The Best Mann

Anthony Mann would have turned 100 last month, if he hadn’t died 39 years ago last April. A centenary is reason enough to celebrate the work of an artist-artisan who lays fair claim to being Hollywood’s finest unsung director.

Or, anyway, undersung. Turner Classic Movies did run a four-day tribute to Mann last month, and that was nice, even if TCM didn’t include his late masterpiece, the epic El Cid. I also hear that Jeanine Basinger’s excellent 1978 study of the director may be issued by Wesleyan University Press, though at the moment the book can be found only in a bilingual edition published two years ago by the San Sebastian Film Festival, and then only if you ask the author to send you a copy. (Thank you, Jeanine!)

Ask students of old high Hollywood to name a mid-century director named Mann and they might say Delbert, whose credits include the Academy Award-winning Marty, or Daniel, who won the International Prize at Cannes for Come Back, Little Sheba. Well, Anthony Mann had it all over “dreary Daniel and Delbert,” as film critic Andrew Sarris pegged them, yet during his life he got nothing like their peer recognition, receiving not so much as an Oscar nomination for his directorial work. A more appropriate Mann would be Michael, whose big-screen version of his Miami Vice TV series opens this weekend. The haunted tough guys of Thief and Heat occupy a Southern California nightscape within hailing distance of the one that Anthony Mann’s antiheroes crawled through in the ’40s. Yet film noir was just one of the genres our guy vivified and perfected.

Anthony Mann’s feature-film career falls into three main phases: noirish melodramas in the ’40s, westerns in the ’50s, epics in the ’60s. Nothing unusual here, since these were the dominant genres of their decades, and nearly every director of middling or higher status was obliged to try his hand at them. But Mann did more than crank out the sausage on order. He turned it into sirloin.

T-Men, Reign of Terror and He Walked by Night may not be the most satisfying of film noir tales, but they are surely the noiriest in their artful oppressiveness, their connoisseurship of violence, their sense of the world as a rat trap with rancid cheese as the bait. The westerns Mann made with James Stewart — Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country — constitute the strongest body of work, for that time, in that uniquely American form. El Cid is, to my mind, among the very finest of epic films, second only, perhaps, to Lawrence of Arabia.

For most of his time in Hollywood, Mann was a director for hire — that is, he was contracted to make movies he usually didn’t write or produce. That helps explain why he was ignored by critics who can parse a movie’s plot and sniff out its moral lesson but can’t appreciate or write about what’s actually on the screen. Mann put it up there handsomely, tellingly, and the great strength of Basinger’s book (really, someone has to get it published here) is its ability to translate his pictures into her words. Mann received little of that scrupulous and passionate attention in his lifetime. Toiling in noir and westerns, avoiding the big adaptations of famous novels and plays, Mann was thought of, if at all, as a “mere” director.

The nice thing about being a mere director, and not a full-fledged, consecrated auteur, is that you get to make more movies. Moving from one assignment to the next, a director hones his craft, finds terser or more elaborate ways to solve a scene, develops what critics like to call a style. Quantity can forge a signature, just as quality can.

Mann had both. He helmed 18 features in the ’40s, most of them cheapies with maybe two weeks to film each; and he did another 18 pictures in the ’50s, when he was working with loftier stars, bigger budgets and longer shooting schedules. (He died while shooting his 41st feature, A Dandy in Aspic). In either decade, the ’40s or the ’50s, Mann directed more movies than Orson Welles managed to complete in a 45-year career, and twice as many as Michael Mann has in his quarter-century as a feature-film maker.

Roaming like a lone gunman or freelance among the most popular genres, Mann found, or imposed, a consistent vision and visual style, making his films both fresh and lasting. He did what a director is supposed to do: tell stories through pictures.

MANN AND BOY

At the beginning, Mann was easy to ignore. “Tony never graduated from grade school,” screenwriter Philip Yordan claimed in a 1987 interview with Patrick McGilligan that appears in that valuable book Backstory 2. “He was an orphan. He and I were about the same age, but [he was] very poorly bred. He loved the theater. He used to sleep in the theater at night. He was an assistant stage manager and maybe he directed one or two plays…. Then when he came to Hollywood, he called me. I avoided him because I figured, jeez, this is a no-talent guy. You couldn’t even have a conversation with him, he was so ignorant. And it turns out we made 10, 11 pictures together.”

Seven, actually, but Yordan is not the most reliable witness, having achieved lasting renown as the “front” for blacklisted writers, whose scripts he would polish, then attach his own name to them. We quote Yordan here because he is virtually the only witness testifying to Mann’s early years.

