Avis des critiques

Both [T-Men and Rawl Deal] are master classes in composition; they rest firmly in the tradition of the American cinema of the 1940s. But the earlier movie is, for me at least, considerably less poignant... In Raw Deal, the richness and complexity are in the story, the acting and the cutting as much as in the compositions, and for me that makes it the superior film.

This 1948 feature is noir to its core, from its archetypal narrative to its vibrant visual expression... With screenwriters Higgins and Leopold Atlas, Mann peppers Raw Deal with seminal phrases like "two-time loser" and "behind the eight ball," and the situations are prototypical noir happenstance: getting tripped up by a bullet-riddled gas tank or a neighboring outlaw on the run.

Men brawl amidst flames in this tremendous, sinewy noir, but the real story lies in Trevor's doleful inner struggle. Shivering behind a veil, her profile set against the heavy ticking of a clock, she listens to her beloved babbling about new beginnings while her rival is being tortured somewhere -- a tangle of desire and guilt pointing the way to the redemptive inferno. In Mann's city, the "breath of fresh air" the antiheroes long for is really their last.

Mann was a master of darkness, using extreme contrasts and often filling the frame with black, leaving only a sliver of light to reveal detail. In Raw Deal, Mann develops this contrast through the sustained visual and thematic motifs of the dragnet and the gridiron... It is this heavy, claustrophobic air, as thick as the fog that crowds the city streets and captured so iconically by Alton, that makes Raw Deal such a masterful example of noir.