Quotes of the Day

Do you think old movies can't speak to today's concerns? See some of Anthony Mann's films and think again. They spoke for their time; they speak to ours.

Jihads. The 1961 El Cid is set in 11th-century Spain, where Christians live in something like peace with the Islamic minority. That doesn't please a fiery-eyed Muslim emir, who issues this warning: "The Prophet has commanded us to rule the world. Where in all your land of Spain is the glory of Allah? When men speak of you, they speak of poets, musicmakers, doctors, scientists. Where are your warriors? You dare call yourselves sons of the Prophet? You have become women! Burn your books. Make warriors of your poets. Let your doctors invent new poisons for our arrows. Let your scientists invent new war machines. And then kill! Burn! Infidels live on your frontiers. Encourage them to kill each other. And when they are weak and torn, I will sweep up from Africa. And thus the empire of the one God, the true God Allah, will spread. First across Spain. Then across Europe. Then — the whole world!"

Foreign wars. The 1957 Men in War, set in Korea, shows a U.S. infantry platoon fighting an indigenous, mostly invisible enemy in a faraway country whose people show no appreciation for the American presence. As Lt. Benson (Robert Ryan) and his exhausted platoon make their risky way through a territory pocked with snipers and land mines, some of the GIs assume that anyone of darker skin is the enemy. Tough Sgt. Montana (Aldo Ray) acts on this premise, gunning down three strangers from a distance and explaining, "If you're not sure, you shoot first or you'll die first." Benson is horrified by this logic. "You couldn't see their faces," he says, and Montana replies, "I could smell 'em." He certainly can smell them at the end: the platoon uses a flamethrower to burn Korean soldiers alive. For the infantry members, killing by any means necessary is implicit in their job description.

Oil. In the 1953 Thunder Bay, James Stewart plays an oil rigger planning to drill for "black gold" in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast. When the local fishermen protest, Stewart revs up the oratory: "The important thing is that there's oil under this gulf. And we need it. Everybody needs it. You need it. Without oil this country of ours would stop, and start to die. You'd die. You can't stop progress. Nobody can." Take that, Friends of the Earth.

Imperial hubris. The villain of Mann's 1964 The Fall of the Roman Empire is the Emperor Commodus (Christopher Plummer), a weak man with a drunken past who says he was divinely chosen to make war against the Middle Eastern tribes. His one sensible adviser, Timonides (James Mason), warns that "Their hatred will live for centuries to come. Rivers of Roman blood will pay for this. You will make nations of them, killers of them." But Commodus is deaf to pleas of reason: "You will tell Egypt, Syria, the entire eastern half of the Empire, that if there is the slightest resistance to my orders, I will destroy them." He is also bent on redressing what he sees as the military flabbiness of an earlier President — sorry, Emperor: "You must also let them know they must forget the weakness of my father."

Illegal Mexican immigrants. Mann's 1949 Border Incident begins with a narrator explaining the migration of braceros (Mexican workers) to the vast farms of California and Texas. Most of these braceros obey the laws of both countries... But there are other braceros who come and go illegally, who jump the fences. These illegal entrants work in the United States for a while, and upon returning to Mexico are often robbed of their savings by bandits who infest both sides of the border."

Note that the movie sympathizes with the illegals and directs its outrage at their exploiters: "human vultures who prey on unsuspecting victims." Even the spokesman for the U.S. Immigration Service sees the danger on his side of the border, not theirs. "Some of my people pay them [the illegals] half-wages, conceal them from arrest, make them live in fear and send them back to the desert to be robbed and killed." At the end of the film, the narrator puffs with pride to note that the workers are "now safe and secure, living under the protection of two great republics — and the bounty of God Almighty."

Isn't it nice to know that the immigrant question was solved back in 1949?

MANN OF THE WEST

Anthony Mann, who would have been 100 this year, had built a solid reputation in the '40s directing low-budget melodramas — film noir, the French later dubbed them — that were pregnant with a sense of dread and doom, drenched with slick streets and humid rooms where nobody thinks to turn on a light, peopled with losers on a toboggan toward disaster and the women who love-hate them. Railroaded!, T-Men, He Walked by Night, The Black Book, Border Incident — titles that in their day got little recognition, let alone informed appreciation — today are seen as seminal works in the cycle: tersely eloquent, boldly designed and, in those films shot by cinematographer John Alton, brilliantly noir.