Emil Anton Bundsmann was born in San Diego on June 30, 1906, and moved to New York with his family when he was 10. He found work on the stage, and in the ’30s directed plays for the Theater Guild on Broadway and the Federal Theater in Harlem. In 1938 he was hired by David O. Selznick, for whom he directed some of the Gone With the Wind screen tests. Mann went to Hollywood and served as an assistant to Preston Sturges, among others, before directing his first feature, Dr. Broadway, in 1942.

His apprentice films (I’ve seen five of the 10) give little indication of the achievements to come, but they have their moments. The Great Flamarion, with Erich Von Stroheim as a jilted, jealous lover, begins with a 1 min. 42 sec. opening shot, in which the camera perches outside a Mexico City vaudeville theater, pauses courteously while customers buy their tickets and present them to the doorman, then tracks slowly down the center aisle for the climax of a cape-twirling act and the beginning of a clown routine. We hear gunfire, and the scene changes; the shot ends the shot. Toward the beginning of another 1945 film, the musical Sing Your Way Home, there’s a shot, a full minute long, that gracefully zigzags backward, with the confidence of an Olympic skater, eventually revealing 14 kids singing, dancing and playing “Heaven Is a Place Called Home.”

Most of the early Mann films, though, show how dependent he was on Hollywood clichés. In the 1946 Strange Impersonation, scientists Brenda Marshall and William Gargan (we know they’re intellectuals because they both wear nerdy spectacles and have bad posture) are engaged to be married, much to the vexation of lab assistant Hillary Brooke. Through some strenuous plot exertions, Marshall has a fight on her penthouse terrace with another scheming scheming woman, who plunges to her death on the sidewalk below. “Fell right on her face,” a bystander observes. “They wouldn’t be able to tell who it is.” Marshall, lurking out of sight, overhears this: cue the identity switch! It’s one of those movies where a slight style change keeps people from recognizing the lead character. Superman had his spectacles; Marshall has a new hairdo. The movie needed a makeover.

Mann’s early films also needed performers with snazzier screen presence. These movies had the noir plots and attitude, but neither the actors to give the stories a fatalist heft nor the actresses beautiful and seductive enough to play a plausible femme fatale. In The Great Flamarion — a triangle drama in which a woman misuses the two men who desire her —Dan Duryea says of his wife, “Any guy who wouldn’t fall for you is either a sucker or he’s dead.” Unfortunately, the wife is played by Mary Beth Hughes, who’s pretty deficient in the allure category.

It’s not that stars in the making weren’t available to Mann. Gorgeous young Jane Greer was an RKO ingénue when Mann was there, just two years before her breakthrough role in Out of the Past. In fact, she had her first billed role in Mann’s Two O’Clock Courage, where, at 20, she is already sultry and spoiled; and she appears again in his The Bamboo Blonde. But Mann apparently didn’t see what Greer had: the high forehead, full lips and amoral aura that gave her a drop-dead-with-a-smile-on-your-face sexual charisma. The director let this budding femme fatale languish at the edge of the frame, while the not-so-hot Hughes and Frances Langford took center-screen.

If some Hollywood tout were to have set a morning line on B-list directors of the mid-’40s, he would have put his money on Edgar G. Ulmer, who with such no-budget films as Bluebeard and Detour was spinning gold out of Poverty Row dross. But fate had a couple of twists in store. Ulmer never graduated to A-level movies. Mann did — after making some remarkable killer Bs.

DARK MANN

Few people noticed it at the time, but in 1947 Mann vaulted from nowhere to the top rank of directors. His filmography seems to explode, with movies as lurid and paranoid as their names. Desperate. Raw Deal. Railroaded! Great pulp titles, suitable for a trashy paperback, though they were all original screen stories. (The studios Mann worked for couldn’t afford to option novels or plays; their writers had to make it up as they went along.)

Mann’s first successful noir, Desperate sets the mood for the whole cycle. It’s about one of those days when everything goes wrong. Steve (Steve Brodie), a decent Joe who’s been married to loving Anne (Audrey Long) for four months, gets a call one evening to make some easy money driving his truck for Walt (Raymond Burr), a guy he used to know. The truck, Steve learns, is to be used for a heist, and when he protests he’s forced into it, and spotted by the police. He gets away, but Walt’s brother Al is picked up. Now Steve is on the bad side of the cops and, worse, Walt. The big man has an unattractive side: sadistic psychosis. He breaks a liquor bottle and hulks toward Steve (the camera). “Say, I’ll bet that bride of yours is pretty. … If Al doesn’t walk out of that police station by midnight, your wife ain’t gonna be so good to look at.”

