Word: manne
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...Anthony Mann would have turned 100 last month, if he hadn't died 39 years ago last April. A centenary is reason enough to celebrate the work of an artist-artisan who lays fair claim to being Hollywood's finest unsung director...
...anyway, undersung. Turner Classic Movies did run a four-day tribute to Mann last month, and that was nice, even if TCM didn't include his late masterpiece, the epic El Cid. I also hear that Jeanine Basinger's excellent 1978 study of the director may be issued by Wesleyan University Press, though at the moment the book can be found only in a bilingual edition published two years ago by the San Sebastian Film Festival, and then only if you ask the author to send you a copy. (Thank you, Jeanine...
...students of old high Hollywood to name a mid-century director named Mann and they might say Delbert, whose credits include the Academy Award-winning Marty, or Daniel, who won the International Prize at Cannes for Come Back, Little Sheba. Well, Anthony Mann had it all over "dreary Daniel and Delbert," as film critic Andrew Sarris pegged them, yet during his life he got nothing like their peer recognition, receiving not so much as an Oscar nomination for his directorial work. A more appropriate Mann would be Michael, whose big-screen version of his Miami Vice TV series opens this...
There's nothing mysterious about Harris, playing Foxx's cop lover. She's brave and tough minded, and her fate is what finally energizes the movie's concluding chapter. Mann is good at action, especially when it comes to surprises--the sudden blossoming of blood behind a gunned-down bad guy, the mighty explosion that we aren't expecting...
...probably fair to say that Mann's detailing of the final sequences is, in its way, of a piece with the careful way he introduces his many characters and lays out his plotlines in the movie's static beginning. There's obviously a compulsive component to his nature. But he more than rewards our patience when he finally flings himself into action. There is a very firm sense of screen geography when the guns start flashing, no careless frenzy in his staging, only a sort of deadly logic. It's a quality that's always in short supply when crime...