THE WALTER READE THEATER

Dark Streets and Vast Horizons: The American Vision of Anthony Mann

August 11 – 29, 2004


left:   Winchester 73

Anthony Mann, born Emil Anton Bundesmann, began his career in show business on the New York stage, first as a child actor, then as a production manager, and finally as a director. He was brought to Hollywood by David O. Selznick, and he shot many of the screen tests for Gone with the Wind and Rebecca. He left Selznick in the mid-40s and began his movie-directing career making a series of visually distinctive B pictures, each one more inventive than the next. Of his film noirs of the late 40s, most of them made with the great cameraman John Alton, Manny Farber wrote: "The films of this tin-can de Sade have a Germanic rigor, a caterpillar intimacy, and an original dictionary of ways in which to punish the human body." You can lose yourself in the velvety shadows of those films, and in their beautifully, almost geometrically precise action. Then, in the early 50s, Mann went outdoors with James Stewart and quietly altered the Western genre. Until they quarrelled during the production of Night Passage in 1957, Mann and Stewart made eight marvelous films together, the last seven in a row. The best of them introduced a new frankness to American cinema, thanks to the boldness of Stewart's often dangerously neurotic characterizations, and to the almost supernatural acuity of Mann's eye for the great outdoors. No one — not Ford, not Hawks, not Daves — had made such creative use of the American West. Few filmmakers anywhere have dramatized space itself so excitingly. And in his last great films, including MAN OF THE WEST and EL CID, that feeling for open space rises to an almost abstract level. A brilliant craftsman, the likes of whom we will not see again, and a fiercely intelligent artist, Anthony Mann more than deserves his place in the pantheon of great American filmmakers. This retrospective will show you why.

Please Note: The Walter Reade Theater endeavors to show the best film prints possible. Sometimes the only available print of an older film is, unfortunately, in poor condition. Please check the individual film descriptions for print condition information. Click here to read a letter from Kent Jones, Associate Director of Programming, addressing the issue of print quality.

THE NAKED SPUR
1953; 91m
Everyone has their own favorite among the Mann-Stewart Westerns, but many would agree that this is the most powerful. There are only five characters in the whole film - six, if you count the mountainous terrain they cross, and which Mann renders so vividly. Stewart is Howard Kemp, a bounty hunter who tracks down escaped murderer Robert Ryan so that he can claim the $5,000 reward and buy back his ranch. Against his better judgment, Howard teams up with an aimless adventurer (Ralph Meeker) and a gentle old miner (Millard Mitchell), and falls in love with his captive's girl (Janet Leigh). Few heroes in American cinema are as bitter and vengeful as Howard. And few films make the links between the psychological tensions among its characters and the landscape around them so palpable. This might be Mann's greatest film.
Wed Aug 11: 5 & 9; Fri Aug 13: 9

BEND OF THE RIVER
1952; 91m
André Bazin spoke of Anthony Mann's "natural gift for direct and discreet use of the lyrical, and above all his infallible sureness of touch in bringing together man and nature, that feeling of the open air, which in his films seems to be the very soul of the Western." His favorite Mann may have been THE NAKED SPUR , but he was almost as admiring of this film, Mann's second with Stewart and the first in which their partnership really came into its own. Stewart and Arthur Kennedy play two fortune hunters who are working together to lead a band of homesteaders into Oregon. On their way back from Portland with supplies, Kennedy succumbs to gold fever. A tense moral showdown, an exploration of friendship under the limits of temptation and extreme duress, and a beautiful demonstration of how to film people within natural surroundings. With Julie Adams and Rock Hudson and written by Borden Chase, who wrote or supplied the source material for four Mann films.
Wed Aug 11: 7; Thurs Aug 12: 9

