Word: mann
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...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...
...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...
...dogged work of government sleuths to catch him. Audiences were assured that not only could this felony happen, it did happen, for it was "based on case histories in the files of" some federal agency. But that was just half of it. The veneer of authenticity allowed Higgins and Mann to display more rotten behavior, more thugs lashing out in violence, than would be permitted in a story with no law-enforcement pedigree. After 70 mins. of betrayal, despair and sadism, the narrator would return to insist that crime does not pay. Except at the box office...