The Best Mann

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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 flamb 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.

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