Rediscovering an American Original

Even in this auteur-obsessed age, which idolizes directors past all reason, a handful of gifted filmmakers from Hollywood’s past have resisted deification. Names like Frank Borzage, the most fearless of romantics, or Monta Bell, a master of silent sophistication, are rarely on anyone’s lips. But no director’s career presents quite the problems, contradictions or unnerving, disorienting fascination that characterize the work of Anthony Mann.

Mann’s career was certainly a prolific one, 40 features over 25 years. He directed some spectacular films noir, completely changed James Stewart’s image (remaking the western in the process) and captivated French critics like Jean-Luc Godard, who liked to call him “Supermann.” But during Mann’s lifetime, as one British writer tartly put it, American “critical opinion on his work was broadly unanimous: his films were either ignored or dismissed as negligible.” And, notes biographer Jeanine Basinger, his untimely death at age 60 in 1967 meant that “he did not live to participate in the great reevaluation” of Hollywood directors that Andrew Sarris’ 1968 “The American Cinema” began. All that, however, is staring to change.

Kino, one of the most adventurous of video companies, has recently put a quartet of Mann noirs out on tape. And, starting Friday, the equally adventurous American Cinematheque is beginning “How to Be a Mann,” a monthlong tribute to the director that’s being billed as the first major U.S. retrospective of his work.

The series features 24 of Mann’s most noteworthy films, all but two of them (“Railroaded” and “The Far Country”) showing in the 35-millimeter prints that insure appreciation of what a remarkable visual stylist he was. Taken together, these films demonstrate not only why Mann demands to be better known and admired, but why the respect he deserves has been slow in coming.

In some respects Mann, born Emil Anton Bundsmann in San Diego’s Point Loma neighborhood, is an atypical candidate for auteur status. He worked in a wide variety of genres, finishing his career doing top-heavy historical epics like “El Cid” and “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” and he was indebted for his success to such supremely talented co-workers as cinematographer John Alton, screenwriters Borden Chase and Philip Yordan and, of course, Jimmy Stewart, who starred in a remarkable string of seven consecutive Mann pictures.

What has hampered Mann most, however, is a double-edged time warp caused by the unusual nature of his films. The brooding westerns that are the heart of his reputation clashed with the wholesome zeitgeist of the 1950s, unnerving people because their bitterness seemed to come out of nowhere. And while today’s audiences are quite at home with darkness, they tend to be turned off by the recurring schmaltzy and sentimental elements, like Stepin Fetchit’s cliched performance in “Bend of the River,” that earlier viewers accepted.

But Mann’s greatest works rise above these problems, and to see them is to experience a director with a powerful and disturbing world view and the means to get it across. Films like Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” owe as much to Mann as to anyone, and as the Cinematheque’s Dennis Bartok, who programmed the series, points out, American film today looks a lot more like Anthony Mann than John Ford.

If there is an element of poetry in Mann’s lack of recognition it’s that his best films invariably focused on fierce loners bent on revenge--often against the people closest to them--in a world where those who stopped to smell the flowers could count on getting knifed in the back. As Mann himself memorably said, his typical hero was “a man who could kill his own brother.” And sometimes did.

It’s no coincidence that four of the director’s key titles (“T-Men,” “Men in War,” “The Man From Laramie,” “Man of the West”) have men in the title. His films are intensely masculine, focusing on complex man-to-man relationships involving questions of honor and betrayal more than romance.

More than anything, Mann, without many illusions about the nobility of the human spirit, understood the fury of men under pressure. Scenes of dreadful humiliation occur again and again in his films, as do episodes of violence. But, unlike the cartoonish MTV thuggery in vogue today, Mann’s violence was no joking matter: every punch carried a weight that was impossible to avoid.

The key question Mann’s best films asked was what doing the right thing meant in a world so venal no one in it escapes unscathed by corruption. Even Mann’s heroes, the figures of rectitude, were often self-centered, conflicted, suspicious of everyone but most of all frightened of what they knew was inside themselves. If they do the right thing, it’s because they have no choice, because they realize, as Gary Cooper’s Link Jones says with palpable disgust in “Man of the West,” “there’s a point where you grow up and become a human being or you rot with that bunch.”

Mann’s background was in East Coast theater, and he was brought to Hollywood in 1938 by producer David O. Selznick to work as a talent scout and in casting. His chance to direct came in 1942, but it wasn’t until his 13th picture, 1947’s “T-Men,” that Mann got what he called “my first real break towards being able to make films the way I wanted.”

Though the Cinematheque is showing them on different nights, “T-Men” is usually linked with Mann’s next film, 1948’s “Raw Deal.” While “T-Men” is a pseudo-documentary focusing on a composite counterfeiting case cracked by the Treasury Department and “Raw Deal” tells its story of prison breaks and criminal double-crosses courtesy of a distinctive, emotional voice-over read by co-star Claire Trevor, there is much they have in common.

Both films are classic noirs, lean and efficient, rife with moral ambivalence and crackling, tough-talking performances from supporting performers like psychotic crime boss Raymond Burr in “Raw Deal” and leading man Dennis O’Keefe, who stars in both. But truly uniting them is the cinematography of noir’s great master, John Alton.

Though he eventually won an Oscar for his work on, of all things, “An American in Paris,” Alton is best known for his spectacular no-budget noir camera work. Even the most casual shots in these films show Alton’s unsurpassed gift for light and shadow, and his bravura signature scenes like the opening of “T-Men” and a later murder set in a steam bath, are astonishing. The chance to see work this exceptional in 35mm is too rare to pass up.

Mann brought something of this unnerving, claustrophobic tone with him when he started working on westerns. Unlike the region Hollywood usually presented, Mann’s West was a callous, morally unstable world of continual menace, a place dark with pain and chaos that was home to anger, despair and murderous, even hysterical rages.

