Desesperado

This 40s noir B-movie has quite a solid reputation, but its plot is strictly second-rate. Steve Brodie plays an average joe, a truck driver not long out of the army and recently married to a lush wife who bakes cakes to celebrate the fact that she is pregnant. Sadly, hubby never gets to taste her culinary skills because he accepts a last minute lucrative driving job that turns out to be crooked. Raymond Burr's gang of crooks haven't got their own vehicle so, bizarrely, they decide to hire one to carry out a warehouse theft and, one dead cop later, Brodie finds himself on the run as a cop-killer.

Mann's direction is better than the plot. He wasn't scared to try something different every now and then. At one point we're even given a blurry POV close-up of Burr's retreating fist after it has connected with Brodie's face. Burr plays the heavy here, as he usually did in his early career. He was a big man even before he put a few pounds on, but looks swarthy here as well, almost Mediterranean. He's certainly the most interesting character in the film, a gangster out to save his brother from the electric chair and endeavouring to have our relatively bland hero take his place.

The main weakness in the storyline is the hero's poor decision-making. He practically panics each time danger is at hand, and yet delays contacting the police for an inordinate length of time so that the villains can more or less pursue him at their leisure.

This is undoubtedly better than its modest production values would suggest, but it isn't a classic by any measure.