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MANN TO MANN April 23 - May 10

 

Thief || Manhunter || Heat || T-Men || Railroaded! || Man of the West || Men in War

Michael Mann (b. 1943) has maintained a remarkably consistent vision through a career in film and television spanning 25 years. A legendary perfectionist and renowned master stylist, he creates a lush cinematic world by utilising intense colour, cold urban environments and choreographed carnage. His films, best exemplified in his reworking of the crime genre, focus on men defined by their obsessive professionalism. Doomed outsiders governed by their own inscrutable codes, Mann’s heroes are the descendents of Jean-Pierre Melville’s solitary underworld wanderers.

"..a Mann film can be imagined as a combination of Antonioni's art sensibility, Kubrick's meticulous construction, and Herzog's Method recreation of reality applied to Sam Fuller material." (Gavin Smith)

Visionaries and Their Visions: Michael Mann Director Series By Alex Hudson
Michael Mann by Anna Dzenis (Senses of Cinema)
Michael Mann John McCarty

Spiritual predecessor Anthony Mann (1906-1967) came from a different generation of filmmakers. Along with directors such as Robert Aldrich, Sam Fuller and Don Siegel, Mann toiled under the studio system making no nonsense, low budget genre pics, carving out his own distinctive style before anyone in Hollywood had even heard of the word auteur. Whether he was making potboilers, Westerns or spectacular historical epics, Mann was noted for his craftsmanship, sharp eye for outdoor cinematography and “an instinctive sense for the visual expression of inner conflict.”

Mann of the Hour By Richard Corliss

Anthony Mann by David Boxwell

7:30 Mon 23 April

thief

Michael Mann  USA  1981  122mins  35mm R Imported 35mm print.

A professional jewel thief played by James Caan, lured into a major diamond heist by the promise of a substantial payoff that would allow him to retire, finds himself betrayed by his malicious benefactor.

Mann’s cinematic debut deploys strikingly expressive mise en scène and sound elements to underscore the psychological torment of Caan’s lone, obsessive protagonist. Foregrounds the thematic and stylistic tendencies found throughout the director’s subsequent works. With William Petersen, James Belushi, Dennis Farina, Tuesday Weld & Willie Nelson.

Michael Mann's Thief is a film of style, substance, and violently felt emotion, all wrapped up in one of the most intelligent thrillers I've seen. It's one of those films where you feel the authority right away: This movie knows its characters, knows its story, and knows exactly how it wants to tell us about them. It's a thriller with plausible people in it. Roger Ebert

Mann demonstrates his legendary commitment to research and authenticity by using real thieves as consultants (and, at times, as actors) and by having Caan crack open real safes. Ben Nuckols

It's a shame Thief isn't better remembered by people. If you really enjoy films about robberies, this one is right up your alley. Caan is terrific, and Mann's budding talent is evident. Larry Carroll Countingdown.com

NY Times (Regn. Reqd)

7:30 Thurs 26 April

Manhunter

Michael Mann  USA  1986  121mins  35mm Rare imported print. MA15+

Retired F.B.I. forensic investigator Will Graham played by William Petersen (To Live and Die in L.A., Thief, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) returns to help the bureau track down a serial killer in Mann’s chilling and edgy adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon. (One of four cinematic interpretations of the novel)

The director’s sparse and clinical imagery is interwoven with some very clever clues and steadily building tension. Brian Cox, delivers a standout performance as the original Dr. Hannibal Lecktor, revealing a character that is much more cold and threatening than Anthony Hopkins’ more famous, scenery chewing interpretation. Also starring Joan Allen & Dennis Farina.

Manhunter,' Michael Mann's adaptation of Thomas Harris's novel 'Red Dragon,' may not persuade you that its hero, the F.B.I. agent Will Graham, operates on the same skewed wavelength as the cracked killers he specializes in tracking down, but the movie drives along with such intensity for much of the time that you can just let it work on your senses without worrying about whether it makes sense. Walter Goodman

Manhunter is a modern masterpiece of sheer cinematic terror that one won't soon forget. Robert Baum

To say that it is superior in nearly every way to the much-lauded and wildly popular The Silence of the Lambs would be something of an understatement. Faithful to Harris' Red Dragon, Manhunter is a detailed and supremely performed piece dedicated to getting into the mind and the psyche of the monster and the monster's twisted hunter. Walter Chaw © Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net.

