Word: basehart
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...Doyle) as the piqued Lt. Dawson. Really slow weekend? Try Tommy Lee Jones and Faye Dunaway in 1978's "The Eyes of Laura Mars," about the terror stalking of a high-fashion photographer, or scour the classics shelves for the 1948 Dragnet precursor "He Walks By Night," with Richard Basehart as the debonair slasher. Beltway addicts, of course, will want to skip right to "Julius Caesar." Just make sure it's the 1953 version, with Brando as the Emperor Newt...
...early masterpiece and the film that brought him international acclaim, "La Strada" has been out of distribution since 1988. The timeless story of an innocent peasant girl employed and seduced by an itinerant circus strongman. Giulietta Masina is outstanding as Gelsomina the waif, and Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart's performances equal hers as the two men in her life...