Word: noir
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...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...
...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 scrupulous and passionate attention in his lifetime. Toiling in noir and westerns, avoiding the big adaptations of famous novels and plays, Mann was thought of, if at all, as a "mere" director...
...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...
...Mann's first successful noir, Desperate sets the mood for the whole cycle. It's about one of those days when everything goes wrong. Steve (Steve Brodie), a decent Joe who's been married to loving Anne (Audrey Long) for four months, gets a call one evening to make some easy money driving his truck for Walt (Raymond Burr), a guy he used to know. The truck, Steve learns, is to be used for a heist, and when he protests he's forced into it, and spotted by the police. He gets away, but Walt's brother Al is picked...
...noir terms, the problem with Desperate was that it had a hero. Mann's next film, Railroaded!, corrects that lapse into sentimentality. It tells a story similar to Desperate's, but from the bad guy's point of view. Gangsters pull off a heist, it goes wrong, and they blame it on the innocent guy whose truck they used. But the movie quickly shifts its focus from the decent victim, Steve (bland Ed Kelly), to the psycho, Duke Martin (strutting John Ireland), who has a dandy's affectations - he uses perfumed bullets - and promiscuous trigger finger. In the film...