Then Mann appeared to do a 180. Though he roamed across a wide variety of genres — including the historical thriller (The Tall Target), the war movie (Men in War), the musical drama (The Glenn Miller Story, Serenade), an adaptation of a famous novel (God's Little Acre), a military recruitment film (Strategic Air Command) and that oil-fever movie (Thunder Bay) — he concentrated on westerns.

His work in sagebrush sagas began with the 1950 Devil's Doorway and continued with another 11 films for the rest of the decade, including five terrific oaters with his signature star, James Stewart: Winchester '73, Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country and The Man from Laramie. Mann's last western was the 1960 Cimarron, which also served as his transition to El Cid and the epic form he embraced in the '60s. (Mann died of a heart attack in 1967.)

No two genres seem as opposite as those two intrinsically American forms, film noir and the western. It's the difference between dark and light, black-and-white and color, cramped interiors and expansive exteriors, personal nightmares and the collective dream, inevitable doom and Manifest Destiny, degradation and redemption, falling into the sewer and looking up at the sky.

Yet both forms focus on hard men in crisis, talking with their guns. And by the '50s, westerns had evolved beyond the moral simplicities of the courtly, white-hatted hero (Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, the early John Wayne) who vanquishes the mustachioed, black-hatted villain. Mann westerns, and lots of others, blurred the line between good and evil. Now the hero, if such we must call him, was a bitter loner, slow to offer a helping hand, suspicious of taking it. In The Far Country, the Stewart character defines such a man: "Maybe he likes to be lonely, d'you ever think of that? He never asks any favors, because he can take care of himself. Never trusts anybody, so he doesn't get hurt. That's not a bad way to live." And of course he's describing himself.

The Mann western hero has learned wariness the hard way, because he usually has something to hide. He is a man with a past: some psychic shadow or criminal activity that has left him gnarled and calcified. Not so long ago he was a raider, a rustler, maybe a killer. If a movie were made of some previous chapter in his life, he'd be the villain, and he might be gunned down before he had the chance at redemption that Mann's films offer. Thus, the dramatic conflict, though ostensibly between two men, hero and villain, is in fact one man's fight to determine his true identity. It's an internal battle between the villain he was and the hero he tries to become.

"Whatcha runnin' away from?" the Stewart character in Bend of the River is asked, and he replies, "A man named Glyn McLintock" — his own name; his old self. A hard man on the run from his demons: that's a plot device familiar from Mann's '40s melodramas. Indeed, it adds the crucial genre element that was missing in those films: the hold of a sordid past on a desperate present. In other words, Mann's westerns fulfilled the crucial conventions of his early films. They were film noir, al fresco.

MANN AND STEWART

How, in a Mann western, do we know the good guy from the bad? The simple answer is: Waall, shucks, because he's Jimmy Stewart, who almost never played a villain. (Instant spoiler alert: the only two exceptions that leap to my mind are After the Thin Man and The Greatest Show on Earth.) But how heroic is the Stewart character in a Mann movie? Frequently he is, or has been, every bit as twisted as a regular-issue movie villain.

And while Stewart, or Gary Cooper in Mann's Man of the West, is terse and unyielding, the bad guy — Arthur Kennedy in Bend of the River and The Man from Laramie, Robert Ryan in The Naked Spur — is slick and ingratiating, with a salesman's charm that initially seduces the supporting characters (and the audience). He wears a wide and deeply untrustworthy smile until it sours into a grimace, and finally, when Stewart has worked his vengeance, a rictus. Further, the putative villain can be much quicker to do a good deed than the hero is. In Bend of the River, Kennedy, before turning on Stewart, saves his life no fewer than three times: from an Indian with a knife; in a saloon brawl; and when a renegade rigger attacks him. (It's not all one-way: Stewart saves Kennedy from a hanging.) Yet at the end of the film the narrative satisfaction comes when Stewart kills him.

