Word: mann
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...