The underworld oozes aboveground in Mann's fast, cheap, and in-control breakthrough film, the first of his legendary seven-film noir cycle. An American Everycouple, blandly honest truck driver Steve Brodie and his pretty (vacant) wife Audrey Long, find themselves on the run from a gang of ruthless criminals, led by the entertainingly menacing Raymond Burr (“You'd have ta study ta get that stupid,” he browbeats one crony). Rushing from city to country and back again, Desperate burns with a fever lit by Mann's obsession with the nightmares throbbing beneath the American dream. A little kid corners our hero with a toy gun (“You're dead now, Steve!”); a solitary swinging light illuminates a brutal beating while a wife bakes a cake; a cream-borrowing neighbor interrupts a possible gangland execution: a well-lit, normal world teeters inches away from a cesspool of vice. Mann's having so much fun, in fact, it's difficult to say if our hero escapes the hold of his torturers for the floury embrace of his wife, or vice versa.