There’s a long, slow middle passage, where Steve hides out with Anne’s sturdy, Czech-American parents out in the heartland. But the movie smartly yanks itself back down into the murk, and ends with a sensational shot, in which the camera peers down a four-story stairwell, and Walt falls from the top flight, his body hitting and caroming off each railing. (Give a little wow of appreciation for the stunt crew.)

In noir terms, the problem with Desperate was that it had a hero. Mann’s next film, Railroaded!, corrects that lapse into sentimentality. It tells a story similar to Desperate‘s, but from the bad guy’s point of view. Gangsters pull off a heist, it goes wrong, and they blame it on the innocent guy whose truck they used. But the movie quickly shifts its focus from the decent victim, Steve (bland Ed Kelly), to the psycho, Duke Martin (strutting John Ireland), who has a dandy’s affectations — he uses perfumed bullets — and promiscuous trigger finger. In the film’s 72 mins. he kills four people, most of them witnesses to the crime Steve has been framed for.

Railroaded! is full of scurvy characters who, when they’re not plugging one another, pass the time by making stabbing insults. There’s the foppish crime boss who snootily tells a moll, “‘Women should be struck regularly, like gongs.’ That’s from Oscar Wilde.” And the moll snarls, “Give it back to him.” The moll is Clara (Jane Randolph), one of those diamond-hard dames who, in the noir universe, are there to dish out abuse verbally and take it physically. Toward the end, when Clara gets drunk, Ireland takes her bottle away and gives her a severe slap: “Just when you oughta keep your head, you start picklin’ it.”

The following year Mann made Raw Deal, which dispensing with heroes altogether. There are only victims and villains, and it’s often not easy to tell them apart. A guy named Joe (Dennis O’Keefe) has been wrongly imprisoned, fingered by his old pals. He breaks out of prison and goes on the run with two gals, a nice social worker, Ann (Marsha Hunt), whom he takes as a hostage, and a tough gal, Pat (Claire Trevor), who helped spring him from stir. Both are doomed to be in love with him.

Joe may be innocent of the crime he did time for, but that doesn’t make him likable, as Ann must find out for herself. She is the pivotal figure and the audience’s surrogate. First she’s repulsed by Joe, then feels drawn into his macho orbit, then pulls herself together and out of her entanglement. Joe, in turn, is attracted to her attraction for him. “If I had a gun I’d stop you,” she says in the early going; and he, acknowledging a woman’s power over a man, replies, “You don’t need a gun.” Later, teary and sexy, she cuddles up to Joe, who mutters, “I’m not worth it.” “Oh yes you are,” she whispers intensely. (But O’Keefe is right: he doesn’t deserve to share a two-shot with the classy, sensual Hunt.) At the end Ann sees the light, and switches from kisses to the big kiss-off: “I may have romanticized you before, but now I know you. You’re something from under a rock.”

THE VIOLENT MANN

We’re in 1947-48, remember, just after the war, when some men needed a domestic outlet for the martial skills they had learned overseas. That explains some of the violence in film noir, and the flashback format which, even if it didn’t specifically refer to a wartime trauma, suggested that men were prisoners of what they had seen and endured.

The typical Mann noir is different. It rarely uses flashbacks. Most of the ganefs in Desperate and Railroaded! have no past to haunt them. The present is spooky enough. Like their movies, they exist in the now. They are what they do, and what is done to them: existential unheroes. Only rarely do they blame society for their scrappy status, as Joe does in Raw Deal: “And if you want to know what happened to that kid with the medal — he had to hock it at 16. He got hungry.” The war, the defining event of the ’40s, may be a given, but it’s not expressed. What is explicit is the violence the American male came to know firsthand.

As violence seared the pages of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels (the first, I, the Jury, was published that year), so they explode on the screen in Railroaded! In Mann movies, the broken bottle, not the gun, is the favored weapon of menace, perhaps because it’s more sickeningly intimate. John Ireland, the film’s primary thug, breaks a bottle and comes after Joe. Raymond Burr, Mann’s inspired (and quite literal) notion of a heavy, had used one in Desperate, and he does it again in Railroaded!, breaking a bottle over Joe.

But a Mann villain didn’t need glassware to express his animosity, not when crockery was available. In a famous scene in Railroaded!, Burr is in a nightclub when he gets some bad news; just then, a woman happens to graze him and spill her drink. A low-angle shot shows Burr smoldering for a moment; impulsively, he picks up a flambé dish and throws it at her. She screams in shock and agony. As a sudden spasm of scalding viciousness, this scene is up there with the hot-coffee clash in The Big Heat.