THE MAN FROM LARAMIE
1955; 104m
The last of the Mann-Stewart collaborations, THE MAN FROM LARAMIE is a stunningly visualized tale of bitterly enacted frontier justice. The setting is New Mexico this time, and Stewart is a freight wagon driver obsessed with finding the gun-runner who sold the Apaches the rifle that killed his brother. He gets mixed up with the Waggoman family of Coronado, ruled with an iron hand by aging cattle baron Alec (Donald Crisp). There's an astonishing scene, as physically frank as anything in Mann's noirs or in 50s American cinema, where Stewart is tied to a wild horse and shot in the hand. This was the only one of the Stewart-Mann Westerns that was shot in Scope, by yet another great cinematographer, Charles Lang. With Arthur Kennedy as Crisp's ranch foreman and Cathy O'Donnell as Barbara Waggoman.
Thurs Aug 12: 4:15; Sat Aug 14: 7; Mon Aug 16: 1

THE FAR COUNTRY
Print courtesy of the Stanford Theatre Foundation.
1955; 97m Stewart is a small-time cattle owner in this one, bringing his herd up to Dawson during the Gold Rush, where he figures he'll be able to sell it for a fortune. He's thwarted every step of the way by Gannon (John McIntire), the "sheriff" of Skagway, who is after his cattle. This might be the best of Stewart's performances for Mann. His Jeff is an intense, driven man, with little if any of the attributes of a typical hero: he just wants to make a killing on the market and go home. As always, the beauty with which the action is tied to the landscape, in this case the beautiful mountain peaks of the Canadian Rockies, is an event. With Walter Brennan as Stewart's sidekick and Ruth Roman as the saloonkeeper he falls for.
Fri Aug 13: 7

THE BAMBOO BLONDE
1946; 67m
Mann was still learning his trade when he made this little B musical at RKO. A B-29 pilot (Ralph Edwards, who later gained fame as the host of This Is Your Life) falls for a nightclub singer (Frances Langford) and puts her image - The Bamboo Blonde - on his plane, which sinks a Japanese battleship. A lively, beautifully crafted 67 minutes of cinema. With Jane Greer, just as beautiful as she would be a year later in Out of the Past. Sat Aug 14: 2; Tue Aug 17: 1:30 & 8:45

TWO O'CLOCK COURAGE
1945; 65m
A quickie remake of the 1936 Two in the Dark. Tom Conway (remembered as the Falcon, the star of I Walked with a Zombie and Cat People, and as George Sanders's brother) is picked up by good samaritan Ann Rutherford and deposited in her cab. She learns that he is an amnesia victim, and as they try to piece together the strands of his identity, they discover that he is also a murder suspect. Beautifully paced and visually sleek, this film is Mann during his apprentice days, before he broke out with T-MEN. Sat Aug 14: 3:30; Sun Aug 15: 5:15; Mon Aug 16: 4:45

WINCHESTER '73
1950; 92m
This film began life as a Fritz Lang project, and the surgically clean structure - the action follows the eponymous gun as it passes from hand to hand - feels like Lang. Mann gives it a different kind of hard-edged beauty. Every image in this film (shot by the great cameraman William Daniels) is stunningly composed, angled into the deep space of the Arizona desert. WINCHESTER '73 marks Mann's first pairing with James Stewart. A lot has been made of the disparity between Stewart's pre- and post war personas, and the fact that he graduated to playing grown-up, morally confused, dangerously neurotic characters for Mann. In fact, those tendencies are already there in the earlier films, including the ones for Capra, but this makes his work for Mann no less powerful. With an amazing cast that includes Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea, the soon-to-be-blacklisted Will Geer and Abner Biberman and, in very early appearances, future Universal stars Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson. Sat Aug 14: 5 & 9:10

RAILROADED!
1947, 16mm; 71m
A crooked beautician (Jane Randolph of Cat People fame) teams up with her boyfriend (John Ireland, as flinty as ever) to knock off the day's winnings at the bookie operation she's fronting. When things go wrong, Ireland tries to pin the rap on the guy whose stolen car was used for the getaway. A police detective (Hugh Beaumont - Leave It to Beaver's Dad) has other ideas. Far from the greatest of Mann's films, RAILROADED! (great title) is still a wonderful piece of terse, hard-boiled moviemaking.
Sun Aug 15: 2 & 6:45


