Word: manns
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...Anthony Mann's feature-film career falls into three main phases: noirish melodramas in the '40s, westerns in the '50s, epics in the '60s. Nothing unusual here, since these were the dominant genres of their decades, and nearly every director of middling or higher status was obliged to try his hand at them. But Mann did more than crank out the sausage on order. He turned it into sirloin...
...Reign of Terror and He Walked by Night may not be the most satisfying of film noir tales, but they are surely the noiriest in their artful oppressiveness, their connoisseurship of violence, their sense of the world as a rat trap with rancid cheese as the bait. The westerns Mann made with James Stewart - Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country - constitute the strongest body of work, for that time, in that uniquely American form. El Cid is, to my mind, among the very finest of epic films, second only, perhaps, to Lawrence of Arabia...
...most of his time in Hollywood, Mann was a director for hire - that is, he was contracted to make movies he usually didn't write or produce. That helps explain why he was ignored by critics who can parse a movie's plot and sniff out its moral lesson but can't appreciate or write about what's actually on the screen. Mann put it up there handsomely, tellingly, and the great strength of Basinger's book (really, someone has to get it published here) is its ability to translate his pictures into her words. Mann received little of that...
...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...