Michael Mann unnerves his viewers with this psychologically slippery, contemplative and disturbing thriller about a detective searching under his own skin for the criminal impulse. As Lektor reminds Graham, “The reason you caught me is we’re just alike. You want the scent? Smell yourself.” As Graham ultimately discovers, once you enter the mind of the killer, you may never return. Jeremiah Kipp

7:30 Mon 30 April

heat

Michael Mann  USA  1995  172mins  35mm MA

A large-scale action heist film that built Mann’s reputation as an action director. As the film opens, Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and his team of brutal, precision thieves (including Val Kilmer & Tom Sizemore) ambush an armoured car for a stash of bearer bonds. Detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), a troubled, angst-ridden veteran of the L.A.P.D. pursues the criminals at all costs and methodically closes in. McCauley’s personal code? To have nothing in his life he can’t walk away from in 30 seconds flat if the heat is coming. Mann’s multidimensional examinations of all the major characters, their wives, children and loved ones are riveting. Strong performances throughout, also starring Hank Azaria, Tom Noonan, Natalie Portman & Jon Voight.

If there's one thing Michael Mann knows how to do, it's create tension. He's a master of texture and atmosphere, and in Heat, the volatile though confounding story of a Los Angeles detective's hunt for a master thief, writer-director Mann works as if he were a composer, laying down his super-saturated wide-screen images like a series of menacing, unresolved chords. Hal Hinson Washington Post

7:30 / 9:00 Thurs 3 May

t-men

Anthony Mann  USA  1947  92mins 16mm 18+

A dark, tough and twisted quasi-documentary style noir, T-Men takes the underground alleyway action of the gangster flick and places it in the corporate world, but keeps it just as violent and grisly.

T-Men follows the story of two treasury agents played Dennis O’Keefe & Alfred Ryder, who go undercover to investigate a paper counterfeiting scheme. An all-engrossing gritty aesthetic, created by John Alton’s dark and foggy cinematography, submerges viewers in a cruel and dangerous world where bad guys are bad and the good can be corrupted.

The team of Mann and Alton is arguably the greatest collaboration in noir. Roger Westcombe

His name may not carry the weight of some of his better-known contemporaries, but everyone from Jean-Luc Godard to Martin Scorsese has sung the praises of director Anthony Mann at one time or another. Although his standing never really solidified until several years after his death, Mann was a crackerjack studio craftsman who seemed incapable of taking a misstep when matched with the right genre. His first noir study, T-Men (1947), is a prime example of what a supremely gifted filmmaker can accomplish on a limited budget. Turner Classic Movies

railroaded

Anthony Mann  USA  1947  72mins 16mm 18+

An edgy and evocative story of a robbery gone horribly wrong and the ensuing frame-up, Mann’s last film before teaming up with legendary cinematographer John Alton is a confidently directed adaptation of a pulp story by Gertrude Walker. Well paced and with excellent performances from the mostly unknown cast, Railroaded is a twisting tale of hardened characters and relationships ranging from malicious to romantic. Starring John Ireland.

Railroaded’s tension is remarkably well maintained, primarily due to the acting. Hugh Beaumont’s cop is fine in a Jimmy Stewart manqué way, Jane Randolph is excellent as gun moll Clara Calhoun (!) – tough, cynical and wounded – and Ireland’s saturnine composure is almost Nixonian. Roger Westcombe

7:30 Mon 7 May

man of the west

Anthony Mann  USA  1958  100min  16mm PG

Gary Cooper (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe, High Noon), stars as Link Jones, a troubled man on the run from his crooked past who is forced to return to the house where he was raised an outlaw when the train he is travelling on is robbed and he is stranded in the western wilderness with dancehall girl Billie Ellis (Julie London) and shifty gambler Sam Beasley (Arthur O’Connell). Now staying with the thugs he used to run with, Link is forced into one last bank job. Personal demons and the dormant violence of a supposedly reformed man make this iconic Western a compelling and edgy tale of the inner struggle between good and evil.

