Originally published June 23, 2024. Updated August 21, 2024.
It’s time for a double bill of Film Noir thrills from 1948 with Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal and He Walked By Night…
Anthony Mann was an acclaimed and prolific director who specialised in westerns, epics, war movies, and film noir. He was famously fired from the director’s chair on Spartacus to be replaced by a certain Stanley Kubrick. Their careers took very divergent paths, with Mann having mixed success in the 60s before his untimely death.
With films like El Cid, Men In War and The Naked Spur his CV is impressive but regardless of making Westerns, noirs or war pictures, he had a particular penchant for rugged and cold antiheroes. Such characters fit well into those particular genres but also have a perfect symbiosis with film noir and in 1948, Mann directed one and co-directed another.
The classic era of film noir, a genre typically revolving around crime thrillers drenched in cynicism, antiheroes and criminal antagonists, was in full swing by 1948. So here’s a double bill of guns, dives, dames and gangsters (with Ironside thrown in for good measure)…
Raw Deal
Not to be confused with a middling entry to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s CV nearly 40 years later, Raw Deal is a moody, stylish and intense film noir from the golden period. They don’t make them like this any more that’s for sure. Between Mann and his director of photography, John Alton the film benefits from some incredible compositions and great blocking. I’ve long held the opinion that great blocking is a dying art. It often feels like an afterthought, or the modern trend might be for the camera to take on a more hefty workload to create some interesting movement on screen. From minute one though, Mann’s Raw Deal never lets up with its evocatively moody frames, bathed in shadows. We get intense light, fog, shadowy allies and some nice use of frames within frames to constantly maintain dynamic visuals.
Raw Deal has the relatively simple tale of criminal, Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe) who is doing a stretch for crime boss, Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr, most famous for playing wheelchair bound Detective, Ironside and Perry Mason). Offered enough crumbs by Coyle to launch a prison escape, Sullivan takes the bait but little does he know that Coyle is banking on his demise. He does make it out though and goes on the lam, seeking freedom but payback too. It’s classic noir stuff but this is delivered with aplomb.
A major strength is the writing by Leopold Atlas and John Higgins. The dialogue is great. It plays almost like a noir blueprint, or how-to guide in most respects but the dialogue really does sizzle. It’s razor sharp and whilst the women in the picture are atypically written less favourably than the male characters, they still get some interesting arcs through the picture. For O’Keefe and Burr though, they’re given a great platform to shine. O’Keefe is stoically charismatic and cool, but his toughness hides a vulnerability. Burr, made to look all the more sizeable and imposing thanks to a broad-shouldered suit and lots of low-angle shots almost feels like the basis for Spider-Man’s Kingpin.
As you would expect from noir cinema of this era, there’s a sense of impending doom which builds throughout the picture and at an incredibly lithe 79 minutes, it definitely breezes by. Shootouts are well constructed with punchy sounds. We get gunfights in echoey streets and the comparative simplicity opposed to modern action filmmaking trends is actually welcome.
Fans looking to dip their toes into some classic noir could definitely do worse than start with Raw Deal.
He Walked By Night
He Walked By Night marks an interesting counter to Raw Deal. For clarity, Mann is an uncredited co-director responsible for a portion of the film, with the majority of duties taken on by Alfred Werker, but there’s never a sense of lacking cohesion here.
Told in a semi-docu style, the film is a vastly underrated entry into noir cinema that felt ahead of its time in many ways. Here we largely follow the police on the hunt for a murderous cop killer, with the perspective occasionally switching to the fugitive Roy Morgan (Richard Basehart) who is peddling stolen radio technology before killing a cop who confronts him on the street. You’ve got voiceover here but it’s a third-person narrator, rather than the more classic first-person noir style narration.
John Higgins is back as a co-writer here, along with Crane Wilbur and a more naturalistic approach works well, even if it syphons out some of that inherent smouldering noir style. Like Raw Deal though, this one looks incredible with John Alton again on cinematography duties. Also running at 79 minutes this is another lithe film that builds nicely to a classic noir finale set in the sewers.
It’s just a great flip on the usual gangster or focused noirs of the time, coming as more of a police procedural. We have a group of flawed cops shaking down the criminal elements as they attempt to shake enough branches to make Morgan fall out of the tree. The tension rises well as the net closes. There’s a great sequence as a group of witnesses help put together an e-fit picture of Morgan, where the police can finally piece together the man responsible.
Watching both back to back was interesting because they felt so markedly different, but both told a compelling story that grips you. Raw Deal is undoubtedly the more purist Noir experience with all the trademarks you’d expect but He Walked By Night certainly feels more like the film that tried to push into newer territory. Both are well worth a watch.
Check them out on Amazon. What’s your favourite film noir? Drop us a comment on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Tom Jolliffe
