The Best Mann

(6 of 7)

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.