In an unpublished "Unforgettable Films" essay on Desperate, Barry Gifford tells the story of his childhood buddy Magic Frank, Frank's two older brothers, Woody and Moose, and Moose's first business partner, a future Mafioso murderer named Cueball Bluestein. All the boys lost their fathers when they were young. "Probably Cueball was more pissed off about it than we were," Frank surmises. Gifford: "When I saw Anthony Mann's movie Desperate...the Raymond Burr character, Walt Radak, immediately reminded me of Cueball Bluestein. Burr is the leader of a group of third-rate gangsters who are in pursuit of a truckdriver and his wife in order to frame him for a murder Burr's brother committed. There's one especially outstanding, unnerving, violent scene in which the thugs work over the truckdriver...(A) one-bulb lamp swings crazily and erratically back and forth each time it's knocked into by an arm or shoulder reacting from a blow...the men are heavily shadowed, their faces sliced by the knifelike light...the images glancing off and after one another. Burr is the nasty fat man who commands the men with pleasure, as obvious and deadly as Cueball Bluestein."