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...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...
...typical Mann noir is different. It rarely uses flashbacks. Most of the ganefs in Desperate and Railroaded! have no past to haunt them. The present is spooky enough. Like their movies, they exist in the now. They are what they do, and what is done to them: existential unheroes. Only rarely do they blame society for their scrappy status, as Joe does in Raw Deal: "And if you want to know what happened to that kid with the medal - he had to hock it at 16. He got hungry." The war, the defining event...
...violence seared the pages of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels (the first, I, the Jury, was published that year), so they explode on the screen in Railroaded! In Mann movies, the broken bottle, not the gun, is the favored weapon of menace, perhaps because it's more sickeningly intimate. John Ireland, the film's primary thug, breaks a bottle and comes after Joe. Raymond Burr, Mann's inspired (and quite literal) notion of a heavy, had used one in Desperate, and he does it again in Railroaded!, breaking a bottle over...