T-MEN AND G-MEN

In a Hollywood movie about World War II movie, ordinary guys often discovered their heroism as soldiers behind enemy lines. There they learned teamwork, resourcefulness, toughness under pressure. Now the boys were back home. And if they weren’t going into the employ of the underworld, they could use their wartime tools in a corporate environment, by continuing to work for the government, but as homicide detectives, immigration enforcers, treasury agents. Sometimes, double agents.

That’s the premise of the 1947 T-Men. Two agents, O’Brien (O’Keefe) and Genaro (Alfred Ryder), are dispatched to infiltrate a mob of counterfeiters in L.A. Pretending to be gangsters from Detroit, they start proving their bona fides and, claiming they have great plates to make new bills from, haggle over the price — capitalism at its lowest and the state at its bravest, head to head. Mann choreographs this Apache dance with brisk efficiency. Even the violence is subtle. The key figure is The Schemer (Wallace Ford), who is locked in a steam bath and scalded to death. He goes down with a kind of pathetic majesty, like a corrupt Roman Senator who got in Caligula’s way.

Mann’s name isn’t on He Walked by Night, a film that had a lot to do with restoring his reputation. Alfred Werker directed most of this exemplary procedural, in which L.A. cops track a clever thief (Richard Basehart) who robs electronics stores to get the parts for state-of-the-art radios, and who eventually kills a cop and is tracked into the city sewers. But “Mann’s contribution was considerable,” the Basinger book tells us. “It seems that he did the location filming with Richard Basehart, the final sequence of his flight through the sewers, the night fight between Basehart and Scott Brady and a scene in which the wounded criminal removes the bullet himself with amazing sangfroid.”

If this is true, then Mann did the best bits. But the whole film is handsome and gripping. Basehart makes a splendidly cool outlaw, never revving up the twitches and mannerisms, just behaving with a curt precision and lurking like a brilliant beast — he could be one of the rats of NIMH, turned to crime, and never more dangerous or poignant than when he is cornered. The film is available in a very good copy from Kino. Get it.

If the villain holds our interest, and some sympathy, in He Walked by Night, it’s the heroes who reclaim the limelight in Border Incident, the first film Mann made for MGM after his very productive stint at Eagle-Lion. It’s essentially a remake of T-Men: two agents go undercover in the underworld; one dies. Pablo Rodriguez (Ricardo Montalban) has come from Mexico to join U.S. Immigration official Jack Bearnes (George Murphy) with the intent — get this — of stanching the flow and exploitation of illegal farm workers coming up from Mexico. Pablo will pretend to be a bracero looking for a fast way into the country; Jack will cover his back. Border Incident has a liberal heart; it does not blame the Mexican laborers for the problem (who could not love them, when they are represented by Montalban and James Mitchell, both with austere good looks and cheekbones to die for). Instead, it fingers the farm workers’ facilitators on both sides of the border and their employers in the States.

Still, this is not Hollywood-humanist tract. It races and shocks like any good Mann melodrama, coiling its tension smartly, filling the screen with vivid tough guys (Howard Da Silva and Charles McGraw as a rancher and his enforcer) and gals (Lynn Whitney as McGraw’s surly wife). The movie also has style to spare, especially in the pearly flashes of white amid the dark skies and darker hills. Somebody had seen Que Viva Mexico, Sergei Eisenstein’s 1932 paean to peons. We’ll tell you who that somebody was in a minute.

MANN’S MEN

Any director, auteur or otherwise, is dependent on the artists he employs, and Mann probably more than most. If Mann had ever given an Oscar acceptance speech — in that alternative universe where achievement, not prestige, is rewarded — there were two “little people” he would surely have thanked.

John C. Higgins wrote or co-wrote the five noirish procedurals — Railroaded!, T-Men, Raw Deal, He Walked by Night and Border Incident — that lifted Mann from the bondage of B-minus musicals, got him hired by a major studio (the major, MGM) and form the bedrock of his current furtive eminence. Higgins had written several Crime Does Not Pay docudrama shorts for MGM in the ’30s. And when the police-procedural docudrama became a popular feature-length genre in 1945 with the success of The House on 92nd Street (produced by Louis de Rochemont, who had fashioned miniature versions of the genre for the dramatized newsreel series The March of Time), Higgins jumped in, and Mann was there with him.

