Word: manns
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Most of the early Mann films, though, show how dependent he was on Hollywood clich?s. In the 1946 Strange Impersonation, scientists Brenda Marshall and William Gargan (we know they're intellectuals because they both wear nerdy spectacles and have bad posture) are engaged to be married, much to the vexation of lab assistant Hillary Brooke. Through some strenuous plot exertions, Marshall has a fight on her penthouse terrace with another scheming scheming woman, who plunges to her death on the sidewalk below. "Fell right on her face," a bystander observes. "They wouldn't be able to tell...
...Mann's early films also needed performers with snazzier screen presence. These movies had the noir plots and attitude, but neither the actors to give the stories a fatalist heft nor the actresses beautiful and seductive enough to play a plausible femme fatale. In The Great Flamarion - a triangle drama in which a woman misuses the two men who desire her -Dan Duryea says of his wife, "Any guy who wouldn't fall for you is either a sucker or he's dead." Unfortunately, the wife is played by Mary Beth Hughes, who's pretty deficient in the allure category...
...that stars in the making weren't available to Mann. Gorgeous young Jane Greer was an RKO ing?nue when Mann was there, just two years before her breakthrough role in Out of the Past. In fact, she had her first billed role in Mann's Two O'Clock Courage, where, at 20, she is already sultry and spoiled; and she appears again in his The Bamboo Blonde. But Mann apparently didn't see what Greer had: the high forehead, full lips and amoral aura that gave her a drop-dead-with-a-smile-on-your-face sexual charisma. The director...
...directors of the mid-'40s, he would have put his money on Edgar G. Ulmer, who with such no-budget films as Bluebeard and Detour was spinning gold out of Poverty Row dross. But fate had a couple of twists in store. Ulmer never graduated to A-level movies. Mann did - after making some remarkable killer...
...DARK MANN...