Anthony Mann's career trajectory formed a steady upward arc, with a precipitous
descent only in the last few years of his life. From California, Mann's
parents relocated to New York during the First World War and, after the
death of his father in 1923, Mann began an acting career centered on the
Triangle Theater in Greenwich Village. He appeared in such plays as The
Dybbuk and The Little Clay Cart in the 1925-6 season. But he
also began to get involved behind the scenes as a production manager, eventually
ending up at the famous Theater Guild. He moved into directing and enjoyed
enough success as the director of such productions as Thunder on the
Left (1933) and So Proudly We Hail (1936) to attract the attention
of David O. Selznick, who hired Mann as a casting director and talent scout.
In this capacity he directed screen tests for such projects as Gone with
the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) and Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock,
1940).
In 1939, Mann left Selznick and landed at Paramount, where he managed to
secure his first directing credit within 3 years. Prior to Dr. Broadway
(1942), Mann had worked as an assistant director to such Paramount contract
directors as Preston Sturges (Mann is known to have worked on Sullivan's
Travels [1941], for example). But his stint at Paramount was short-lived,
for Mann went on to spend his apprentice years as a B-picture director at
Universal, Republic, and RKO. These tyro films usually were lightweight
musicals or comedies, but the standout pictures, Strangers in the Night
(1944), The Great Flamarion (1945), and Strange Impersonation
(1946), were disturbing revenge melodramas that reveal the nascent Mann's
stylistic and thematic preoccupations: characters trapped in a hostile world
with no escape but in violence or obsessive madness. 1947 was Mann's first
banner year: Desperate and Railroaded together signaled Mann
as a film noir director of note and so for the next three years, Mann directed
crime melodramas for the low budget studio Eagle-Lion and its enterprising
producers, Bryan Foy, Edward Small and Walter Wanger. Mann's most noteworthy
collaborator on the Eagle-Lion films was Hungarian-born cinematographer
John Alton. T-Men (1947) and Raw Deal (1948) look,
in retrospect, like textbook noir. These memorably stylized films attracted
the attention of Dore Schary at M-G-M, who brought them to the flagship
studio to replicate their success in a higher-budget arena. Border Incident
(1949) and Devil's Doorway (1950) were the two final Alton-Mann collaborations
before each went their separate ways at the studio. These two films were
also significant in marking Mann's transition to location-shot Westerns.
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Winchester
'73
|
In 1950, Mann was to make Westerns—Winchester '73 and The
Furies—at two different studios (Universal and Paramount) before
settling down to work for half a decade with another notable collaborator,
actor James Stewart. Together they made seven more films, most of them popular
successes, and most of them Westerns (a noteworthy exception was a biopic
of big-band leader Glenn Miller). These films were significant for making
the Western a more psychological and overtly violent genre, and Mann brought
a noir sensibility to the Western unlike any other director. After an intermittent
period making an assortment of films, which varied wildly in quality (sublime:
Man of the West [1958]; execrable: Serenade [1956]), without
Stewart from 1956 to 1960, Mann became a pre-eminent director of the epic
film, Hollywood's answer to the alarming decline in movie audiences seduced
by the small screen at home. As early as 1951, Mann was tapped to do big
set-pieces and his uncredited work on M-G-M's Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy,
1951) was a harbinger of the final decade of his career. After a bumpy start
(removed early from Spartacus [Stanley Kubrick, 1960], after “creative
differences” with star-producer Kirk Douglas, and withdrawn from Cimarron
[1960] toward the end of the shoot), Mann's apotheosis as an epic filmmaker
was achieved on producer Samuel Bronston's El Cid (1961) and The
Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). The final few years of Mann's career,
however, resulted in a compromised war film and the posthumous release of
his final film, a turgid spy drama, completed by the film's star, Laurence
Harvey.
