Word: manns
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Francke Professor of German Art and Culture, Emeritus, Henry C. Hatfield '33, who was known for his critical studies of such authors as Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, died Tuesday at Youville Hospital in Cambridge...
Among Hatfield's publications are Thomas Mann A Collection of Critical Essays (1964) and Modern German Literature. The Major Figures in Context...
...this adds good weight and tension to the movie and provides a lot of very good actors with the opportunity to do honest, probing work in a context where, typically, less will do. But Mann's aspirations don't stop there. Having revived the historical saga in The Last of the Mohicans, he obviously wants to do the same thing for what has become a much more familiar (and tiresome) genre, the urban action picture...
...This Mann achieves with truly epic sweep, maniacal conviction and awesome technical proficiency. He announces his intentions in an opening sequence that may be the best armored-car robbery ever placed on film. He proceeds to a crazily orchestrated bank heist that goes awry and finishes in a wild firefight on a crowded downtown street that is a masterpiece of sustained invention. He ends with a chase that takes Pacino and De Niro into wholly original realms of hellishness, the back end of an airport, where their passions are nearly drowned out by the thunderous comings and goings of heedless...
There, in case you've missed it, is Mann's point. Throughout the movie, he has given us a vision of Los Angeles that goes beyond the usual sheen-and-scuzz contrasts it amuses most directors to observe. His L.A. is a void, a blankness, something like an empty movie screen--or an empty modern soul--waiting to be filled up with that most hypnotic of abstractions, violent action. This, he's saying, is what some of us are good at. And, all pieties aside, look how much we like...