(2 of 7)
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.