Man of the West

Julie London and Gary Cooper in Man of the West (dir. Anthony Mann, 1958).

This film--its story, presentation of character, plot movement, implied heroic code--is best watched as one would attend to the speech of one's patient (assuming one is a therapist) on the psychiatric couch. The same could be said for the bulk of classic Hollywood narrative cinema, especially in genres like the Western: genres, that is, that require investment in a mythos of lonely dignity and the quiet transcendence of principled individualism over the barbarisms that attend social alliances on the frontier.

In the case of Gary Cooper's Link Jones, this is a transcendence of both the outlaw gang, led by Lee J. Cobb, in which he was conditioned for a life of crime, and the emerging America of technological progress and civilized conformity. A train pulling into the station envelops him in steam, and he cringes in horror: the future has arrived, and it is bigger and rougher than he is. A chatty fellow passenger, played by Arthur O'Connell, nearly suffocates him with his familiarity and urban banality. Only once the train is waylaid by bandits, and he must escort O'Connell and schoolteacher Julie London through the countryside, is he at ease. In the wild, he can be self-possessed. Nevertheless, this trek leads him smack-dab onto the porch of his old hideout from his early days as a badman. His mentor Cobb has become a half-senile monster, an aging king who exerts a fragile control over his followers. For the rest of the film, Cooper has to exploit whatever cred he still has with Cobb to keep him and his charges from being killed. He must re-enter his old life in order to burn it out from within and effect a virtuous rebirth.

It's all much messier than that. It's a messy movie (though not at the level of visual composition). Tangents like Julie London's enforced striptease and Cooper's outrageous fight scene with Jack Lord take center stage. Mann was always a skilled orchestrator of symptoms rather than a director with a consciously critical vision. Man of the West was problematic for its original audience, perhaps because the symptoms in question really do look like symptoms. Cooper's anxiety is the dominant note of the film, and it never dissipates, even after the main plot points are resolved. This is most evident in the erotic tension that permeates his scenes with London. She accentuates by reverse example the safeness and dullness of his reformed life with a wife and family we never see. Just as Cobb and his outlaws represent the past he has tried to leave behind, she represents the sacrifices he must make to preserve his present and future. There's never a moment of climactic acceptance or dramatic breach; everything just simmers continually.

A fascinating, semi-dark movie that coasts along on the most tenuous logic and finally just drifts to a standstill. As in so many other great Westerns, the action scenes, however entertaining, feel like incidental interruptions of a muffled core psychodrama that never quite announces itself as central, but trembles beneath the surface like a rattlesnake in a burlap bag.

Strange Impersonation

Brenda Marshall (seemingly observing her own facial reconstruction operation) in Strange Impersonation (dir. Anthony Mann, 1946).



Hillary Brooke lets in the noir.

A spirited early Mann thriller, and it would be truly noteworthy if--consider yourself warned--someone hadn't decided at some point not to bother writing a real ending. It's low-budget, but does a good job of straining past its limitations with fluid camerawork and inventive staging. The leading man, played by William Gargan, is uninspiring, and Brenda Marshall as the main character is mostly effective on an ironic level as a caricature of the independent woman researcher ("Stephen!" she exclaims, as her amorous employer/fiance attempts a passionate embrace: "Remember science!"). But Hillary Brooke is a fine femme fatale, and there are good supporting performances, notably from George Chandler as an ambulance-chasing lawyer, and Mary Treen as (in the apt words of the IMDb cast listing) "talkative nurse."

Side Street

Farley Granger in Side Street (dir. Anthony Mann, 1950).

Granger and O'Donnell team up again for another small classic. O'Donnell doesn't have quite as much to do here as in They Live By Night, but she's still in top form, and Granger seizes his chance to shine: he is an absolutely sympathetic anti-hero, whose increasing sense of fear and desperation drives him to make ethical decisions that prove equally as disastrous as his unethical ones.

Mann is one of the pioneers of location shooting in the noir mode, and Side Street is nearly as impressive in this regard as Dassin's Naked City. A liberal application of aerial shots emphasizes the characters' haplessness and alienation as they skulk and speed down the endless maze of side streets framed by absurdly tall structures, scrambling like rats over a stolen and re-stolen bag of already-stolen money. Jean Hagen enters the film late in the action, but totally takes it over as a poetry-loving nightclub singer ("Oh, my love's like a red, red rose," she intones dreamily over a shabby little flower, shortly before playing Farley Granger for a sucker, and then getting played for a sucker herself).

The Far Country

Walter Brennan, Corinne Calvet, and Jimmy Stewart in The Far Country (dir. Anthony Mann, 1954).

RENEE [Corinne Calvet]: It arrived today: a piano.
BEN [Walter Brennan]: A pie-anny? Why couldn't that old walrus pack in a pig, or a sheep, or a goat, or a--
RENEE: You can't play a goat!

T-Men

Dennis O'Keefe in T-Men (dir. Anthony Mann, 1947).



