DESPERATE (1947) B/W 73m dir: Anthony Mann

w/Steve Brodie, Audrey Long, Raymond Burr, Douglas Fowley, William Challee, Jason Robards Sr., Freddie Steele, Lee Frederick, Paul E. Burns, Ilka Gruning

From Variety's contemporary review of the film: "Desperate is a ripsnorting gangster meller. Yarn [by Dorothy Atlas and Anthony Mann] is strictly one of those things, and not unfamiliar. Steve Brodie, honest truck driver, becomes involved innocently in a fur warehouse robbery and cop slaying. He's beaten up by the mobsters when they realize he's tipped off the police. Brodie flees with his wife, fearing gangster vengeance since the mobster's brother is captured and charged with murder. From then on, picture becomes more or less a continuing flight of Brodie and his wife, Audrey Long, from both the gendarmes and the gangsters.

"Surprise ending gives film a lift. Anthony Mann's direction mainly stresses suspense, being done skillfully.

"Brodie is okay as the honest truckman who gets into one jam after another. Long, as his wife, shapes up nicely; at times she resembles Ginger Rogers."

From the Off Screen website (www.offscreen.com), this 2018 review of the film by Douglas Buck:

"Independent trucker Steve Randall (Steve Brodie) doing his best to make an honest life for himself, ends up reluctantly swept up in a robbery in which a cop is killed and he, of course (in proper noir style), is mistakenly fingered. Caught between the mob threatening (in pretty stark detail) the life and limbs of his pregnant wife (Audrey Long) and the police out to get him, Randall and his love get the hell out of Dodge ... with the forces of darkness (the mob) and --- well --- lesser darkness (the law) on their tales.

"Another one of those tough, no-nonsense (yet still admirably stylish --- the scene of a savage basement beating, for instance, under a single swinging overhead light might approach cliche today, but works perfectly within the shifting, dangerous shadow world of characters lurking in the dark) short running time B-noirs directed by that cross-genre stalwart Anthony Mann. While Brodie and Long are decent enough in their roles as the endangered lovers on the run, with the clock literally ticking against them (a device used nicely to ratchet up the tension as the film draws to its conclusion, with the head mob boss behind the initial robbery demanding Randall confess to the murder before the mob boss’ brother is executed at exactly midnight), the real performance highlights revolve around the two representative antagonists on opposite sides of the law; the aforementioned mob boss, played with sociopathic menace by Raymond Burr (long before his two decade run on television, first as lawyer Perry Mason, then the wheel-chair bound detective Ironside) whose tragic flaw is his single soft familial spot for his impulsive brother and the shifty-natured Detective (played by Jason Robards Sr, father of the late, exceedingly great actor with the deeply resonantly voice Jason Robards Jr) who ends up revealed as a kinda good guy at the end, but yet was awfully callous with putting Randall in danger’s way multiple times to ascertain exactly who was guilty of what (providing just another glimpse at the oft suspect and contemptuous view with which film noir held the image of American authority, leading to the counter-creation of the fascistic House of Un-American Activities which went directly after Hollywood as a hotbed of festering communism)."