Word: mann
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...Mann villain didn't need glassware to express his animosity, not when crockery was available. In a famous scene in Railroaded!, Burr is in a nightclub when he gets some bad news; just then, a woman happens to graze him and spill her drink. A low-angle shot shows Burr smoldering for a moment; impulsively, he picks up a flamb? dish and throws it at her. She screams in shock and agony. As a sudden spasm of scalding viciousness, this scene is up there with the hot-coffee clash in The Big Heat...
...dispatched to infiltrate a mob of counterfeiters in L.A. Pretending to be gangsters from Detroit, they start proving their bona fides and, claiming they have great plates to make new bills from, haggle over the price - capitalism at its lowest and the state at its bravest, head to head. Mann choreographs this Apache dance with brisk efficiency. Even the violence is subtle. The key figure is The Schemer (Wallace Ford), who is locked in a steam bath and scalded to death. He goes down with a kind of pathetic majesty, like a corrupt Roman Senator who got in Caligula...
...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...
...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...