In her absolutely essential book on Mann (which may soon be reissued but is now unavailable, so you'll just have to take my word for it), Jeanine Basinger argues that Mann's pictorial eloquence brought clarity to such ambivalences. "Viewers understood and accepted a man who came from nowhere, and a revenge based upon a conflict never shown." I still think that Mann's merging of, or confusion between, hero and villain set up a tug of loyalties for '50s moviegoers. They must have felt like the Millard Mitchell character in The Naked Spur. He is supposed to aim his rifle at the bad guy but confesses, "It's gettin' so I don't know which way to point this no more."

Even when Stewart is not trying to outrun some old demon, he isn't instantly honorable. In The Naked Spur, Stewart (with the not-so-heroic name of Howie) is a bounty hunter toting a killer, Ryan, back to Kansas. He has the mercenary motive; Ryan has the best lines. "What'll it be?" he asks Ryan. "A bullet here or a rope in Abilene?" Ryan, the philosopher-knave, muses: "Choosin' the way to die — what's the difference? Choosin' the way to live — that's the hard part." Later, Stewart is ready to kill Ryan even though the man‘s hands are crippled. With great effort (and a wonderful play of fury on his features), Stewart reins in his murderous impulse. It happens over and over in these movies: the hero's recognition that his old self is his own worst enemy.

Through most of The Far Country, Stewart watches and does little while good people get pushed around. He enunciates his creed to his one pal, salty Walter Brennan: "I don't need other people. I don't need help. I can take care of me. And in a pinch," he adds with a rare smile, "I can take care of you." But he can't. Brennan is killed. The wrongful death of a defenseless friend — that's the kind of mid-film crisis that galvanizes Stewart to dig down and find his latent hero-ness.

The other kind is that Stewart suffers a near-fatal injury, usually by his old partner-nemesis. In Bend of the River Kennedy leaves him for dead. "I'll be seein' you," says the ever-puckish villain. And Stewart whispers, "You'll be seein' me. Every time you bed down for the night you'll be lookin' out into the darkness and wond'rin' if I'll be there. You'll be seein' me." (After that, Stewart might be a vengeful ghost, picking off those who dare to confront him.) The Far Country has a similar death and resurrection. Stewart is shot with such force, he's blown into a river. Then he rises slowly, spectrally, like the creature from the Black Lagoon, and cathartic Act III — the revenge — kicks in.

By the end of each film, Stewart has killed the main bad guy and made off with the good girl, if he wants to. But the "happy" endings won't stick in your mind as much as the moral struggle that preceded them. For the kind of loner played by Stewart (and, for sure, Wayne in The Searchers), his temperament suited his mission. He was the Moses of the American West: he could lead the faithful to the promised land but not dwell with them there. The kind of man it took to forge the West was not the kind it took to settle it.

GOOD COMPANY

It would be idiocy to say that Mann and Stewart made these movies. The pictures had stories and dialogue, fashioned by top screenwriters. Borden Chase wrote Winchester '73, Bend of the River and The Far Country. Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom (who later dreamed up those gentleman-rogue TV series Have Gun — Will Travel and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) created the five-character chamber play The Naked Spur. Reginald Rose, best known for the TV show, play and film Twelve Angry Men, wrote the coruscating Mann-Gary Cooper western Man of the West. And Mann's old buddy Philip Yordan had his name on The Man from Laramie and The Last Frontier, as well as Mann films in the noir genre (The Black Book) and epic cycle (El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire).

On screen, Stewart was front and center for most of the major Mann westerns, but filling out the mural was an informal repertory company, lending color and texture to the depiction of the Old West. Often these secondary players assumed similar roles from film to film; so, even if the hero's motives were somewhat baffling, audiences could get their bearings by spotting the supporting players. Readers who grew up on movies of the '50s and '60s may not recognize the names of these actors, but if we showed you their mug shots you could finger them in a second.

Consider Jay C. Flippen, who appeared in Winchester '73, Bend in the River, Thunder Bay, The Country Country and Strategic Air Command. With a gift for bombast and the twinkle of chicanery in his eye, Flippen was the genial spirit of the pioneering American entrepreneur. In Thunder Bay he's the old wildcatter who takes a chance on Stewart's scheme to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. And in Bend of the River he leads his flock of settlers into the West to create a garden out of the wilderness. "It's what I've always dreamed about, Glyn," he rhapsodizes to Stewart. "A new country where we can make things grow... In a few years we'll bring fruit to the world such as the eyes of man has never seen." In Flippen's gaze you can see the 19th century turn into the 20th.

