Anthony Mann: The Universe In Contrast

The salutary effect of Anthony Mann's work is that, despite its insistent violence and psychological intensity, he is still a figure in the immediate post-Fordian tradition, not ever working in pastiche or abstraction. In what I am coming to understand as the Neo-Classical era of Hollywood cinema, Mann plays a vital role: he belongs to the directors who came-up within the studio system, he was educated by it, and then oversaw the years of its decay as a major director, dying in 1968 right as the last of the wheels was falling off.

His films are divisible into five periods:

• 1939-1946: Coming from a theatre background, Mann is slotted into musical comedies and light mysteries. Gradually there is a discovery of the varieties of camera movement in these films, some occasional bouts of inspiration, but the B-movie material is too broad and light to satisfy a modern viewer.

• 1947-1949: In a great burst of activity, Mann begins to specialize in a variety of crime films, and with ace cinematographer John Alton he explores the possibility of atmosphere and environment within small spaces, codifying a certain stylistic habit in Raw Deal, which remains a remarkable achievement in the genre that helps him to leave B-movies and move up to A-pictures.

• 1950-1955: Mann and James Stewart set about an eight-film collaboration that is justifiably the stuff of filmic legend, especially in the five westerns, where Mann transplants the nervous interiority of his noirs into the wide expanses of the wild west and becomes a master of the emerging widescreen and cinemascope formats.

• 1956-1958: Mann and Stewart have a falling out over their next western project, and Mann expands his talents beyond that singular star persona, directing career-best films for Gary Cooper and Robert Ryan, both of whom are amenable to his style in different ways. The trio of Men In War, Man of The West and God's Little Acre is the perfect bloom of Mann's increasing versatility and his power to combine iconography and specificity in a single package.

• 1960-1968: After Mann is kicked-off of Spartacus, he continues to pursue epic-scale filmmaking as was in vogue at the time, and his work increasingly becomes both more political and more personal, abruptly ending in the atypical A Dandy In Aspic, a James Bond riff that surpasses its model in terms of personality and as a document of changing stylistics in the late 60s.

What I have observed in his work as a whole is that Mann finds reality torn between the particular and the universal, between inner personality and exterior survival, and that his visual strategy evolves in response to this conflict. At times there is the appearance that there might be harmony gained at the end of a battle, but the war goes on and the gulf widens with increasingly higher stakes.

The early noirs of Mann are claustrophobic, off-kilter, and more than a little manneristic in their stretching out of small budgets to produce the largest visual impact for the cheapest dollar, John Alton's ultra-stark single-source lighting lending abstraction even as some of these stories aim for 'documentary' veracity.

Mann no longer has to invent his minimalism on sets as his work gets more and more location based, and the Stewart cycle gives him the highest mountains and flattest plains and deepest forests to paint with: the psychological damage that the Stewart characters evidence is in direct contrast to the size of the landscape he is aiming to conquer.

Mann's melding of geology and character is never more clear than in God's Little Acre, where Robert Ryan's patriarch digs up huge holes on his land looking for buried treasure instead of working the land for food. The way that the town around him deals with the closing of a crucial factory is equally individuated, with heroic action hoping to turn back on the machines and lights but being unable to surpass the social forces which condemn the town to poverty. Given that situation, Ryan's desire to sublate his body into the raw dirt, dreaming of instantaneous wealth, seems less like a pipe dream than a desperate cry for relief, a practical hope for salvation.

And increasingly the individual seems not only unable to stem the tide of collapse, but also unable to escape it, as in The Fall Of The Roman Empire, where the sheer complexity of society compounds personal failure with institutional excess and condemns everyone to suffer the debauchery and destruction of an entire way of life -- Mann's turn towards Europe and European subjects at the end of his career is not only because of the rise of international productions in the business, but seems to me to indicate an increasing interest in the real dynamics of history, away from the raw confidence of a post-war America and into a wider awareness of cyclical patterns, the nitty-gritty of how a state is defended and maintained against inside and outside threats, and how all of that imposes a fractured subjectivity upon the persons whose task it is to represent and enforce what they've been raised to be: far past the criminal derring-do of the noirs, Mann's last films are subtle, systemic, and able to dial all the way from the self to the civilization with ease.

