Later this week, the recently revived Northwest Chicago Film Society presents a screening of Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River, one of the director’s numerous collaborations with actor James Stewart. Mann and Stewart made different kinds of movies together, but it’s the westerns that endure. Psychologically knotty and unconventionally violent, the films’ revisionist nature reshaped the traditional western landscape by acting as allegories of masculinity under fire during the Cold War. Mann’s characters struggle with any number of personal crises—paranoia, insecurity, delusion—and are often searching for things that start out clear but grow murkier as their stories progress. His films are almost always suspenseful, but not in any sort of obvious or cloying way. As much as his legacy is tied to his westerns, he excelled in noir and character drama, and more often than not, he utilized the same stylistic conventions across all genres, transcending Hollywood convention and paving the way for the iconoclastic directors of the late 60s and 70s. (Mann’s influence on the likes of Martin Scorsese and Sam Peckinpah cannot be understated.) You can find my five favorite Mann films after the jump.
- Raw Deal (1948) Perhaps the director’s earliest triumph, a uniquely gothic noir with a fatalistic story and some uncharacteristically melodramatic moments. Overall, it has the sort of lean, precise style Mann would build his career on, the kind that eschews needless screenplay contrivances in favor of high visual style and a story that unfolds through decisive, intelligent editing. The film features a number of remarkable close-ups, a trademark for the director, and they’re intensified by the almost oppressively dark cinematography—Mann often fills the frame with pure blackness, occasionally drawing a single slice of light across the screen to keep the audience attuned to the action.