John McIntire (Winchester '73, The Far Country, The Tin Star) was often the sardonic version of Flippen: a homespun hard case who had become the the boss or patriarch of a lawless territory, and who enjoys meting out injustice. "I'm gonna like you," he tells Stewart when they first meet in The Far Country. "I'm gonna kill you, but I'm gonna like you."

Harry Morgan (Bend in the River, The Glenn Miller Story, Thunder Bay, The Far Country, Strategic Air Command, Cimarron) the skeptical runt, with a weakness for the sort of bravado he could rarely back up. In The Far Country he snaps at Stewart, "The law says you can't get away with this," and Stewart asks, "What law?" Royal Dano (Bend in the River, The Far Country, Man of the West, Cimarron) played the malcontent, tall and taciturn — in Man of the West he's literally mute until he suffers a very vocal death — who's seen enough of people to expect the worst of them. "Where there's gold there's stealin'," Dano mutters in The Far Country, "and where there's stealin' there's killin'."

Other reliables included Chubby Johnson (Bend in the River, The Far Country), the Gabby Hayes-like grizzled prospector, and Robert J. Wilke (The Far Country, Man of the West), whose mean attitude scarred a face that usually got pushed in; and those magnificent troglodytes Jack Elam (The Far Country, The Man from Laramie) and Jack Lambert (Border Incident, Bend of the River). Outside the core westerns, but a Mann favorite, was Charles McGraw (T-Men, Reign of Terror, Border Incident, Side Street, Cimarron), whose magnificent granite features and sturdy, short frame made him perfect as the enforcer for a gangleader or trail boss.

You'll note there are no actresses in this rogue's gallery. That's because, even in Mann westerns, women were stuck in two traditional roles: the virgin and the whore. The virgin, like Julie Adams in Bend of the River, was a prize for men to fight over, like a sack of gold or a parcel of land. Her job was to lure the hero into protecting her during the climactic fight, during which she stands by, her hand to her mouth, her feet glued to the floor, while he gets beat up. As the representative of genteel civilization, she needs to be instructed in the code of barbarism. "I know ya ain't never seen a man killed close up," killer Robert Ryan tells winsome Janet Leigh in The Naked Spur. "Well, that'll pass. Day after tomorrow it'll be just like a story you once heard." That's how hearts harden in the West: by pretending the evil one committed was part of some epic saga.

The whore — Ruth Roman, say, in The Far Country — was a woman who strutted her sexuality (read: independence) rather than hiding it, and who talked to a man like a man. After saving Stewart from men who would arrest or kill him," Roman coos, "Say thanks." Stewart drawls, "That's a term I seldom use." They could have a kinship of self-reliance; they could have similar histories. (Roman: "I trusted a man once." Stewart: "Funny coincidence. I trusted a woman.") But a woman could not dominate a western; she could only inhabit it. The major rivalries, and partnerships, were all-male.

MEN (AND A WOMAN) IN PAIN

And the ordeals they had to endure could be intense. Critic David Boxwell nicely analyzes "the peculiarly intimate agony" in Mann's films. "The hero's suffering is viscerally shared by the viewer of Mann's best films. For example, we are invited to share the unendurable pain of Stewart being shot in the hand at close range, filmed in close-up, in The Man from Laramie.... Certainly, Mann's Westerns and film noirs portrayed some of the most consistently shocking representations of pain and violence in American film before Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese."

Pain is the human condition in Men in War, which ranks with Black Hawk Down among the movies' most remorseless depictions of combat. The Mann film never leaves the platoon — which is stranded far from other U.S. troops in a no-exit purgatory that is often Hell — and thus allows the audience not even a momentary release from the perilous tension. Haggard and haunted, propelled only by fear, the soldiers might be corpses who don't know they're dead; and these warriors can expect no resurrection. Lt. Benson's aim is to get back to headquarters, yet as platoon members are picked off by the enemy and resolve sours to despair, he acknowledges the futility of the mission. As he tells one of his men: "The battalion doesn't exist. The regiment doesn't exist. Command Headquarters doesn't exist. The U.S.A. doesn't exist. They don't exist, Riordon. We'll never see them again."