DESPERATE
1947; 73m
Steve Brodie is Steve Randall, an independent trucker who refuses the mob's enticements and reports them to the police. As a result, his brother is framed for a crime he didn't commit, and Steve and his wife Anne (Audrey Randall) are forced to run from the mob and the cops. Fairly inconsequential material is given an immeasurable lift by Mann's extraordinary visual sense (he makes thrilling use of a swinging lightbulb here), and by the menacing presence of Raymond Burr, who would soon up the menace factor to danger levels in Mann's Raw Deal.
Sun Aug 15: 3:30 & 8:30; Mon Aug 16: 3:10

HE WALKED BY NIGHT
1948; 79m
Mann did uncredited work on a couple of minor classics of the late 40s, including Richard Fleischer's Follow Me Quietly as well as this odd, intense semi documentary about a young cop-killer (Richard Basehart) stalked by the police. The credited director, Alfred Werker, was a very capable man, but he never made another film like this one. Basehart is extraordinary, not least during the film's great, indelible moment: the young killer sweating about six quarts as he removes a bullet from himself. Shot by John Alton. With Scott Brady and Jack Webb.
Wed Aug 18: 1, 4:30 & 8

SIDE STREET
1949; 83m
Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell, reunited after their triumph in Nick Ray's They Live by Night, once again play young lovers in a bad-luck streak. Granger and O'Donnell are Cathy and Joe, poor newlyweds who are expecting a baby. One fateful day on his mail route, Joe steals an envelope filled with $30,000 in blackmail money, and before he can give it back he finds that the friend with whom he's entrusted it has taken it on the lam. A terrific noir, and also a terrific New York location movie - a little sweeter than RAW DEAL or T-MEN but no less inventive. With Jean Hagen, the ever-present Charles McGraw, and the great Paul Kelly. Shot by Joseph Ruttenberg.
Wed Aug 18: 2:45 & 6:15

THE FURIES
1950; 109m
A psychologically delirious Western noir, with obvious roots in Greek tragedy. Walter Huston is rancher TC Jeffords, who presides over an empire, and Barbara Stanwyck is his tough, beloved daughter, Vance. When a San Francisco socialite (Judith Anderson) comes between them, the bloodlust rises and Stanwyck goes on a vengeful rampage - in the film's most perversely memorable scene, she disfigues Anderson's face with a pair of scissors. An amazing film, quite unlike any other in the Mann canon; Stanwyck and Huston both give ferocious performances. With Wendell Corey, Gilbert Roland, Thomas Gomez, and Albert Dekker. Art direction by the legendary Henry Bumsted.
Thurs Aug 19: 2:15 & 6:30

DEVIL'S DOORWAY
1950; 84m
Another wonderful Mann-Alton collaboration, this time dealing with the plight of peaceful Native Americans who are mistreated by plundering white men. Robert Taylor is surprisingly good as a Shoshone chief who returns from the Civil War with a Medal of Honor won at Gettysburg, to find that the Homesteading Act has deprived him of his land. Along with Broken Arrow by Delmer Daves, made around the same time (and starring James Stewart), this is one of the rare films of the period that speaks for the rights of Native Americans. It's a dark, brooding, tragic film, and a gorgeous one as well. With Louis Calhern and Paula Raymond.
Thurs Aug 19: 4:30 & 8:45; Fri Aug 20: 5

EL CID
1961; 182m
Anthony Mann ended his career with a series of historical pageants for the king of historical pageantry himself, Samuel L. Bronston. The scale was bigger than ever, but somehow, Mann's customary terseness remained. This majestic version of the life of the great warrior who drove the Moors out of Spain is as filled with visually splendid artifacts and opulent production design as the other Bronston epics, but there's a uniform austerity, a cleanness of line, that harks back to Mann's B-movie days. Charlton Heston is probably the only actor who could have played the lead role, and Sophia Loren is gorgeous, but Mann is the star, and the Cid's final ride along the beach is quite a stirring moment - it feels like the twilight of epic moviemaking itself.
Fri Aug 20: 1:30; Sat Aug 21: 7

THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
1964; 188m
Mann worked for quite a long time on Spartacus before he quarrelled with Kirk Douglas. Some say that he completed only the first few shots; some say he is responsible for the first hour. Whatever his level of involvement on that project, it's clear that he was more than up to the task of epic filmmaking. This melancholy film, whose narrative bears more than a passing resemblance to the vastly inferior Gladiator (both films deal with the transfer of power from Marcus Aurelius to Commodus), is one of the most intelligent of the great epics of antiquity, with their casts of thousands. The vast panoramas are impressive, as expected, but so are the smaller and more intimate scenes, such as Marcus Aurelius's funeral during a snowfall. With more of Stephen Boyd than you might want as Livius, Alec Guinness as Aurelius, Christopher Plummer as Commodus, James Mason as Timonides, and Sophia Loren as Lucilla, the film's token love object.
Fri Aug 20: 7

THE GLENN MILLER STORY
1954; 115m
The famous composer biography is not one of the American cinema's more distinguished genres, but this old chestnut is a genuinely beautiful film. James Stewart plays Miller, the king of mellow, double-brass swing, with great tact and understatement, and the moments of discovery, where Miller painstakingly works his way toward finding "that sound," are fairly believable, even suspenseful. Needless to say, the film is visually beautiful - there are many scenes that gleam and glow like the inside of a jukebox. And if you don't cry at the end when June Allyson hears her husband's rendition of "Little Brown Jug" after he's been downed over the Atlantic, then you don't have a heart. With guest appearances by Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, Frances Langford, and Cozy Cole, among other famous musicians.
Sat Aug 21: 2:30; Sun Aug 22: 8; Mon Aug 23: 1

T-MEN
1947; 92m
Mann and Alton's noir docudrama tour-de-force, along with RAW DEAL, is among the most beautiful films of the 40s. Dennis O'Keefe and Alfred Ryder are the T-men, or treasury agents, infiltrating a gang of Detroit-based counterfeiters. Despite the fact that the film is punctuated with the kind of law-enforcement documentary inserts so beloved in the late 40s, the action is crisp with tension and menace. In one of the film's most famous and memorable scenes, a man is killed, slowly, in a locked steam bath where the temperature keeps rising. This is the film that got Mann noticed by MGM.
Sat Aug 21: 5; Tue Aug 24: 3 & 9

RAW DEAL
1948; 89m
One of the most beautiful film noirs ever made, and one of the nastiest. Dennis O'Keefe, with whom Mann made his other definitive noir classic T-MEN, stars as Joe, sprung from prison by his murderous old boss (Raymond Burr), who has set him up for a fall. Marsha Hunt is the "good" woman in his life and Claire Trevor, as unforgettable as ever, the "bad" woman. But the real stars here are Mann and Alton, who make the screen crackle and pop with more shades of black, white, and gray than you ever knew existed.
Sun Aug 22: 2 & 6; Tue Aug 24: 1 & 5

REIGN OF TERROR aka THE BLACK BOOK
1949; 89m
Mann's Classic Comics version of the French Revolution, as dramatically ridiculous as it is visually exciting - shot in the richest chiaroscuro by John Alton. Given the fact that the film is set in 18th-century France during the height of the Terror (the plot involves the attempts to retrieve a purloined diary), the cast is nothing short of hair-raising: Robert Cummings, Arlene Dahl, Charles McGraw, Beaulah Bondi, and Richard Basehart as Robespierre. The action reaches new heights of hard-boiled lunacy near the end, when Cumming's Charles d'Aubigny meets a certain fellow in the street. "By the way, I didn't quite catch your name." "Bonaparte. Napoleon Bonaparte."
Sun Aug 22: 4; Mon Aug 23: 3:30; Tue Aug 24: 7

