Anthony Mann

When I first became interested in movies Mann was a North Star. His Bend of the River was model Technicolor entertainment and, unlike the makers of others like San Antonio, Scaramouche or Halls of Monteczuma, all of who tried, he was able to do it again - four terrific colour westerns with Jimmy Stewart, in with their other collaborations.

More than that, his taste would mature in step with my own - The Tin Star, Man of the West, God’s Little Acre and Fall of the Roman Empire. Anthony Mann turned into a life time project. The interview Chris Wicking and I did with him in the sixties is on the way to being my most re-printed and most cited piece of journalism, probably because Mann died shortly after, just at the point where his work was becoming trendy but before all those other carpet baggers got around to him. It may be the only time he spoke to people who had actually seen his films.

Well most of his films ... there remained the dozen movies he’d made before T-Men and the collaboration with cameraman John Alton made him conspicuous.  The early B movies were hard to find, to be picked off one at a time in 16mm. or late night TV.  Now three of the most elusive have finally come my way.

Sing Your Way Home turned up as a  Barcelona (!) DVD - problems getting rid of the Spanish voice track and Castillian subtitles but there it was.

A musical with overtones of I Was A Male War Bride, it offers egotistical War Correspondent Jack Haley needing to be repatriated from immediate post war Paris. The only way he can get an SS Arcadia berth is as chaperone to a kid entertainer group going back to the ‘States. Predictable complications, as he tries to keep the boys away from the girls (“I don’t want fifteen fathers with shot guns after me”). It’s breezy, efficient and quite enjoyable and it turns out to be the lightest - and most uncharacteristic - of Mann’s films, totally unlike the other new arrivals.

Buried on You-Tube in an excellent copy for once, I finally found 1944’s  Strangers in the Night.  It precedes his equally twisted Erich Von Stroheim The Great Flamarion also made by poverty row’s Republic Studios. The film has aspirations to be grouped with noir standards like Woman in the Window, Experiment Perilous, Rebecca and My Name Is Julia Ross.  There is a menacing mansion with a portrait of a glamorous girl (serial queen Linda Stirling posed for it) in the big room.  However the script by thriller writer Philip McDonald, whose work Hitchcock, Michael Powell and Jacques Tourneur all filmed, lurches into preposterous.

Sustained by letters from a girl from a Californian cliff top mansion,  Marine William Terry recovers from un-scarring Pacific War injuries and back stateside again takes the train to her home town, wanting to meet her. However in the dining car, he runs into doctor Virginia Grey, whose services are in demand because of war time male labor shortages and who happens to be reading the same book that Terry’s pen pal had shared with him (why?). He gets to the mansion to find limping matriarch Helen Thimig (wife of Berthold Brecht, in the largest of her series of forties Hollywood movie parts). She explains that her daughter is due back soon. The mother takes a murderous antipathy to his blooming romance with Grey.

Thimig’s performance is the best element, though Mann does manage a couple of quite starting moments, a train wreck and Terry’s unexpected reappearance at the climax. The director’s style has matured, covering the action in sustained, mobile, deep focus three  quarter length shots and giving Thimig a long, diopter-split monologue. The film looks like a production which cost more than the cheese paring Republic budget would have allowed. It is however unconvincing, dull and nasty.

Much the same can be said of Mann’s Strange Impersonation also made for Republic a couple of years later and curiously anticipating Dark Passage.  Brenda Marshall is a scientist injured in a laboratory accident engineered by jealous assistant Hilary Brooke. A blackmailer, who has stolen her engagement ring, is killed falling off Brenda's high rise balcony. She lets everyone believe it’s her and leaves town for plastic surgery that so changes her face that fiancé William Gargan in a silly mustache can’t recognize her. It all goes pear shaped however, when an ambulance-chasing lawyer has her accused of  murdering herself.  More atmospheric and more noirish, this is still a ponderous forties B movie.

Strange Impersonation: Brooke, Marshal and Gargan

Insignificant in themselves, these film are fascinating in the way they show Mann’s development. One of the all time most imposing film makers took twelve Hollywood fiction features to hit his stride. Makes you wonder about all the people who only got to do one or two - or eleven.

... and I’ve still got My Best Gal, Nobody's Darling, Moonlight in Havana and his pioneer pre WW2 TV production to find.