In essence, Mann personified Hollywood's own history from the 1940s to the
1970s, as it uneasily transitioned from the steady supply of product, before
1948 and the end of monopoly control over distribution, made on studio soundstages,
to bigger-budget location shoots, to grandiose post-studio multinational
epics that frequently got mired in their own excess. But Mann's critical
reputation since his death has blossomed with the rediscovery (or “invention”)
of film noir and its ripple effects on other genres in the 1940s and '50s,
most significantly, the Western. The French New Wave critics, especially
Jean-Luc Godard, greeted Mann's work rapturously at a time when Mann had
little critical reputation beyond one as a routine “tough guy”
director. Mann's consistently dark vision has only grown in stature as his
most characteristic works strike a chord in an era when optimism seems less
sustainable than pessimism. Mann's camera eye conjured some of the most
astonishingly original imagery in American film. And the best Mann films
contain an abundance of thematic material appealing to critics interested
in race, class, and gender politics. Moreover, Mann's films probe the human
psyche's obsessions and latent desires in startlingly adventurous, and even
disturbing, ways. It is not for nothing that Martin Scorsese has singled
out Mann as a primary influence on his own cinematic worldview and stylistics.
Pain
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Raw
Deal
|
If there is one consistent image in Mann's work it is the close-up of a
man registering pain, more often than not caused by another man in a fight.
These shots usually consist of the hero enduring his antagonist's fingers
pushed into his face or his enemy's hands locked around his throat or the
flat of a hand shoved against his chin in an effort to break his neck. This
image, then, is the condensed site of Mann's world of violence for, as Robin
Wood has pointed out, violence matters in Mann's films (in contrast
to the comparatively underinflected violence of John Ford's Westerns). Robert
Ryan's fingers pushed into Jimmy Stewart's face as they hang from a precipice
over a rushing river (The Naked Spur [1953]); Jack Lord's fingers
pushed into Gary Cooper's face in front of a Conestoga wagon (Man of
the West); John Ireland's fingers pushed into Dennis O'Keefe's face
in Raw Deal: these are the moments of excruciating pain captured
in close-up that recur in most of Mann's fight scenes. But the protagonist
himself is also distorted by the pain he's inflicting. James Stewart's all-American
looks become twisted in Mann's film in ways that prefigures Hitchcock's
with the actor. The low-angle shot of Stewart shoving his hand into Dan
Duryea's face in Winchester '73 crystallizes Mann's world of violence
in which the good guy and the bad guy are frequently indistinguishable,
because the good guy is just as capable of the uncontrolled infliction of
pain on his antagonist.
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The
Man from Laramie
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The peculiarly intimate agon/y in Mann's Westerns and film noirs evoke a
response in the viewer that Jeanine Basinger has rightly described at the
beginning of her book on Mann. That is to say, the viewer is drawn in as
spectator in extraordinarily identificatory ways. 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 (1955).
And, in Mann's world, even women are not immune from committing acts of
violence against each other. Think, of the fight scene between Sheila Ryan
and Jane Randolph's characters (good girl/bad girl) in Railroaded,
which is composed of medium-close-ups of the women shoving their hands in
each other's faces as if they wanted to wipe away the image of each other
right off the celluloid (memorably, the bad girl is wearing a cheap feathered
kimono that sheds). The grimace of pain—such as that on Richard Basehart's
sweating face in He Walked By Night (1948) as he surgically removes
a bullet from his own shoulder, or that on Judith Anderson's wounded face
in The Furies after her eye has been struck with a pair of scissors,
or that on Brenda Marshall's disfigured face after a chemical explosion
caused by her romantic rival in Strange Impersonation—is the
hallmark image of a body of film that always, ultimately, insists on the
physicality of human experience and the limits of human endurance when the
body is under duress. 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.
Patriarchy
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God's
Little Acre
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And if there is one consistent major character archetype in Mann's work
it is the thwarted patriarch: Walt Radak (Raymond Burr) in Desperate;
Lance Pool (Robert Taylor) in Devil's Doorway; T.C. Jeffords (Walter
Huston) in The Furies; Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp) in The Man
from Laramie; Ty-Ty (Robert Ryan) in God's Little Acre (1958);
Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb) in Man of the West. These men have tragic
limitations of almost Greek proportions as they attempt, and often fail,
to exercise control over self, family, and property. The limitations of
their character and their power provide a thoroughgoing analysis of the
limits of patriarchy as a social and economic structure of kinship and commerce.
