Desperate

The femme fatale in this movie lured and trapped a man by using home-cooked deserts. This short film could be a study in noir cinematography. The angles, the lighting, the shapes and shadows...  Raymond Burr's best. Oddly unbelievable character behaviors prevent this from being rated higher.

I enjoy watching classic black-and-white film noir. RKO Radio Pictures made this movie as a B-picture and has Raymond Burr playing the villain role, which I find pretty entertaining.

Great noir. Ray Burr was THE best bad guy in noir.

Why he the victim didn't just go straight to the police is not well explained. If only he'd listened to his lovely wife. Acting is well done however with Raymond Burr a 1st class thug.

One of Anthony Mann's more stylish film noir entries. Raymond Burr's screen presence as a villain is always amazing. Add to that some long shadows and swinging overhead lamps and you can add anything else you like. Not as hard-hitting as "Raw Deal" but it's in the same ballpark.

The plot is full of action, but it's all ridiculous, impossible, and B-level material; something to see on Saturday morning with the kids. The story is so outlandish and the actions of the characters are so out of line with what anyone would do that the only saving grace here is that it keeps moving. To heighten interest, it throws in violence, gun battles, and fights. Everything adolescent boys would love. This is a mongrel of a picture, but deserves a slight nod because it is a niche above the simple gun, car chase, and knife fight violence that became prevalent around this time and saturated the movie industry with its insipidness.

Desperate is an excellent film. It is about a young married couple flee both police and a gangster out for revenge. Steve Brodie and Audrey Long give amazing performances. The screenplay is well written. Anthony Mann did a great job directing this movie. I enjoyed watching this motion picture because of the drama.

Not the best noir, but not a bad one, either. B-movie mainstay Steve Brodie is an easygoing trucker who falls in with a gang of murderous thieves, led by childhood pal Raymond Burr. When a warehouse job goes awry and Burr's kid brother is captured, he blames Brodie, and the chase is on. With Audrey Long as Brodie's pretty blonde wife, and Jason Robards Sr. as a police detective. The innocent dupe, a damsel in distress, tough crooks, even tougher cops, and enough gorgeous black-and-white photography to satisfy even the most hardened fan of the genre: it's all here. At a mere 73 minutes, the plot moves so fast that it doesn't always make sense, but this one's worth seeing for Burr himself; pre-Perry Mason, this is the big man at his B-movie best--cold, steely-eyed, and just a little bit scary. Just try to take your eyes off him.

Early film noir from Anthony Mann that contains some great moments (for example, a swinging overhead light that alternatingly reveals the bad guys and casts them into darkness) although the happy ending shakes off a bit too much of the desperation that a fully-fledged noir would leave intact. Typical of the genre, Mann places the innocent hero into a tough position, caught between the cops and the gang, and having to flee with his pregnant wife from both. En route to the conclusion, things get rather picaresque but Raymond Burr, the chief heavy, keeps coming and coming. It's not clear whether our hero did anything wrong (in needing to make money so badly) or whether it's just the fickle finger of fate that laid in wait for returning servicemen of all moral persuasions - but this guy doesn't deserve the things that happen to him. Mann would go on to make a few more, darker, noirs and then a string of really great dark westerns with a morally ambiguous Jimmy Stewart.

Flawed (particularly with some glaring plot holes), but solid little film noir from director Anthony Mann. Truck driver Steve Brodie is robbed by mobsters, led by a menacing Raymond Burr, and is forced to go on the run with his wife, Audrey Long. Solid little low budget noir.