Higgins’ twist was to wed the docudrama to the crime romance (film noir, as the French later called it). For the docu part of the story, an authoritative off-screen voice would set up parallel narrative tracks: a criminal’s m.o. and the dogged work of government sleuths to catch him. Audiences were assured that not only could this felony happen, it did happen, for it was “based on case histories in the files of” some federal agency. But that was just half of it. The veneer of authenticity allowed Higgins and Mann to display more rotten behavior, more thugs lashing out in violence, than would be permitted in a story with no law-enforcement pedigree. After 70 mins. of betrayal, despair and sadism, the narrator would return to insist that crime does not pay. Except at the box office.

No question that for Mann, and the genre, the docudrama approach was mostly an excuse to show lowlifes in low lighting. And if Higgins supplied the craft of Mann’s noir films, cinematographer John Alton surely served up the art. Before hooking up with Mann, Alton had a nomad’s résumé: born in Hungary, an assistant in Hollywood silent films, shooting pictures in Argentina in the ’30s, then B and C movies back in America. The two men clicked as collaborators, sparking with extreme visual tropes, each instantly elevating the other’s work. “I found a director in Tony Mann who thought like I did,” he told Todd McCarthy in the illuminating introduction to Alton’s how-to book Painting With Light. “He not only accepted what I did, he demanded it.”

The Alton-Mann films — T-Men, He Walked by Night, Reign of Terror, Border Incident and Devil’s Doorway — are unlike any other noirs in their visual density and tonal texture. Like many movies in the genre, these are indebted to the look that Orson Welles and Gregg Toland created for Citizen Kane: chiaroscuro lighting, characters in extreme closeup or long shot, and plenty of low-angle shots. Alton pushed these tenets further than most. He shot even the sitting figures from below, with the tops of rooms pressing down on them; he loved ceiling shots more than Japanese tourists in the Sistine Chapel. This perspective not only enhanced a doomsday mood, it kept the costs down on low-budget productions. According to Joe Cohn, his boss at MGM, Alton “saved a lot of time by lighting only from the floor.”

Cinematographers are also known as lighting cameramen. Well, Alton was a darkening cameraman. “Where there is no light, one cannot see,” he wrote in his book. “And when one cannot see, his imagination runs wild. He begins to suspect that something is about to happen.In the dark there is mystery.” Alton put this theory into practice, spectacularly; he become the master of visual mystery.

As McCarthy notes, Alton liked to throw whatever light he needed on a back wall, leaving the actors as foreground shadows. Sometimes the only thing visible in a closeup is the white of a man’s eyes, or the moisture in a woman’s. The enveloping shadows reduce the visual information, isolate elements to which the audience’s attention can be directed. In Raw Deal, Alton’s closeups of Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt manage to catch a cross of light in the left eye of each actress, and another glistening cross in their earrings. Later, to show that time is running out, Alton’s reflects Trevor’s face in the dial of a black clock. He might allow a figure to swallow the frame, as bulky Raymond Burr does in Raw Deal. Alton also delighted in visual puns: On a dark street, a trash can lid rattles to the ground, and a gunman collapses on it — his head on a platter.

Alton’s masterpiece with Mann was not, strictly speaking, a noir. It was a historical epic called The Black Book also known as The Reign of Terror, and it concerned the head-chopping horrors of the French Revolution, with Basehart as a rabid Robespierre and Robert Cummings as yet another Mann hero serving in the noble role of secret agent. (Instead of counterfeit plates, Cummings is looking for a Robespierre diary with an enemies list inside.) Yet, from force of habit, or in anticipatory tribute to the French critics who would later give a name to the genre, Alton concocted the ultimate film noir.

Actors in closeup shout their speeches out of the darkness, their faces caged by the tight frame. Or they’ll be grouped, at sardine density, to form a cacophonous crowd. The only actors granted a little light, and thus a bit of traditional movie glamour, are Cummings and the heroine, Arlene Dahl, whose gown Alton lends a silky luster. The angles are, of course, lower than low, giving the viewers the impression they are the masses staring up at these puffed-up figures of power, these gargantuan gargoyles.

Even in the less-than-pristine prints that exist today, The Black Book is an shining, or rather murky, example of monochromatic camera artistry. It makes a sympathetic viewer rue Hollywood’s decision, in the mid-’60s, to make all movies in color. Something was lost: the cinematographer’s ability to paint with light in black-and-white.

Mann and Alton would soon cease their partnership. And the director would move on to the wide open spaces of the western and the epic. But his characters would remain as gnarled, and noirish, as ever.

COMING SOON TO TIME.COM: PART II — MANN OF THE WEST.