Word: manns
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...people noticed it at the time, but in 1947 Mann vaulted from nowhere to the top rank of directors. His filmography seems to explode, with movies as lurid and paranoid as their names. Desperate. Raw Deal. Railroaded! Great pulp titles, suitable for a trashy paperback, though they were all original screen stories. (The studios Mann worked for couldn't afford to option novels or plays; their writers had to make it up as they went along...
...Mann's first successful noir, Desperate sets the mood for the whole cycle. It's about one of those days when everything goes wrong. Steve (Steve Brodie), a decent Joe who's been married to loving Anne (Audrey Long) for four months, gets a call one evening to make some easy money driving his truck for Walt (Raymond Burr), a guy he used to know. The truck, Steve learns, is to be used for a heist, and when he protests he's forced into it, and spotted by the police. He gets away, but Walt's brother Al is picked...
...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...
...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...
...VIOLENT MANN...