Corner Shot

Cornered/Desperate (1945) is a great double bill - but I'm only going to talk about Desperate.

It stars Steve Brodie and Audrie Long as a truck driver and his wife getting ready to celebrate their one-year anniversary. An old friend calls and offers Brodie a quick job for a lot of money, so he tells his wife to hold dinner. Of course, it turns out to be a robbery, and one of the heisters kills a cop.

Brodie tells the police, and they get the shooter. But he is the younger brother of gang leader Raymond Burr. Burr threatens Brodie's wife if he doesn't go the police, confess to the killing, and get his brother out of danger. Amazingly, Brodie collects his wife immediately and they go on the lam, running from Burr and the law.

The rest of the movie is them running from town to town, working on farms or in garages. Long is pregnant, and soon they have a kid. It's a good life in clean-living Middle America, but they are always looking over their shoulders and moving on. This reminds me a bit of the middle of They Live By Night (although not so doomed). A solid noir.

Cornered stars Dick Powell as a Canadian pilot who has just been released from a German POW camp after the war. He finds out that his French girlfriend from the Underground was killed by a traitor, and sets off to get revenge. But I'm sorry to say that we watched this after Desperate, and we fell asleep pretty quickly. I'll just say that it looked great, really grim and compelling. And I think they ended up in Argentina, but that might have been part of a dream...