The movie, written by Yordan and the blacklisted Ben Maddow, is essentially a debate between two views of battlefield ethics. Benson, who's seen too much to be an idealist, still believes the a soldier should distinguish between the enemy and the civilian population. Montana, as if anticipating the conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, takes a darker, more practical view: expect the worst in man and you won't be disappointed. "I'm not in your war," he tells Benson, "and you're not in mine." In a great moment, the men capture a Korean soldier and Benson orders Montana to "Give him a cigarette. Light it." Montana demands, "What are you tryin' to prove?" and Benson replies, "That you're human."

Humanity is the first and lasting casualty in any war, where the purpose is to kill as many of the enemy as stand between you and your objective. (It turns out that, in Men in War, the objective was an illusion: when the remnants of the platoon reaches its base, it finds that the Koreans have taken it.) Montana has one spark of humanity: he cares deeply for his wounded colonel (Robert Keith), struck mute by shell shock. But that doesn't soften his resolve against any foreigner who might be the enemy. In this unforgiving context, it's clear that he has genius for combat; even Benson recognizes it. But when he tells Montana, "It takes your kind to win this war," he spits it out as a bitter maxim. The suggestion here, as in Mann's Westerns, is that the men who are most suited to fight for their country are not fit to live in it.

Most of the men in the instructively deranged Man of the West are not fit to live, period. They are a gang of outlaws led by Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), a ranting, randy patriarch — a western King Leer. Link Jones (Gary Cooper) was once a part of this gang, and Dock treated him like a son (though Cobb was 10 years younger than Cooper). In fact, this was Mann's patriarch period: four consecutive movies, in 1957-58, with a father-son relationship at their core. In three of them — Men in War, Man of the West and God's Little Acre — the father figure is, respectively, shell-shocked, homicidal and genially obsessive. (Only in The Tin Star is the older Henry Fonda unconditionally, paternalistically helpful to the callow sheriff played by Anthony Perkins.)

Like many a Mann hero with a deadly past, the Cooper character has managed to reform himself without getting strung up first. But now, through a series of credence-straining coincidences, Link has landed back with Dock's gang, and in the company of a saloon singer named Billie (sultry Julie London). Billie, whose affection for Link must remain unfulfilled because he has a wife back home, wonders how a man so righteous could have run with a gang so rancid: "You're not like them." "I was," Link replies. "There wasn't any difference at all." Explaining his youth with Dock, Link says, "He taught me killing and stealing. I didn't know any better. Then one day I grew up. There's a point where you either grow up and become a man, or ya rot like that bunch."

Just how rotten they are becomes clear when a gang member, Coaley (Jack Lord, another Mann villain with a Pepsodent smile), waves a knife in Billie's face and forces her to strip in front of the entire gang — and Link. This long scene is a battle between the lurid prurience of the men in the shack (and maybe in the audience) and the proprieties of the Production Code. The undressing stops at her petticoat. Still, it packs a slow, sadistic jolt. At the time, it affronted not just the softer sensibilities of the audience but Hollywood's movie mores. From films of the '50s I can't think of a scene like it.

The plot justification for the stripping comes later, when Cooper and Lord engage in a brawl that lasts a harrowing 4 minutes 25 seconds. It's one of the longest fights ever in American movies, and startling in its vicious, clumsy realism. ("I never saw anything like that in my life," Dock says in stunned admiration, and for once we have to agree with him.) Link eventually strips Coaley, as Coaley had made Billie do. The message: expressions of male sexuality and male violence can be equally pernicious — and, in movies, equally crowd-pleasing.

MANN'S MASTERPIECE

The success of the 1959 Ben Hur — it won a then-record 11 Oscars (later tied by Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) and was the decade's highest-grossing picture — triggered a slew of outsize period films. Screenwriters ransacked the history books to find tales of great battles, and warriors with a charisma to match their military prowess. Curiously, the two finest epics of the period (in my opinion) were about chapters of history few Americans knew of, involving confrontations between the Christian and Muslim worlds. One was, set in a middle-Eastern outpost of World War I, was David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, in 1962. The other, released a year earlier, was Mann's El Cid.

Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (Charlton Heston) is an 11th-century Spanish soldier who tempered force with wisdom, seeking a peace with the large local Islamic minority it is his job to subdue, and preaching moderation in the Court of King Ferdinand. This combination of battlefield bravery and diplomatic restraint causes the royals to misunderstand Rodrigo and the Moors to suspect him, but his valor and sanctity eventually earn the awe of everyone but the North African warlord Yussuf (Herbert Lom), whose tirade I quoted at the beginning of this article, and whose army rides against Spain at the film's climax.

The script, by Yordan, Ben Barzman and Frederic M. Frank, is constructed as a series of confrontations that become conversions, as each of Rodrigo's antagonists turns to an adherent. His rival Ordonez (Raf Vallone) tries to kill him, fails, is forgiven and comes to believe he is a god. His wife, Jimena (Sophia Loren), tries to kill him, is forgiven and slowly falls in adoring love with him. Ferdinand's successor, the young Alfonso (John Fraser), banishes Rodrigo, is still championed by him, recognizes his power and finally marches by Cid's side.

The religious metaphor couldn't be clearer: the movie's Cid is a man-god, Jesus with a sword, a truly holy warrior; and his is the one justifiable Crusade. At the beginning of the film, Rodrigo saves a large cross, sacred to the people of the village he has defended, and, Christlike, carries it on his shoulder. In the middle, preparing for a solo battle with 13 men, Rodrigo proclaims, "What you do is against God's law. Were you 13 times 13, I would not be alone." At the end, he is mortally wounded, perhaps dead, yet on horseback he leads his army to victory against Islam's petrified foe — another death and resurrection for a Mann hero.

Rodrigo's battle cry is unequivocally religious, royalist and nationalist: "For God, the King and Spain!" But you'd be wrong to see El Cid as the victory of good Christians over bad Muslims. The issues are much more tangled. Rodrigo realizes that from the start, when he is, as he says, "Betrayed by a Christian. Saved by a Moor." His very epithet is Arabic, bestowed on him by a Muslim chief who tells him, "We have a word for a warrior with the vision to be just and the courage to be merciful... El Cid." And while he befriends (and thus pacifies) many on the Moorish side, he has a hard time convincing the Court that not all non-Christians are devils.

Standing stalwartly for his ideals, yet honoring his fealty to the Crown, Rodrigo is a burly humanist in a world torn by fundamentalist certainties. As the armies march into their final battle, each is convinced it has God on its side. And the price for believing in the wrong god is fatal. In a testy tete-a-tete with Ordonez, Yussuf asks, "You dare to think of [Rodrigo] as we do of our Prophet?" Ordonez replies, "We do," and Yussuf thunders, "Then this will be more than a battle. It will be our god against yours." With that invocation of his deity, Yussuf stabs Ordonez to death.

Watching El Cid today (which I urge you to do), you will of course notice the modern political reverberations. The movie seems to predict the religious wars of the late 20th century, not just in the Middle East but in Africa, the Indian subcontinent and (in a slightly less belligerent way) the United States. You will also detect motifs reused in more recent epics: the plot device that a war's outcome will be decided by the best fighter on each side (Troy), the notion of Christian and Muslim chiefs as friends (Kingdom of Heaven).

But the film gives off more than eerie presentiments. Like the best action films, El Cid is both turbulent and intelligent, with characters who analyze their passions as they eloquently articulate them. The Court scenes, in particular, have the complex intrigue, if not quite the poetry, of a Shakespearean history play. This richness is especially evident in the film's love story. Challenged to a death duel by Jimena's father, Rodrigo kills the man, thus cuing her to choose between love and blood. She is cold to his protest that "The man you chose to love could do only what he did," yet still he presses his suit...

Rodrigo: I told my love it had no right to live. But it wouldn't die.

Jimena [fiercely]: Kill it.
Rodrigo: You kill it! Tell me you don't love me.

Jimena: I cannot. Not yet. But I will make myself worthy of you, Rodrigo. I will learn to hate you.

