Slant Magazine

Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948). Blessed with DP John Alton's Wellesian deep focus, chiaroscuro illumination, and images fraught with foreground/background tension, Anthony Mann's Raw Deal is the apex of noir style, offering up electric visions of sin, salvation and sexual mania. The aching urgency and fervor of Alton's breathtaking work is regularly counterbalanced by star Dennis O'Keefe's lumbering blankness, but typically wooden acting (for a Mann crime pic) can't alter the fact that this story of a hood who busts out of prison seeking romance and revenge with a pair of dames (one his obsessed girlfriend, the other his semi-willing hostage) is the director's bleakest and most neurotic. A messy jumble of carnal desires, naive dreams and soul-crushing pessimism, the film derives its lusty perversity from Claire Trevor's narrating moll, and its viciousness from Raymond Burr's flaming desert-hurling mobster. Nick Schager

Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949). Noir visits the French Revolution, as the emphasis on vicious brutality suggests an account written by the Marquis de Sade. The setting is France during the turbulent 1790s, where Robespierre (Richard Basehart) spreads dictatorial horror and dissenting voices are succinctly guillotined; Robert Cummings, an operative for the newly-formed Republic, infiltrates the tyrant's circle. The studio may have asked Anthony Mann for A Tale of Two Cities reworked as a tasteful quickie, but what it got was a wicked, visually astonishing entry in the director's ferocious crime thrillers. Beneath the powdered wigs of period reconstruction lurks not only Mann's violence (Basehart's demise is a stunner), but also a glimpse of the political anxieties of the '40s and beyond. Fernando F. Croce

The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949). Robert Ryan's washed-up palooka clings to the belief that one punch will land him back on the fast track to respectability, not realizing (thanks to his greedy manager) that the fix is in. Robert Wise's The Set-Up isn't noir by any serious definition, its boilerplate fatalism undone by overbearing moralizing and the fact that Ryan's boxer is too one-dimensionally good to register as tragic. There's a dynamism to Wise's rough, real-time in-ring action (an influence on Raging Bull). But the same can't be said about Ryan's wife's (Audrey Totter) nighttime stroll through the city—littered with eye-rollingly obvious symbols of an alternate, "normal" life—or the stereotype-upending ringside spectators, highlighted by a hilariously bloodthirsty blind man. Nick Schager

Side Street (Anthony Mann, 1950). Cineastes have embraced Anthony Mann's great westerns but his equally exceptional noirs still await discovery. Like Reign of Terror and The Tall Target, the heady Side Street is a triumph of visual savvy and moral exactitude—a scurrying spectacle of dog-cat-and-mouse throughout the veiny streets of New York City. The Big Apple comes alive via a nervy mix of photojournalistic shots of people on the move and hieratic compositions that give the squeeze to Farley Granger's Joe Norton, a poor mail carrier who steals $30,000 somewhat accidentally, loses it, and spends the duration of the film trying to retrieve it while avoiding murder charges. The film's title is a reference to its entwined physical and moral frameworks: Through the venomous-winding city streets of the city plays out a clammy morality tale about a man living on the fringes of society who succumbs easily and understandably to weakness only to struggle with great difficulty to atone for his indiscretion. In a city so big, will anyone care? Ed Gonzalez

The Tall Target (Anthony Mann, 1951). As in Reign of Terror, Anthony Mann fashions a noir mini-masterpiece out of incongruous period reconstruction. The hook is the Baltimore Plot, a conspiracy which in 1861 attempted to kill Abraham Lincoln (the "tall target") during the inaugurating train ride of the Ohio & Baltimore Railway. Dick Powell, flashing the tough-guy persona from Murder, My Sweet like a badge, protects Abe from the assassins hidden in the shadows, making creative, gruesome use of locomotive steam in the progress. The train's cramped spaces offer Mann a challenge, and the director rises to it via sinewy camera movement, elegantly modulated rhythms and arresting paranoia, not to mention the blueprint for the following year's The Narrow Margin. Fernando F. Croce

They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949). Celebrated by the Cahiers du Cinema clique for its formal inventiveness and melodramatic grandeur, Nicholas Ray's first feature They Live By Night remains essential predominantly because of the former, its ominous aerial shots, evocative framing and meticulous acoustic design all contributing to an atmosphere of tormented romanticism. Its socially conscious lovers-on-the-lam tale (from Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us), alas, has grown somewhat creaky, whether it be Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell's virginal smitten kittens confessing their inexperience at kissing (tee hee!) or O'Donnell's belief that a good woman "is sort of like a dog" (loyal to the end!). Fortunately, in scenes such as Howard Da Silva shattering the naïve couple's Christmas tree ornaments—and, in the process, their quixotic dream of ever escaping the criminal life—Ray's plaintive artistry lends this weepy noir a melancholic beauty. Nick Schager

Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949). A bleak portrait of post-WWII despair, corrupt capitalism and idealistic disillusionment, Jules Dassin's melodrama about long-haul truckers was the director's final, and finest, film made in America before the HUAC exiled him to Europe. Richard Conte's trucker returns home from the war and, discovering that Lee J. Cobb's produce market kingpin has ruined his father, sets out for revenge. Its Darryl Zanuck-mandated ending may be insincerely upbeat, but the close-ups of speedometers and spinning tires create a propulsive sense of the inevitable doom that follows Conte's desperate, road-raging nomad—transformed from an enthusiastically optimistic ex-soldier into a battle-scarred itinerant—as he hurtles through the night in his rickety rig. Nick Schager

Thunder Road (Arthur Ripley, 1958). Southern drive-in staple Thunder Road is basically The Robert Mitchum Show; not only does the sleepy-eyed tough guy headline this romanticized portrait of a Tennessee moonshine transporter, but he also produced it, penned its script and theme song, and had his son cast in a supporting role (as his kid brother!). The ubiquitously involved star's charisma can't completely overshadow a sluggish plot, in which Mitchum's sexually magnetic whisky hauler makes the ladies swoon and his male cohorts jealous while evading the law, battling a crooked businessman and preventing his sibling from entering the liquor racquet. Nonetheless, its hard-charging chase sequences make it a vintage Dukes of Hazzard-flavored noir. Nick Schager

T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947). Subtext is king in Anthony Mann's noirs, with engrossing, underlying social, political and psychological traumas compensating for caricatural dialogue, monotonous performances and plodding plot twists. In T-Men, treasury agents Dennis O'Keefe and Alfred Ryder go undercover to crack a counterfeit ring, only to confirm both the slender gulf between lawmen and louts and—in the film's spousal rejection pièce de résistance—cops' simultaneously noble, destructive and pathetic devotion to duty. Awkward omniscient narration is merely one way Mann strives for an aesthetic of semi-documentary verisimilitude. However, in myriad shots defined by lacerating diagonals and ground-up angles, genre legend John Alton uses heavenly light and hellish shadow to firmly confine the paranoid action within anxiously expressionistic parameters. Nick Schager

Witness to Murder (Roy Rowland, 1954). This threadbare little thriller looks like it was written and shot over a weekend, and it would be entirely forgettable if not for two things: John Alton's moody cinematography and the jaw-dropping moment when murderous ex-Nazi George Sanders, whose books are described as "a hash of Nietzsche and Hegel," starts shouting in Hitler-style German at a terrified Barbara Stanwyck. It's the only laugh in the movie, but it's quite a howler, especially because Alton highlights Sanders's face with a satirically "wicked" glow. Dan Callahan