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...Alton-Mann films - T-Men, He Walked by Night, Reign of Terror, Border Incident and Devil's Doorway - are unlike any other noirs in their visual density and tonal texture. Like many movies in the genre, these are indebted to the look that Orson Welles and Gregg Toland created for Citizen Kane: chiaroscuro lighting, characters in extreme closeup or long shot, and plenty of low-angle shots. Alton pushed these tenets further than most. He shot even the sitting figures from below, with the tops of rooms pressing down on them; he loved ceiling shots more than Japanese tourists...
...question that for Mann, and the genre, the docudrama approach was mostly an excuse to show lowlifes in low lighting. And if Higgins supplied the craft of Mann's noir films, cinematographer John Alton surely served up the art. Before hooking up with Mann, Alton had a nomad's r?sum?: born in Hungary, an assistant in Hollywood silent films, shooting pictures in Argentina in the '30s, then B and C movies back in America. The two men clicked as collaborators, sparking with extreme visual tropes, each instantly elevating the other's work. "I found a director in Tony Mann...
...Alton's masterpiece with Mann was not, strictly speaking, a noir. It was a historical epic called The Black Book also known as The Reign of Terror, and it concerned the head-chopping horrors of the French Revolution, with Basehart as a rabid Robespierre and Robert Cummings as yet another Mann hero serving in the noble role of secret agent. (Instead of counterfeit plates, Cummings is looking for a Robespierre diary with an enemies list inside.) Yet, from force of habit, or in anticipatory tribute to the French critics who would later give a name to the genre, Alton concocted...
...Mann and Alton would soon cease their partnership. And the director would move on to the wide open spaces of the western and the epic. But his characters would remain as gnarled, and noirish, as ever...
...COMING SOON TO TIME.COM: PART II - MANN OF THE WEST...