Mann splendidly manages the mix of spectacle and pensiveness, action and dialogue. He alternates epic long shots with luscious closeups, gorgeous faces filling the screen. A simple definition of a Hollywood movie is: beautiful people enduring ugly problems. And in El Cid, everybody looks great. Heston, the hero from Central Casting, with a powerful voice to match his visage; Loren, stately and voluptuous, with a regal command of the English dialogue; Fraser, blond and pretty and spoiled, the Jude Law of his day; Vallone with a face hewn from Carrera marble. Actors at the peak of their screen beauty, lending meaning and glory to their complex characters.

AFTER CID, CAESAR

El Cid, which cost just over $6 million to make, took in a heroic $26,620,000 at the box office, encouraging Madrid-based producer Samuel Bronston to bankroll more epics. Nicholas Ray directed King of Kings and 55 Days at Peking (about the Boxer Rebellion), and Mann signed on for The Fall of the Roman Empire, released in 1964. By then, costs were mounting, revenues plummeting. Heston's rejection of the lead male role deprived the movie of star quality, and the mass audience a topic with defeat etched in its title. Empire, with a $19 million budget, earned less than $5 million. The Roman Empire took some three centuries to fall; Bronston's crumbled in four years.

Empire is no El Cid. It relies on stentorian speeches more than the intimate, charged conversations that brought El Cid alive, and its actors often seem posed, like Coliseum statuary. Like Ben-Hur, it has a chariot race (staged, as the original was, by Yakima Canutt), which is thrilling, all right, but irrelevant to the story. Heston’s no-thanks was a big loss to the production; his replacement, Stephen Boyd (Heston’s antagonist in Ben-Hur), can't do a lot with the role of Livius, the warrior who should have been Emperor. But there's an unsolvable dilemma in an epic hero who is doomed to lose control of his dream, rather than being able to seize it. In that sense, he's one of Mann’s film-noir protagonists, only in battle garb.

Still, the movie, written by Yordan, Barzman and Basilio Franchina, is a magnificent ruin, and yet another investigation of that favorite Mann strategy: the debate between urgent humanism and mad militarism. In Men in War the two sides played to an exhausted truce. In El Cid might and right triumphed together. In Empire, the tempered voice belongs to the aging Caesar, Marcus Aurelius (Alec Guinness). "Rome has existed for a thousand years," he tells an aide. "It is time we found peaceful ways to live with those you call barbarians." But Marcus Aurelius is succeeded by the daft, sadistic Commodus, who translates his brutal decadence into imperial policy. In doing so, he stokes more virulent rebellion in the provinces and ignites a Roman holocaust — a flame that will hasten the Dark Ages.

Empire also pursues the Cid argument on the use of religion to advance military goals. Each side, again, thinks it has God (Wotan) or the gods on its side. Forcing Timonides to have fire pressed against his arm, a barbarian chief says, "If your gods are stronger than our gods, they will protect you." Commodus is even more inspired, more deranged: "The gods are with me. They will always be with me. Go to the East and crush this rebellion!" (In fact, the historical Commodus has a religiously liberal slant: he was the first Emperor to recognize the burgeoning Christian sect. But that doesn't fit the screenwriters’ thesis, so they ignore it.)

From these elevated, provocative sentiments — and from the falling revenue of his last epic — Mann retreated into more modest terrain. The Heroes of Telemark was a Kirk Douglas-starring, Norwegian-set war movie (on skis!), with little of the power or ambiguity of Men In War or the epic films. He followed this with the spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic but never completed it. His last decade had included several aborted projects: he had walked off Cimarron, been fired (by Douglas) from Spartacus. The reason he didn't complete A Dandy in Aspic was sadder. He died while making it.

Mann was just 60 then, and barely known outside Hollywood. No Oscar nominations, little critical attention in the his homeland (though Jean-Luc Godard and the Cahiers du Cinema crowd were his champions across the water). Even today, if you type "Anthony Mann" into the Internet Movie Database search engine, the first name that comes up is Baz Luhrmann's. That’s a pity, for a body of work — in film noir, the western and the epic — that transcends almost anyone else's contribution to those genres.

But don't take my word for it. Go to your video store, walk up to the clerk and say, with the noble defiance of a Jimmy Stewart or Charlton Heston, "Mann — Anthony."

• RICHARD CORLISS
• Anthony Mann's films from the '50s and '60s speak with an eerie prescience to the fears of today