The Mann patriarch may not die in the end (Jeffords does, but Waggoman lives
on to recognize his self-destructive hubris), but the essence of his character
is that he spawns conflict within his own family and conflict with other
rivals. Those rivals may even be matriarchs (as in The Man from Laramie
or The Furies) who have just as much ambition and will to survive
as do the patriarchs. Most memorable is T.C. Jeffords' slayer, Senora Herrera
(played as a violent, cursing crone by Blanche Yurka), who defiantly defends
her family with a shotgun in a mountain siege that ends only in Jeffords'
dynamiting the matriarchal lair and dispersing them off their land and into
the town where Jeffords meets his retributive end. Moreover, it is his daughter
Vance (played by Barbara Stanwyck) who has undermined his power as capitalist
and landowner, exploiting their quasi-incestuous relationship to her advantage.
Waggoman's tragic status is denoted by his blindness and there are few more
poignantly futile duels in the Western than in his failed attempt to get
the hero (played by Stewart) in his sights. Waggoman's blindness is a marker
of his impotence since the only fruit of his loins is a brattish psychopath
who would destroy his father's legacy, while his surrogate son is an opportunistic
gun-runner indirectly responsible for the death of the hero's brother. Walt
Radak's obsession with avenging his younger brother's death is another example
of Mann's idea that family loyalty, when allowed to be twisted within a
criminal underworld milieu, sets in motion a chain of events that ensnare
the hero (Steve, played by film noir stalwart Steve Brodie) not in any cosmic
terms, but in terms that are all too human. Even in Mann's most overtly
Rabelaisian and comedic work, God's Little Acre, Ty-Ty's success
at reclaiming his land from his own destructive search for an illusory cache
of gold is undercut in the last moments of the film. The discovery of the
rusted shovel is presented comically as an invitation to Ty-Ty to have one
more go at fulfilling his ludicrous quest. In film after film, then, Mann's
flawed patriarchs underscore the limits of patriarchal power, as other characters
in conflict with them (especially their children) resist and even undermine
that power.
Paranoia
Even the most sympathetic Mann characters, male and female, are trapped
in their own persecution complexes. Their psychic traumas are augmented
by external forces in the films conspiring them to drive them to the brink,
and even over the edge, of dramatic precipices into violence and self-destruction.
While these hostile forces may be actual, they are also correlative of a
character's sick predisposition to mistrust others. Consider Nora Goodrich
(Brenda Marshall) in Strange Impersonation, whose persistent belief
that she will lose her fiancé to her lab assistant, Arline Cole (Hilary
Brooke), causes one of the most fevered nightmares in B-picture history,
as she dreams of destroying not just one, but two female persecutors. The
vicious shakedown artist Jane Karaski (Ruth Ford) provides for displacement
and doubling in Nora's active sexual paranoia and desire for vengeance.
For Nora, all women become potential threats to her sense of sexual attractiveness
to men, which she represses in her severe self-presentation as a research
scientist. On the male side of the equation, Buck Walden's obsessive jealousy
of Griselda's sultry appeal to other men, including his brother-in-law,
sets in motion a violent series of events in God's Little Acre. Beyond
the realm of sexual frustration, and inhabiting the world of political paranoia,
Reign of Terror, perhaps the visually darkest of all the Mann-Alton
collaborations, relocates the anxieties of the early Cold War years, and
the blacklists of the McCarthy era, to a French Revolution in which all
are suspect and all are vulnerable to the guillotine after being “listed”
in Robespierre's Black Book. If the essence of classic film noir is paranoia,
Mann's works overtly enact characters' fear of others—Mann's world
is a world in which no one is trustworthy and everyone is suspicious and
harmful. T-Men, for example, is a startling analysis of how American
“law and order” enshrines paranoia as a necessary modus operandi
in the pursuit of criminals, and The Naked Spur's troubled hero,
played by James Stewart, is a bounty hunter who almost pathologically suspects
everyone else of encroaching on his mission.
