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...Anthony Mann had it all over "dreary Daniel and Delbert," as film critic Andrew Sarris pegged them, yet during his life he got nothing like their peer recognition, receiving not so much as an Oscar nomination for his directorial work. A more appropriate Mann would be Michael, whose big-screen version of his Miami Vice TV series opens this weekend. The haunted tough guys of Thief and Heat occupy a Southern California nightscape within hailing distance of the one that Anthony Mann's antiheroes crawled through in the '40s. Yet film noir was just one of the genres...
...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 scrupulous and passionate attention in his lifetime. Toiling in noir and westerns...
...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...
...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 let this budding femme fatale languish at the edge of the frame, while the not-so-hot Hughes and Frances Langford took center-screen...
...noticed it at the time, but in 1947 Mann vaulted from nowhere to the top rank of directors. His filmography seems to explode, with movies as lurid and paranoid as their names. Desperate. Raw Deal. Railroaded! Great pulp titles, suitable for a trashy paperback, though they were all original screen stories. (The studios Mann worked for couldn't afford to option novels or plays; their writers had to make it up as they went along...