Steaming the Schemer: Wallace Ford and Charles McGraw.



William Malten (an uncredited bit player in his only screen role) fills in the space between dissolves.

Persistent newsreel-like voiceover makes this grimy procedural somehow even more affecting for me, though many viewers might wish it would go away. There's a poignancy to its crackly authoritarian earnestness, as though at any moment the narrator will realize what a tool he is, and that everyone else already knows. I wish there were still movies that used this device. Can you imagine a film about Homeland Security, for example, in which a benevolent invisible spokesman constantly interrupts to tell us how heroic our government's efforts to protect us are? Can you imagine the filmmaking chops it would take to work around this constraint without recourse to overt irony? It would take, for one thing, a cinematographer as bold and sensitive as John Alton. The play of light across Dennis O'Keefe's face when he watches his partner get shot is an entire set piece in itself, and then there are the steam room scenes, in which Alton's camera becomes creepily intimate with the sweating, half-naked lowlifes therein. Charles McGraw's smoothly chiseled physique crowding in on Wallace Ford's flabby middle-aged flesh before he does him horribly in is an expression of something both conscious and unconscious: a statement about animal power in the absence of moral law, and a nervous disclosure of the homoerotic anxieties running through Mann's cinema and the he-man action genre generally.

Dennis O'Keefe: "Did you ever spend ten nights in a Turkish bath looking for a man? Don't."

Border Incident + A Digression on Noir

George Murphy in Border Incident (dir. Anthony Mann, 1949).

This is one of those movies that people argue about over whether it is or isn't noir. I guess it's about time I offered my own definition of noir, and in so doing show why I believe Border Incident qualifies. I divide the elements of noir into three essential categories, and four variable ones. A film might count as noir even if it only meets the three essential qualifications, but if exhibits one or more of the four variables as well, it's noir for sure.

ESSENTIAL
1. Theme revolves around crime, often though not always in an urban setting. At least some major characters are themselves criminals, some of whom may be corrupted law enforcement officials or other representatives of authority.
2. Story includes elements that problematize conventional narrative models of morality, justice, heroism, etc. In some cases, the central character or characters may elicit a certain amount of audience identification despite acting in illegal, amoral, or even cruelly violent ways. Films noir often eschew a Hollywood "happy ending" in favor of a more downbeat resolution, which might include prison or even death for the protagonist(s). Many of the exceptions to this tendency are the result of film board censorship or studio interference rather than directorial choice.
3. Technical apparatus of the film calls attention to itself via vivid stylization that nevertheless remains generally circumscribed by realist parameters. For example, the lighting frequently emphasizes play of light and shadow, often in high contrast, and there may be a preponderance of canted camera angles and other means of achieving skewed visual perspectives. The standard take is that these techniques complement and enhance the unstable moral and psychological timbre of the stories.
VARIABLE
1. Presence of a femme fatale.
2. "Snappy" sticomythic dialogue, often between a man and a woman.
3. A mise en scene that features certain stock elements of the urban crime melodrama, such as flashing neon hotel signs, light through venetian blinds, wet city streets at night, smoky bars and pool halls, dimly lit police stations, fleabag hotel rooms, etc.
4. A general sense, as in "naturalist" nineteenth-century French fiction, that the world is corrupt and no one can be trusted. Rather than "good" or "bad," characters tend to be either "weak" (victims, drudges, rats) or "strong" (bosses, goons, vamps). Men are wolves and women are "dames." The police are often ineffectual and/or crooked. Life is appetitive, vicious, dangerous.

This schema could be tweaked in various ways, but it'll do for a starting point.

Anyway, the noir status of Mann's Border Incident has been questioned because both protagonists--Ricardo Montalban and George Murphy--are completely straight arrows, neither of them in any way morally compromised by the dark world of crime and violence they enter into as undercover operatives. They represent law and order unproblematically, and the picture they present of US-Mexican police cooperation is optimistic (naive) in the extreme. The corny flag-waving frame structure of the narrative in particular can make the film seem like a pretty unsubtle piece of governmental propaganda. All this countered, however, by the nightmarish atmosphere of the underworld in which most of the story takes place. The villains (especially uber-tough guy Charles McGraw and the uncredited Lynn Whitney as his wife) exude near-tragic menace and desperation. The grisly bandit-murders of braceros trying to make their way back across the border with their illegal US wages are deeply horrifying. And one moment in particular--George Murphy's moment of excruciating terror, shown above--flouts Hollywood convention so successfully that I'm frankly almost shocked this movie isn't more famous. John Alton's severe black-and-white photographic composition (he wrote the book Painting with Light) solidifies the accomplishment.

Railroaded!

John Ireland and Sheila Ryan's shadow in Railroaded! (dir. Anthony Mann, 1947).

Like Kansas City Confidential, the last film I reported on, Railroaded involves an innocent delivery man being framed for a crime. Weird that I just happened to watch two films in a row with that same story element.

John Ireland, as a sociopath who perfumes his bullets: "People shouldn't scream."