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Desperate
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Every chance encounter that seems, on the surface, to be benign, is an occasion
for betrayal. In Desperate, Steve and Anne Randall, on the lam from
both the police and Radak's criminal associates, are betrayed by such figures
on the landscape as the used car salesman and the sheriff who picks them
up hitch-hiking. Only the pastoral provides any promise of safety in Desperate,
and even that is easily invaded by Radak's gang who bully their way into
the farmhouse kitchen. In T-Men, the scene at the Los Angeles Farmer's
Market in which Gennaro is recognized by his wife's friend, leads to his
doom at the hands of the Shanghai Gang of counterfeiters, so that his elaborate
effort to infiltrate the gang as an undercover operator for the Treasury
Department ends in a plan gone awry and places his cohort, O'Brien, in immediate
danger as well. Link Jones (Gary Cooper) in Man of the West has a
past history, of criminal violence and thievery as a former member of Dock
Tobin's outlaws, which the character's efforts to conceal, at the beginning
of the film, is constantly threatened by the forces of law and order in
Crosscut. Link attempts to evade the probing gazes and questions of the
town's sheriff and others, and his physical entrapment in the railway carriage
seats is just one indication that his effort at becoming a law-abiding member
of a civilized society is challenged at this stage of the narrative, before
he has been forced to destroy his former gang for good. Mann's films deliberately
set out to confine characters in threateningly enclosed spaces (prison cells,
cheap hotel rooms, frontier cabins and saloons, train compartments, steam
rooms, caves, cars and the backs of lorries) and let them stew in their
juices, under pressure from their own fears and consciences, and in full
view of the critical spectator, the surrogate for an intrusive, surveillant,
and punitive outside world, which offers little escape or little protection.
Pictures
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Claire
Trevor in
Raw
Deal
|
Mann's stylistics are superb at emphasizing these themes. The kind of immediate
visceral response to Mann's films Basinger describes is most obviously produced
by Mann projecting things and characters directly into the camera lens.
A few examples: a flaming pan of Crepes Suzette in Raw Deal; a falling
body in Border Incident; a broken bottle in Desperate; a double-barrel
shotgun in Winchester '73. The threat to the viewer is seemingly
unmediated, and the viewer fully inhabits this assaultive world as much
as the characters. To produce a sense of extreme unease in the viewer, Mann
masterfully introduced into his shots extreme visual tension, often structuring
them on diagonal patterns and making deliberate use of clearly delineated
foreground, mid-ground, and background shot with wide-angle lenses and deep
focused perspective. Inanimate objects placed in the foreground dominate
the frame, suggesting the threatening power of the material or natural world.
Figures in the frame are hemmed in by their surroundings, if they are confined
within interiors, or are diminished as if they were figures on the theatrical
stage, hieratically set against landscape and sky on Western locations.
If his narratives are often impelled by allusions to Classical literature,
Mann's visuals, by contrast, call attention to themselves in ways that might
be called Baroque (rather than the “classicism” of Hawks or Ford).
The stylized compositions and lighting of the noir period are felt in the
entirety of Mann's oeuvre. Even the opening scene of the innocuous Technicolor
biopic The Glenn Miller Story (1954) reveals traces of Mann's characteristic
composition: pawn shop of the left of the frame in foreground, background
cut partially in half at a 45-degree angle by the Angel's Flight tramway.
These traces of noir iconography and visualization are certainly abundant
in the transitional Westerns of the 1949-50 period. There's the great sequence,
for example, in the saloon in Devil's Doorway in which returning
Civil War hero Lance Pool is humiliated by the sinister Verne Coolan (Louis
Calhern). Pool's placement in the highly shadowed frame, shot by Alton from
a low angle so that the ceiling dominates and diminishes the hero, reveals
that his status is being undermined by the ruthless forces of white imperialism
in the push westwards and the consequent dispossession of the Native American.
Mann stages Herrera's lynching in The Furies as if it were a theatrical
tableau, the characters statically occupying set positions on a horizontal
plane, with Herrera in close-up profile in the foreground, monumental saguaro
cactuses and darkening sky intrusively entering the edges of the frame.
Border Incident, perhaps the greatest Mann-Alton collaboration in
terms of its visual style, stunningly integrates chiaroscuro lighting, detailed
focus in depth, extreme camera angles, disorienting patterning within the
frame, and discontinuous editing to powerfully evoke a world of hostile
and exploitative relationships. This very world is denied by the stridently
didactic voiceover and flagwaving images inherent in the pseudo-documentary
genre of the 1940s (T-Men, He Walked By Night among others),
which Mann consistently subverted and challenged with his disquieting, but
compelling, pictures.