This is perhaps his finest western, a magnificently staged and photographed film - few directors could match Mann's appreciation of space - at the centre of which a flawed, neurotic hero struggles to do the right thing. Channel 4 Film Review

Jean-Luc Godard wrote a review of Man of the West when it came out, describing "the delightful farm nestling amid the greenery which George Eliot would have loved." If he'd written his review two years later he might have no less aptly connected the ghost town to the modernism of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura. His view of Mann merged image and idea, classical and modern: "Just as the director of The 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, exactly as Matisse's portraits reinvent the features of Piero della Francesca. . . . In other words, he both shows and demonstrates, innovates and copies, criticizes and creates."

Mann (1906-'67) is still cherished today by aficionados of golden-age Hollywood. In the latest issue of CineAction, Robin Wood, perhaps the best critic of that cinema, ranks him alongside George Cukor, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Leo McCarey, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, and Preston Sturges -- all of whom, he notes, "retain their amazing freshness and vitality today." If Mann is less known than the others it may be because his painterly gifts tend to wither on TV screens. Painter-critic Manny Farber first recognized these gifts in the late 40s and early 50s, when Mann still had the "museum space" afforded by 35-millimeter -- resurrected today only in special screenings, such as the Film Center's.

Scripted by Reginald Rose -- a TV dramatist of the 50s second in prominence only to Paddy Chayefsky; his best-known work is probably 12 Angry Men - Man of the West is shot in CinemaScope, yet it's initially hampered by the shallow dramatic space associated with television. This effect is made worse by the casting, which pairs the stagiest of stage actors (Cobb) with the most cinematic of movie actors (Cooper, at 57 only three years from retirement). But Mann is canny enough to turn these limitations to his advantage whenever he can, offering sly notations about Link's physical discomfort on the train and using a long, tense scene inside the farmhouse to create claustrophobia before sending the characters outdoors for virtually the remainder of the picture. Once again, the hero is a dialectical contradiction, both regressing toward an unbearable past and making an anguished effort to break free from it -- the struggle ultimately engendering hatred, violence, pain, and humiliation, and revealing boundless evil.

Classical tragedy is evoked in both these westerns as all of the characters apart from the hero and heroine are gradually killed off. In The Naked Spur, three white men and several Blackfoot Indians die. In Man of the West, the entire gang and one captive are killed, and the penultimate shoot-out in the ghost town is an appropriately eerie split-level confrontation between two wounded, supine men -- one stretched out on a porch at screen left, the other stretched out underneath the porch at screen right, as if he were already buried. It's a key example of the way that landscape and architecture, people and settings, painting and drama, image and idea, classicism and modernism all merge on Mann's monumental canvases. By Jonathan Rosenbaum

7:30 Thurs 10 May

men in war

Anthony Mann  USA  1957  102mins  16mm 18+

An uncomfortable and unflinching study of the effects of prolonged combat on human endurance and psyche, Men in War is Anthony Mann’s foray into the Korean War.

Robert Ryan, stars as Lt. Benson, whose platoon is stranded in enemy territory after a retreat and is forced to work with Sgt. Montana (Aldo Ray), who he despises and whose primary concern is caring for his critically fatigued Colonel. Together they must set aside differences and lead the platoon to hill 465, travelling through grave danger along the way.

The reflections of doomed souls pervade this skilful exploration of that bizarre human institution known as war. Also starring Vic Morrow & L.Q. Jones.

One of the best of the lost patrol movies. Time Out

Mann leaves us a realistic glimpse of the tense interpersonal moments of men pushed into a hostile conflict that no amount of training could prepare them for. Another Mann masterpiece. 4 1/2 Stars  DVD Beaver