to jobs with strange hours and long absences with reasonable returns. But on the night of his first anniversary, his wife takes a message from a "Mr. Reynolds" who has "a load of perishables" that need to be hauled tonight. Steve starts to beg off but when the amount of $50 is mentioned, well, when you're starting out right out of the army with a new bride...

At least, that's how Walt Rattak sees it. Walt knows Steve from "back in school" and where the one has taken the right road, Walt has taken the dark path. He's a racketeer and a bit of a sadist, even if he doesn't want to get his hands dirty, and he has no qualms in placing his acquaintance, Steve, into a compromising position. He's much more reluctant about his baby brother Al (Larry Nunn), whom he dotes on. But, when Al starts to whine about going along on the job, Walt protests a little, but relents. After all, it's a bit-job, what can go wrong?

But, he still gives Al a gun.

Bad parenting skills.

And probably a little too cocky for his own good. When Steve gets to "the job," he becomes quickly aware there are no "perishable goods"—with the exception of him—and starts to back out, wanting nothing to do with criminal activity. Trouble is, he's already in it—the crooks could turn evidence against him, and then there's the matter of the loaded guns that could also turn—his way. He's in a tough spot.

But, a beat cop walking nearby gives him an idea. He flashes his headlights, alerting the cop, and a panicking Al starts to fire. There's just enough time for Randall to squeal out of there and Al, on the loading ramp of the truck, takes a tumble. The shots bring a patrol-car and Rattak and crew beat it, leaving an unconscious Al behind with a cop-killing charge—the officer he's fired at is hit—and for that, he'll swing.

This does not sit well with Walt. He starts to put pressure on Randall—a lot of pressure—to take the fall for killing the cop. Part of that is pure viciousness, but a lot of it is his cold feeling of responsibility for letting his kid brother go out on the job with no experience and abandoning him when the heat was on. He's not going to take the blame for that. Randall is.  Watch the scene below:

Amazing how Mann makes the beating seem so much worse by not showing it and he uses the available light in the room to suggest the violence and invoke a queasy feeling in the audience (yes, Hitchcock borrowed this for the basement scene in Psycho), but rather than have the light simply swing, it arcs in a circle and the way the light plays on Walt and "Mr. Randall" (William Challee—he played Jack Nicholson's elderly father in Five Easy Pieces) is cold and eerie, making them look like statues—they are the only still things in the room—before Walt threatens Randall's wife.

There begins a chase, with the Randalls, trying to evade both the police and the mob, leading to a tense scene that surely must have influenced the showdowns of Sergio Leone. For a low-budget film noir, it boasts a lot of A-list ideas and the efficiency and economy with which Mann shoots it—he was only a few years after assisting Preston Sturges direct at Paramount—shows a director who could satisfy both the demands of drama and the studio. He would move from RKO quickly to direct the low-budgeted T-Men and hone his craft in the dark recesses of film-noir before moving to more prestigious projects.