Hobbled from the jump by the first uninspiring sight of Dennis O'Keefe's flabby medicine ball of a face, Raw Deal is a film that will only please those who giggle automatically at noir tropes and who think of the 1940's as some kitschy wonderland of slang and fedoras instead of real people backed, as they are in every era and every country, into existential corners.
Let's take the scene where Raymond Burr shoves a hotpot of cherries jubilee in a groupie's face. This scene comes between Cagney's '32 grapefruit smash in Public Enemy and Lee Marvin's 1950 coffee fling in Gloria Grahame's face in The Big Heat. Why does it make me roll my eyes instead of gasp at the sadistic audacity of it all? Well, a grapefruit is benign and yet to shove it in a woman's face is humorously degrading, while a cup of coffee is something that is often at hand and which could easily be seized upon as a weapon in a moment of pique. But with the cherries jubilee, all you can think of is the effort the screenwriter had to make to get them on the table in the first place, explain via dialogue why they're on fire, and then come up with a plausible excuse for an underwritten character to brandish them. And having a faceless extra spill some water on his back is not that excuse, no matter how psychotic Raymond Burr's character is supposed to be. He might as well brain his dog with a curling iron, or wrap his henchman in wallpaper and then headbutt him with a Viking helmet. I get more chills from Groucho Marx's attacks on Margaret Dumont.
I also have a hard time believing anyone can be impressed by a dialogue exchange like this: "Pat --" "Pat? Patsy, that's what I am! A lost little lamb who waited for you ten years and'll wait another fifteen if need be... Twenty!" Sounds like something Brittany Murphy might deliver in Sin City II. Nothing is really convincing here, from Claire Trevor's hard-luck moll to Mann's attempts at jacking up some Kafkaesque absurdity with the sudden intrusion of a wife-killer. There is no personal approach and it all remains a master's thesis on noir rather than noir itself. It's appropriate that TCM showed this along with Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life -- my respects to Bob Osbourne, but both films are made by directors who try to be "dark" for the sake of their careers rather than out of any coherent philosophy, and as usual, film buffs and critics lap this mechanistic nonsense up.
Let's take the scene where Raymond Burr shoves a hotpot of cherries jubilee in a groupie's face. This scene comes between Cagney's '32 grapefruit smash in Public Enemy and Lee Marvin's 1950 coffee fling in Gloria Grahame's face in The Big Heat. Why does it make me roll my eyes instead of gasp at the sadistic audacity of it all? Well, a grapefruit is benign and yet to shove it in a woman's face is humorously degrading, while a cup of coffee is something that is often at hand and which could easily be seized upon as a weapon in a moment of pique. But with the cherries jubilee, all you can think of is the effort the screenwriter had to make to get them on the table in the first place, explain via dialogue why they're on fire, and then come up with a plausible excuse for an underwritten character to brandish them. And having a faceless extra spill some water on his back is not that excuse, no matter how psychotic Raymond Burr's character is supposed to be. He might as well brain his dog with a curling iron, or wrap his henchman in wallpaper and then headbutt him with a Viking helmet. I get more chills from Groucho Marx's attacks on Margaret Dumont.
I also have a hard time believing anyone can be impressed by a dialogue exchange like this: "Pat --" "Pat? Patsy, that's what I am! A lost little lamb who waited for you ten years and'll wait another fifteen if need be... Twenty!" Sounds like something Brittany Murphy might deliver in Sin City II. Nothing is really convincing here, from Claire Trevor's hard-luck moll to Mann's attempts at jacking up some Kafkaesque absurdity with the sudden intrusion of a wife-killer. There is no personal approach and it all remains a master's thesis on noir rather than noir itself. It's appropriate that TCM showed this along with Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life -- my respects to Bob Osbourne, but both films are made by directors who try to be "dark" for the sake of their careers rather than out of any coherent philosophy, and as usual, film buffs and critics lap this mechanistic nonsense up.