- Anthony Mann's Desperate gets a lot of mileage out of a simple premise, namely that an innocent man tricked into driving the truck in a heist ends up pursued by both mobsters and the police. The truck driver in question is Steve Randall (Steve Brodie), and the mobster, Walt Radak (Raymond Burr), is nominally an old friend of his, although you wouldn't know that from his behavior. After the heist erupts into a police shootout, Steve soon finds himself on the run while Radak's brother (Larry Nunn) lands in police custody. Radak and his goons (Douglas Fowley, William Challee, Freddie Steele, Lee Frederick) figure they can coerce Steve into taking the brother's place on the electric chair if they can just get a hold of Steve's wife, Anne (Audrey Long).
- The film's best scene arrives relatively early on, when Radak and company have Steve tied up in a chair shortly after the heist. As they're beating on him, one of them sends overhead light swinging so that even the scene's lighting becomes strangely erratic and off-kilter. (Hitchcock would famously employ this same technique in Psycho, but Mann did it first.) In another great scene, a rotund gentleman (Dick Elliott) offers Steve and Anne a lift, only to reveal that he's the county sherriff. When the call on Steve and Anne comes in over the police radio, their pleasant drive suddenly takes a turn for the shocking. Although the fleeing couple finds a few moments of rest with Anne's amusingly wedding-obsessed Czech relatives (Ilka Grüning, Paul E. Burns), Radak's crew is never far behind.
- In addition to being a remarkably compelling and underrated film noir, Desperate is all the more impressive when you realize that its cast features essentially no big stars. Although modern audiences would recognize Raymond Burr from his subsequent TV career (I will admit to chuckling upon seeing Perry Mason punch a guy in the face), none of the other actors ever became household names. This works to the film's advantage since Steve Brodie is much more convincing as an innocent "everyman" than a noir icon like Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum ever could have been. The film's stable of talented character actors supplies a memorably dishonest car dealer (Cy Kendall), a pushy insurance agent (Eddie Parks), and a seemingly disinterested police detective (Jason Robards Sr.), while Mann's direction provides interesting angles from which to view its characters' truly desperate circumstances.
