We’re happy to present an excerpt from Scout Tafoya’s new book on the work of Anthony Mann. The synopsis from Amazon is below, followed by the excerpt. Get your copy here.
He brought sadism and shocking violence to the western, he staged the French revolution on a backlot for a pauper’s pittance, he remade the Hollywood epic, he died in the middle of his last film before he could be properly appreciated, and he’s still relatively unheralded. Anthony Mann did all this in just over twenty years, going from low budget programmers to the most expensive, star-studded films the world had ever seen, and leaving one classic after another in his wake. Author Scout Tafoya (But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, Cinemaphaghy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper) looks at every Mann film, with special emphasis on his 1949 guillotine opera The Black Book or Reign of Terror, the most gleefully black-hearted, erotically depraved achievement of 40s low budget cinema. Discover and rediscover a master of American cinema…
For the last little bit I’d been collecting prose about Anthony Mann, maybe the best B-movie auteur in America (though he did eventually become an A list director) and decided, rather than bug my fiends and editors Nell Minow and Jon Nix, who edited and published my previous books “But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century,” and “Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper,” both of which I was privileged to run excerpts on RogerEbert.com before, I’d just frisbee this at the public. One more collection of poetry in service of an artist whose star never falls, but doesn’t quite rise anymore either. Though perhaps a new Criterion edition of “Winchester ’73 “might rekindle interest in the great director. I reason Jon and Nell, who did such exquisite work and were shining beacons of support for me and my work in hard, hard times, and their companies Miniver Press and With An X books deserved something a little more concrete than this, a book without a thesis, just a lot of love, and hopefully style enough to keep readers hanging on. Having said that I am proud of all 38 blurbs within, including an extra long piece on Mann’s wonderful Black Book, one of the craziest American movies full stop, exclusive to this book. Enjoy this blurb and preview on Winchester ’73, one of Mann’s best westerns, which makes it one of the best westerns of all time.
Winchester ’73 – 1950
“An Indian would sell his soul to own one…” Hardly a bright beginning to this quite dark western, Mann’s first. Jimmy Stewart’s natural itchy Americana is starting to grow strange and tired, like he woke up from his filibuster and the country hadn’t changed at all. There’s nobody honest and virtuous in Dodge City which Stewart’s canvassing (with a shooting contest as sting) looking for an outlaw named Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally). Marshall Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) and his brother Virgil (Guy Wilkerson) take his gun and take him to the saloon. Millard Mitchell is Stewart’s second, and between him and Earp, they just about manage from keeping he and McNally from killing each other with imaginary six shooters in the bar. They both reach for them like phantom limbs. “Money won’t buy it, and it’d be wrong to sell it.” He’s talking about the rifle of the title, the prize in a shootin’ match, but he means the soul, too. Stewart and McNally talk to each other like jilted lovers; this dynamic, too, seems a sequel to another classic, Howard Hawks’ “Red River” if Montgomery Clift and John Ireland’s affair had continued, then ended badly. Stewart would later play Wyatt Earp in John Ford’s “Cheyenne Autumn”.
“All I need is a beaver hat and I’ll be dressed for Easter.” The film’s structure is a marvelous revision of the oater, with the gun’s changing fortunes our anchor more than any of its owners, like the same year’s “La Ronde” by Max Ophüls, finally. Perfectly the French film centers on amorous connection between strangers and the American looks at a shooting iron as stand-in for all its country symbolizes. William H. Daniels drinks in the unforgiving light of the desert and its chiaroscuro counterpoints by night, whether in a room with shades to mask a beating or out on the trail as the enemy closes in with murder in his eyes. Daniels had been, in the parlance of “Winchester”, shooting holes in postage stamps like Stewart long before Mann needed a suitable John Alton stand-in. He won an Oscar for “The Naked City” under Jules Dassin’s direction, who like Alton and Mann, had been inventing noir’s new language at the end of the 40s. He shot a passel of classics for Lubitsch, Stroheim, Cukor, Mamoulian, some minor Wellman, and Clarence Brown’s gorgeous “Flesh and the Devil“ with Greta Garbo. He (and Mann) is all about atmosphere, as if he were still shooting silent films. He hangs out in the gorgeous environs, every watering hole and desert trading post, and just let tensions simmer in the noon day sun.
“You’re beginning to like it…” The gun passes between/before John McIntire’s shiftless trader, a grizzled sergeant played by the ever-reliable Jay C. Flippen and his fresh-faced corporal Tony Curtis, good time gal Shelley Winters, angry brave Rock Hudson (Douglas Sirk likes what he sees), Charles Drake’s hapless, lying entrepreneur and Dan Duryea’s sadistic outlaw. It’s both a pleasure and trouble to spend time with each of them, hatred and mistrust and murder behind them, as if bad vibes wore the suits of men. Mann’s pursuit of a more relaxed pace (like a snake who knows its prey can’t escape) and Stewart, trying to prove he was more than Capra’s earnest dreamer, is perfect as a hitch-stepped, dust coated grudge hunter. He wants satisfaction bad. When he erupts into violence, you’d almost convinced yourself he wasn’t like that, that the man who instinctively grabbed a gun was responding to conditioning, not the direction of his twisted heart. Stewart would continue to let self-loathing and fury and persecution seep into his characters for Mann as the 50s wore on, allowing himself, he who stood in for veterans on the home front, to become a lacerating object, a cancer in the saddle. Hitchcock would take even more advantage of him, turning him into a pervert P.I. and a coercive husband drugging his wife. Even with all these cutthroats around you don’t exactly feel safer around him. Evidently this was also the first time an actor received points in exchange for a lower salary.
“You think they’d let a man keeps his hair…” Mann’s methodology is deliberately anti-Fordian, with handheld chaos and menacing landscapes suggesting not the beauty and promise of a land but its treachery and deceit. Its haunting and tough, which Ford so rarely chased as a matter of course, but then Mann was always much more eager to mine for frailty. His Wyatt Earp isn’t nearly so agreeably stoic as Ford’s. The figure Mann cut by now was like Stewart’s, heading from place to place, story to story, just doing his best, purpose drilling down wherever he landed. For the first time he wasn’t chasing breakneck plot, he was just inhaling behavior, like the romantic look of relief on Stewart’s face when he wakes and realizes he’s alive and Winters and Mitchell are, too, or Flippen and Winters’ brief, abstract flirtation when she escapes death. The Mann landscapes come to seem conjured to enact biblical violence. Nobody can win out here, with guns above and below, and the angry sun judging all of them.
