Desperate
All actors and roles (10)
All team (16)
Short description
A newly married independent trucker, Steve Randall, is offered a job hauling what turns out to be stolen cargo. He refuses to take part and alerts a patrolman, and in the encounter that follows a policeman is shot dead by a young hoodlum. The killer's brother, the gangster Walt Radak, blames Steve for the arrest and swears revenge, forcing him into hiding while the authorities also search for him. Steve and his pregnant wife, Anne, flee from one refuge to another with both the gang and the police on their trail.
Anthony Mann directed the film, the second of the twenty features listed in his directing career, following T-Men and preceding Railroaded!, from a screenplay by Harry Essex and produced by Michael Kraike for RKO Radio Pictures. Steve Brodie plays Steve, Audrey Long plays Anne, and Raymond Burr plays Walt Radak, with Douglas Fowley, William Challee and Jason Robards Sr. among a credited cast of fifty-one. The picture runs seventy-three minutes.
On TMDB the film holds a rating of 6.5 out of 10 from around forty votes, a modest level of attention for a late-1940s crime thriller made under a low budget.
What's left behind the scenes
- Mann was not chosen to direct the film by chance. Together with Dorothy Atlas, he wrote a 66-page story for the film, titled “Escape,” in under five days. In May 1946, Mann submitted the story to RKO Studios. According to him, “the responsible people at RKO immediately showed interest and offered $5,000 for a preliminary script.” However, Mann replied that he would give the story for free if the studio appointed him as the film’s director. Initially, the studio was against it, but later, for an unknown reason, changed its mind and appointed Mann as director.
- The film was shot in 27 days between November 21st and December 23rd, 1946, with a budget of $234,635. Mann’s salary as director was reduced from $4,375 to $3,500. As Alvarez notes, the budget cuts confirm the theory that film noir became darker and grimmer due to reduced production costs. Specifically, the $14,000 originally planned for lighting was cut to $10,000.
- Within the 25-day shooting schedule, 20 days were allocated to studio filming and 4 to location shooting, with one paid day off. In reality, filming was completed three days behind schedule, a serious but fairly common violation for low-budget films at the time. A more significant issue was a 28 percent overspend on film, resulting in a film-to-footage ratio of 1:15 (6.5 thousand feet of material made it into the film from 95 thousand feet shot). However, Mann had a history of overspending on film.
- Filming took place at the RKO studio ranch in Encino, and the fur robbery scene was shot directly at the RKO warehouse. The most technically challenging were the climactic scenes in the finale, which became a "triumph of cinematic skill." For example, Steve's confrontation with two bandits in his apartment is shown through an alternation of shots taken from eleven carefully calculated angles, and the impact of the edited material is enhanced by synchronized, anxious clock ticking and music. The final confrontation on the staircase between Steve and Walt became a "masterpiece of expressionism," utilizing 13 camera angles in 2 minutes and 21 seconds of screen time.
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