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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 rsum: 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.