© David Boxwell, January 2003.
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Anthony
Mann
|
Filmography
Dr.
Broadway
(1942)
Moonlight in Havana (1942)
Nobody's Darling (1943)
My Best Gal (1944)
Strangers in the Night (1944)
The Great Flamarion (1945)
Two O'Clock Courage (1945)
Sing Your Way Home (194)
Strange Impersonation (1946)
The Bamboo Blonde (1946)
Desperate (1947) also co-story
Railroaded (1947)
T-Men (1947)
Raw Deal (1948)
He Walked By Night (1948) uncred co-dir with Alfred Werker
Follow Me Quietly (1949) co-story & uncred co-dir with Richard
Fleischer
Reign of Terror (1949) also known as The Black Book
(UK)
Border Incident (1949)
The Devil's Doorway (1950)
Side Street (1950)
Winchester '73 (1950)
The Furies (1950)
The Tall Target (1951)
Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951) uncr dir “Fire of Rome”
sequence
Bend of the River (1952) also known as Where the River
Bends (UK)
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El
Cid
|
The
Naked Spur (1953)
Thunder Bay (1953)
The Glenn Miller Story (1954)
The Far Country (1955)
Strategic Air Command (1955)
The Man from Laramie (1955)
The Last Frontier (1955)
Serenade (1956)
Men In War (1957)
The Tin Star (1957)
God's Little Acre (1958)
Man of the West (1958)
Cimarron (1960)
Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960) uncred (Mann directed all
the scenes set in the gladiator school)
El Cid (1961)
The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
The Heroes of Telemark (1965)
A Dandy in Aspic (1968) dir completed by Laurence Harvey [uncred]
Select
Bibliography
Jeanine
Basinger, Anthony Mann, Boston, Twayne, 1979
Elizabeth Cowie, “Film Noir and Women” in Joan Copjec (ed.),
Shades of Noir, London, Verso, 1993, pp. 121-65
Andrew Dickos, Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American
Film Noir, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2002, pp. 206-13
Stephen Handzo, “Through the Devil's Doorway: the Early Westerns
of Anthony Mann”, Bright Lights, Vol 1, No 4, Summer 1976,
pp. 4-15
Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah:
Studies of Authorship Within the Western, Bloomington, University
of Indiana Press, 1970, pp. 7-87
Don Miller, “Eagle-Lion: the Violent Years”, Focus on Film,
No 31, November 1978, pp. 27-39
Douglas Pye, “The Collapse of Fantasy: Masculinity in the Westerns
of Anthony Mann” in Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (eds.), The Big
Book of Westerns, New York, Continuum, 1996, pp. 167-173
Robert Smith, “Mann in the Dark,” Bright Lights, Vol
2, No 1, Fall 1976, pp. 8-15; and in Alain Silver and James Ursini (eds.),
The Film Noir Reader, New York, Limelight Editions, 1996, pp. 189-201
Andrew Spicer, Film Noir, London, Longman, 2002, pp. 105-12
Susan White, “t(he)-men's room” in Peter Lehman (ed.), Masculinity:
Bodies, Movies, Culture, New York & London, Routledge, 2001,
pp. 95-114
Christopher Wicking and Barrie Patterson, “[Last] Interview with
Anthony Mann”, Screen, Vol 10, No 4, July-October 1969, pp.
32-54
Paul Willeman, “Anthony Mann: Looking at the Male”, Framework,
No 15-17, Summer 1981, pp. 16-20
Robin Wood, “Man(n) of the West(ern)”, CineAction, No
46, June 1998, pp. 26-33
Articles
in Senses of Cinema
The
Far Country by
Karli Lukas
Web
Resources Compiled
by Albert Fung
Film
Directors – Articles on the Internet
A number
of online articles can be found here.
The Films
of Anthony Mann
Here's a piece on several Mann films discussing his aesthetics and
visual style.
Images
– Anthony Mann/John Alton Film Noirs
Kino release of T-Men, Raw Deal, and He Walked by
Night on video. Includes short exposition of these films.
Mann
Movies
Synopses of several Mann films.
Turner
Classic Movies
A piece about The Naked Spur.
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