A Film Canon

More than any noir to date, Raw Deal's play of light and shadow approaches an abstracted opacity that reduces its protagonist, escaped convict Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe) to little more than "a nail on a barrelful of oil", and extrapolates an entire aesthetic from the dragnet that tightens around him, as well as its various surrogates - both literal (the wedding veil that covers his fiancee's face in the penultimate scene, the girders of the Golden Gate Bridge, the proliferation of fishing nets in and around a critical, traumatic encounter at a seaside store) and metaphorical, in the narrative preoccupation with intersections, of which the most pervasive manifestation is the petrol station, and which maps Sullivan's encounters with a series of increasingly localised obstacles between himself and the man who placed him in prison. In this way, Mann fulfils the prison's film's potential to construe society itself as a form of imprisonment - most poetically explicated in the conflation of policeman and gangster 'Spider' as agents of this dragnet - against which a series of spectacular natural vistas are set, anticipating his Western sensibilities, as does the overwhelming focus on revenge, to the exclusion of a devoted, hard-boiled lover and narrator (Claire Trevor), whose relative unattractiveness clarifies that the detached femininity of the femme fatale is a precondition to, rather than a disruption of, the hard-boiled universe. That said, although this journey concludes at San Francisco, it lacks the peculiarly sublime outlook of Out Of The Past, as well as its preoccupation with car travel, instead opting for a hushed, brooding projection of that interminable, unbearable waiting endemic to noir onto the landscape itself ("Waiting...waiting...all my life it seems as if I've been waiting"), which takes on the eerie desolation that could attend either imminent or recent apocalypse - a morbid vision of nature as a mummified world, a giant taxidermy.