Anthony Mann

So Film Forum is continuing their Year of Greatness (so far they've done a Victor Fleming fest, a Kurosawa fest, the restored Metropolis, Five Easy Pieces, Breathless, and they have a Chaplin fest coming up...and The Prowler, which was totally ballin') with an Anthony Mann retrospective at the end of the month. I'm sad to say I didn't make it to as many of the aformentioned festivals as I would have liked, but I'm recommitting myself to seeing more movies at FF before the year is out.

Since Mann's features seem to demand to be seen on the big screen, I hope to get to as many of these as possible. I know The Furies and his four-film cycle with Jimmy Stewart is a must, as is the proto-procedural He Walked By Night (which I saw on a really crappy DVD transfer), but how are his epics? His other noirs? Is there anything I need to be on the look-out for?

Showing both of those!

I love seeing stuff in the theater -- with the classics, I try to do it whenever possible -- and I got a membership for Christmas that gives me tickets at six bucks a pop. That membership would be worth it alone for the chance to see Seven Samurai, Five Easy Pieces, Gone With The Wind, and The Red Shoes on the big screen for the first time, all of which I did this year. I'm sure I could make the effort to go out to BAM or up to Lincoln Center/MOMA, but again, it's not as cheap and Film Forum is closer to me.

My big problem with Film Forum is that its clientele tends to be older, and thus, noiser/creakier, but at least it's not pretension central like the IFC center is.

So I'm putting together my viewing schedule for the next three weeks (and hopefully I'll be posting my thoughts in this thread, too), and I have the films I am moving heaven and earth and my schedule at the call center where I work for. However, there are a few films on the list that I'm not sure about. I'd be curious to hear if any are must-sees, and which are worth seeing. Here's the list of candidates:

Bamboo Blonde
Devil's Doorway -- Elvis, saw you recommended this. Any reason why?
God's Little Acre
Thunder Bay
The Tin Star
The Glenn Miller Story*
Desperate
The Great Flamroon
Reign of Terror

*I don't really like Glenn Miller as a musician, that's why I'm wary about this one.

First two days and two of the Mann-Stewart collaborations down!

Winchester '73 was great, great, great. It might be one of my new favorite Westerns. I loved the symbolism of the titular weapon passing through the different hands that won the west, from the Native Americans to the bandits to the homesteaders to the con artists. The movie runs rich with the mythology of the West, with character cameos by Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, to the specter of Little Big Horn hanging over the days in which the film is set, to the 'dead man's hand' of Bill Hickcok. Mann's lighting in this makes the whole thing feel very modern, and the film is sort-of-episodic, but it rarely strays from Jimmy Stewart's pursuit of justice. I like how even though he wins and gets his gun back and his vengance, we end on a shot of his face/the rifle and it's ambiguous as to whether or not he can truly go back to a normal life. I really dug his relationship with Millard MItchell, too. There's a lot going on underneat the surface of this film, and I want to watch it again soon. That, and Dan Dureya is a lot of fun as a villian in the last act of the picture, plus, Stephen McNally sounds like Ian McShane.

I wasn't quite as nuts about The Naked Spur as I was about Winchester, but it looked absolutely gorgeous, even in a less-than-restored print. One of the things that I loved about it was how much of it seemed to be shot on location, including the climax. Mann's landscapes and vistas are knocking me out. I thought the middle of the movie dragged a little bit, but I really dug the cast for this one. Ralph Meeker in particular, I knew him only from Kiss Me Deadly -- he's kind of a pimp in this. I also liked Robert Ryan, who I know we have a thread about. Millard Mitchell was fun, but I didn't like him as much as I did in W73. Besides the dragging, I was kind of put off by the ending -- Stewart plays this driven, obsessed guy for the entire movie, and then he just gives up his pursuit because Janet Leigh falls in love with him? It makes sense, as Stewart's seen everyone on his crew die except Leigh, and maybe he realizes that if he continues his pursuit of greed, he'll die too. Still, it was a lot of fun. This is a movie I'm surprised they haven't remade or set in space or some shit yet.

I'll write more about the two noirs I saw, Raw Deal (which is easily in my top 10 noirs now. Fucking gorgeous movie.) and T-Men, possibly tomorrow, but here's my ranking so far:

1. WInchester '73
2 (tie) Raw Deal/The Naked Spur
3. T-Men

Tomorrow: Dr. Broadway, Mann's debut, for sure and maybe The Bamboo Blonde

Oh, I really liked Stewart's acting in Naked Spur, no doubt. I think the problem for me -- and the film is growing on me, especially the visuals and the colors -- is that the minute Stewart finds Ryan with the other two, he goes bugfuck crazy and is pulling his six shooters and ranting and raving. Based on that first-act impression, even though we learn more about his backstory and why he's so obsessed, it didn't feel like he was descending into madness and sacrifice, because he was already kind of crazy. The opposite of that was slowly learning that Ryan is a badder dude than we think, which was an arc/reveal that I really enjoyed.

I was going to touch on this after I saw Devil's Doorway, but since that looks like it's not going to happen (stupid work schedule), I wanted to say that I was really impressed by Mann's fair (if surfacely sterotypical) portrayal of the Native Americans in the two westerns I saw. They were the agresssors in both, but in Naked Spur, he lingers on the slaughtered bodies and Stewart's reaction to it just long enough for it to sink in, and I really dug that.