“Hey Joe”, that blues standard made famous by Hendrix, does not have the titular words in it anywhere near as much 1948 noir Raw Deal.  In such a movie, I like to think the screenwriter actually typed every single occurrence of that line.

Dennis O’Keefe is the designated Joe in this movie, which also stars Marsha Hunt and Claire Trevor.  Trevor helped to spring him from prison but, now that he is a fugitive, he seems more interested in Hunt, whom he and Trevor have kidnapped.  Regardless, both of them will call out his name.  A lot.  Like several dozen times in a 79 minute runtime.

He is trying to get across the country to San Francisco for a confrontation with Raymond Burr.  You see, Burr and O’Keefe were in a heist together and the former arranged for the latter take the fall.  Burr may have also arranged for O’Keefe to be sprung from the joint, but that is only because of the likelihood of the man getting killed while trying to escape.

Instead, the trio of O’Keefe and the two women make it to the point where Burr said he would meet the fugitive.  Instead, he sends John Ireland, one of his murderous thugs.  Hunt saves O’Keefe’s life by shooting Ireland, though not fatally. 

Then she goes full Stockholm syndrome, though I think that encounter took place somewhere in Colorado.  I don’t think there is a Colorado syndrome, though she would be the first case of it. Her personality does a complete 180 and she falls hard for O’Keefe, despite her being increasingly convinced he was a cold-blooded killer up until that point.  There simply is no rationale for this change of heart, except to turn Trevor even further against her.

To risk further danger to Hunt, O’Keefe continues onward only with Trevor. Unfortunately, this only puts Hunt directly in jeopardy, as she is captured by the wounded Ireland and brought to San Francisco for Burr to use as leverage to keep O’Keefe at bay. 

It is Trevor who intercepts a phone call from Ireland to O’Keefe to inform him he has taken Hunt hostage.  She keeps that info secret while she and her man wait for a ship to take off for Latin America.  In the best noir photography of the film, she wrestles with her conscience while the minutes tick by on the clock on the wall.  That clock casts one seriously long shadow, and noir is all about shadows.

There are only a couple of other isolated incidents of superb photography scattered in the runtime of this picture.  One such moment has the trio of leads silhouetted against a campfire in a forest, the smoke of it full of motes captured in diagonal shafts of sunlight.  What is odd is instances such as this are embedded in footage which is largely unremarkable. 

Interiors are consistently cheap sets, but those serve well a movie full of hard on their luck ne-er-do-wells.  The outdoors, on the other hand, are such poor substitutes for the real thing as to betray the limitations of the poverty row studio which released this.  Somebody had to capture the good shots, and the actors are clearly in some of those, so why weren’t the entire scenes filmed in these real-life locations?

The performances are all over the place.  O’Keefe is solid in the type of tough-guy role in which he specialized.  Burr chews the scenery with gusto as a sadistic and selfish criminal with an obsession with fire.  Trevor looked a great deal to me like Madeleine Kahn, which made it even harder to take seriously some of the more ridiculous dialogue she has.  Even worse are some of her internal monologue we hear as narration.  But Hunt has, by far, the most thankless role.  Especially embarrassing are the overwrought hysterics she goes through when O’Keefe sends her away, and that was after the sudden, complete and inexplicable change of heart I mentioned earlier.

Typical of the output of the poorest studios, this is a more violent film than most of what emerged from the majors.  In a fight where Hunt ends up shooting Ireland, O’Keefe tries at one point to gouge one of the thug’s eyeballs out with an antler of a deer head mounted on the wall.  Failing to do that, he seems to try for shoving the antler into an ear.  Then there’s Burr fascination with fire, and he casually tosses the contents of a flaming dish on a woman in what appeared to be a spur-of-the-moment decision.

There is also some intentional humor.  Though wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny, it was something clever I don’t recall seeing done before in any other picture.  Actually chuckle-inducing is a bit where Ireland makes O’Keefe put his hands up, and the man just happens to be standing next to a stuffed grizzly bear doing the same.

Alas, a surprising majority of Raw Deal is either Hunt or Trevor going around and calling out, “JOE!”.  One might think they were less confused than O’Keefe, who remarks of what he believes to be Hunt’s privileged upbringing that she has “probably had [her] bread buttered on both sides since the day [she was] born.”   That would make bread a lot harder to hold and either he’s mistaken or the top 1% have some unusual struggles not experienced by the remaining 99% of us.

Dir: Anthony Mann

Starring Dennis O’Keefe, Claire Trevor, Marsha Hunt

Watched as part of the Classic Flix blu-ray set John Alton Film Noir Collection