MAN OF THE WEST
1958; 100m
"A man (Gary Cooper) is in a little local train when it is attacked by bandits. Along with two chance travelling companions, a professional gambler (Arthur O'Connell) and a saloon girl (Julie London), he tries to get back to civilization. All three end up at a bandit hideout, and we suddenly discover that the Man of the West is none other than the chief's nephew, who used to belong to the gang but gave it all up to lead a more Christian existence under different skies....I have seen nothing so completely new since - why not? - Griffith. Just as the director of Birth of a Nation gave one the impression that he was inventing the cinema with every shot, each shot of MAN OF THE WEST gives one the impression that Anthony Mann is reinventing the Western....In other words, he both shows and demonstrates, innovates and copies, criticizes and creates...MAN OF THE WEST is quite simply an admirable lesson in cinema - in modern cinema." - Jean-Luc Godard
Fri Aug 27: 2; Sun Aug 29: 2 & 6

THE HEROES OF TELEMARK
1965; 131m
This WWII drama, based on actual events, was Mann's last great film. Kirk Douglas is a Norwegian physics professor, and Richard Harris is an underground leader. They are entrusted with the formidable task of destroying the Norse Hydro Plant in Telemark, where the Nazis are producing heavy water for the creation of an A-bomb. The film shifts into high gear for its final, thrilling sequences, among the best Mann ever directed, in which the underground fighters ski through a pass and down to the plant. Mann was great in the desert and on the plains, and he was just as great in the snow. With a great, largely British cast, including Michael Redgrave, Roy Dotrice, and Eric Porter.
Fri Aug 27: 4 & 8:45

MEN IN WAR
1957; 102m Robert Ryan, one of the best actors who ever walked in front of a camera, is Lieutenant Benson, whose platoon is stranded in enemy territory during the Korean War. The scared platoon is joined by crazy Sergeant Montana (Aldo Ray) and his catatonic commander (James Keith). They have to make it through hostile territory to get to safety at Hill 465. Why this somber, beautifully scaled, relentlessly intense war film, beloved by everyone from Pauline Kael to Manny Farber, isn't better known is a puzzle. It's probably one of the finest films ever made about combat fatigue, and about those devastating moments when giving up seems just as reasonable as going on.
Fri Aug 27: 6:30

THE TALL TARGET
1951; 78m
A little-known episode in American history, turned into an electrifying exercise in suspense. Dick Powell is New York detective John Kennedy (that's right...John Kennedy), who learns of a planned assassination attempt on President Lincoln on the way to his inauguration, and boards the Ohio and Baltimore Railway in an attempt to foil it. A beautifully orchestrated film, both psychologically (Kennedy doesn't know who he can trust) and physically (the period detail nicely offsets the nail-biting action). One of Mann's most ingenious, least appreciated movies. With Adolphe Menjou, Will Geer, and a young Ruby Dee as a slave.
Sat Aug 28: 2 & 5:45

BORDER INCIDENT
1949; 94
Mann and Alton made this film in 1949 under Dore Shary's regime at MGM, during the heyday of the criminal docudrama. The solemn narration and upstanding behavior of Ricardo Montalban and George Murphy, as border cops trying to catch illegal immigration on both sides of the Mexican border, tells one story, while the brooding, almost demonically violent images tell another. There are some amazing sequences in BORDER INCIDENT, shot in rich, velvety black and white, and none more amazing that the moment when an unsuspecting man meets his fate in the form of an oncoming harvesting machine.
Sat Aug 28: 3:45 & 7:30


THE LAST FRONTIER aka SAVAGE WILDERNESS
1956; 98m
Victor Mature, James Whitmore, and Pat Hogan are three trappers who lose their supplies and are forced to take jobs as Indian scouts at a nearby fort. Mature's Jed falls in love with Corinna (Anne Bancroft), the young wife of the grandiose Colonel Marston (Robert Preston), only heightening the conflicts between the civilized and uncivilized worlds. Mann made this Western near the tail end of his James Stewart cycle, and it deserves to be better known, because it's one of his most sheerly beautiful. With Guy Madison as the more reasonable Captain Riordan. Sun Aug 29: 4 & 8

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