The last person you’d expect to see at home in this world was James Stewart, but it was Mann’s gift (which Alfred Hitchcock later built on) to see and utilize the potential for almost sadistic rage in an actor whose career at that point, critic Philip Kemp noted, “had been faltering, trapped in a prolonged adolescence.”

Mann and Stewart made five westerns together, all of them in the Cinematheque series and all of them featuring a Stewart who was especially terrifying to those who remembered his gee-whiz Frank Capra past. If you see enough of these films, you’ll forget that other Stewart ever existed.

In the brutal “The Naked Spur,” Stewart played malevolent through and through, while in “Bend of the River” he was eager to reform. And as a stranger bent on avenging a brother in the gripping “The Man From Laramie,” Stewart managed to be both sweet and terrifying. His scenes taking tea with ingenue Cathy O’Donnell reveal a man who’d probably been decent in some long-ago, distantly remembered past. But as always in the Mann westerns, Stewart in an instant becomes someone frighteningly eager to kill with his bare hands, a man who could convincingly say, as he moved in for the coup de grace, “I’ve waited a long time for this and I’m not going to rush it.”

“Winchester ‘73,” the crackling film that created the mold for these westerns, opens the Cinematheque series on Friday night. In it Stewart plays for the first time a model of brusque, malevolent implacability, determined to track both the one-of-a-kind rifle the film is named after and bad guys Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally) and Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea) past the ends of the earth if necessary. Mann’s direction adds a touch of the sinister to even the most innocent exchanges, and leads to a tense climax that Britain’s Time Out calls “one of the most neurotic shootouts in the history of the western.”

That finale, set among dramatic rock formations, highlights an aspect of Mann that is unexpected given his theater background, and that’s his exceptional use of real locations. Critic Andrew Sarris credits Mann and his cinematographers with turning out “some of the most brilliant photography of exteriors in the history of American cinema,” and his western landscapes especially are models of how to use the outdoors not just as scenery but as an equal partner in dramatic development.

Passionate about shooting in the fresh air, Mann told one interviewer “actors achieve far more truth on location. . . . When an actor has to play it on top of a mountain, by a river or in a forest, you’ve got the wind, the dust, the snow, the creaking of branches interrupting him, forcing him to give more; he becomes that much more alive.”

Though Stewart and Mann worked impeccably together, one of Mann’s best westerns, and one of his last, 1958’s “Man of the West,” starred Gary Cooper. Cooper plays Link Jones, a man so taciturn sultry dance-hall singer Billie Ellis (Julie London) is half-serious when she asks, “Do you talk?”

Jones is a former outlaw, struggling to stay straight, whose circumstances force him to confront the leering and sadistic gang he left behind. His main nemesis, and one of Mann’s most effective villains, is his uncle, the legendary half-mad bad man Dock Tobin, played with Shakespearean grandeur by Lee J. Cobb. A Lear-like monarch of darkness who rages against an indifferent universe, Dock Tobin roars lines like “god forgive us, we painted those walls with blood that time,” and inspired Jean-Luc Godard to write of the film that “each shot gives the impression that Anthony Mann is reinventing the western.”

Besides the westerns, the noirs and the epics, the Cinematheque series also offers a selection of Mann’s more offbeat efforts. Look for a radiant cameo by Ruby Dee in the tightly made “The Tall Target,” starring Dick Powell as a detective determined to stop an 1861 plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. And “Reign of Terror,” Mann’s Alton-photographed look at the French Revolution, is famous for dialogue like Robespierre’s touchy “Don’t call me Max!”

But perhaps the greatest surprise of the series, because it is hardly ever seen, is Mann’s impeccably made, implacable 1957 “Men in War.” Set during the Korean War and starring Robert Ryan as a lieutenant concerned about his men and Aldo Ray as reckless loner who balances his complete amorality with peerless combat instincts, “Men in War” reduces Mann’s themes and concerns to their most potent essence. Bleak and nihilistic as well as realistic and believable, it recreates a combat situation so unnerving that only the most paranoid have even a fair chance to stay alive. Which pretty much says all you need to know about the unsettling world of Anthony Mann.

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24 Lessons in ‘How to Be a Mann’

The monthlong tribute, billed as the first major U.S. retrospective of Mann’s work, presents the following schedule of 24 films:

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Date Time Movie Friday 7:15 p.m. “Winchester ‘73” Friday 9:15 p.m. “T-Men,” “Desperate” Saturday 7:15 p.m. “The Naked Spur” Saturday 9:15 p.m. “Raw Deal,” “Railroaded” April 24 7:15 p.m. “Bend of the River” April 24 9:15 p.m. “Border Incident,” “Reign of Terror” May 1 7:15 p.m. “The Far Country” May 1 9:15 p.m. “Side Street,” “Devil’s Doorway” May 2 7:15 p.m. “The Tall Target” May 2 9 p.m. “Thunder Bay,” “The Furies” May 8 7:15 p.m. “Men in War” May 2 9:30 p.m. “The Man From Laramie” May 9 7:15 p.m. “The Tin Star” May 9 9 p.m. “The Glenn Miller Story,” “God’s Little Acre” May 15 7:15 p.m. “Man of the West” May 15 9:30 p.m. “El Cid” May 16 7:15 p.m. “The Heroes of Telemark” May 16 9:30 p.m. “The Fall of the Roman Empire”

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American Cinematheque screenings are held in Raleigh Studios’ Charlie Chaplin Theater, 5300 Melrose Ave., Hollywood. Tickets are $4 for Cinematheque members, $7 for nonmembers. Free parking on the Raleigh lot. Information: (213) 466-3456 Ext. 3.