When I first began taking notice of Anthony Mann, what became clear to me was how he was a sort of middle figure between someone like John Ford and Sergio Leone, not just in terms of genre but compositional logic: Ford's classicism of Cathy Downs' medium shot yearning dwarfed by the natural grace of Henry Fonda riding into Monument Valley, then to Mann's neo-classicism of vertical and old Gary Cooper crawling around in the bloody dirt of a huge canyon, then to Leone's post-modernism of a desolate abandoned town crashing into an extreme close-up of a silent gunfighter's blank expression. The movement here is from a restrained discipline and withholding of implication to a deliberately elliptical flatness that condenses the image into the most direct formulation of person and context, the transformation of what Hollywood established in the 20s and 30s as the inter-cutting schema of wides, mediums and close-ups.

Mann isn't like Leone, he is still working within that schema instead of trying to blow it up, but his sophisticated understanding of it allows him to push its boundaries, which we see him do especially in his 60s films which are all about the tension held within bodies being expressed upon an indifferent nature, and it doesn't matter whether it is urban or rural, Mann finds the same alienation in both: A Dandy In Aspic's brutalist depiction of London shares an identity with the wartorn Korea of Men In War and the nightmarish gothic gloom of Reign of Terror, but we see as Mann's career progresses, he has less need of overt flourishes and canted lighting and relies more on the sparseness of real people within real places.

What I believe is central to Mann's philosophy as an artist is his drive to maintain a certain objectivity and a cartographer's knowledge even as he also hopes to portray the full internal life of his characters. They act out in response to their circumstances and are increasingly determined by it, but while Mann and Fritz Lang are close brothers, Mann never begins from the feeling of foreclosed doom or fairy-tale fatalism that was the favorite of Lang, his heroes are never 'suckers' even at their most naive. Mann depicts suffering as the bridge between the personal and the outside, that to impose your will on the rest of the world means a corresponding level of pain that might even result in your death, and that there are no guarantees: we rarely see the fruits of his characters labor, we are more often left on the precipice or promise of hope, he provides no illusions or warm consolations. Thus Mann is able to inherit the distancing of Ford and others of the classical generation, but the moral and political ambiguity is more front-and-center, the text asserts itself at regular intervals and does not fade into the comfortable horizon of consolidated storytelling -- Ford got there too, in the 50s and 60s, but it was a deliberate response to directors like Mann who were willing to take the fabulist nature of classic Hollywood and ground it in a post-war taste for realism and non-conformity.

Mann's best films show a history and a species de-centered from its responsibilities and ethics, and the striving to reclaim those ideals of justice is inconsistent but ultimately seen as a worthy pursuit, best esteemed in El Cid's divided hero who holds steady to his chivalric code even past the point of self-interest, sanity and mortality. Mann depicted excess, but unlike other directors he himself was not enamored of excess, and his camera acquired a firm footing that held suspicion for the chaos of his narratives and tried to corral them into an orderly vista that would be clear and direct for the viewer to understand. He was dependent on several great collaborators and one speculates on whether or not he would have thrived in the New Hollywood era of writer-director whiz-kids, but in that sense he continued a noble path of the American cinema in being an artist who could really make the best of a good script, and Mann became very consistent over time to the point where even the film he died a few weeks into still bears the impression of his 'touch'. He faithfully discharged his duty with Stewart but was less defined by it than is popularly known: outside of that cycle lies his greatest work, where he applied the lessons he learned to a period of the cinema that demanded a filmmaker who could handle ambitious subject matter and still know how the human soul spoke no matter how big things became. He worked from the outside to the inside, and if his empire fell, he knew exactly where those pressure points were that shaped men and their destinies, and if they rose to the occasion, he saw them without exaggeration or cynicism, but never forgot their beauty.