The Best Mann

His apprentice films (I've seen five of the 10) give little indication of the achievements to come, but they have their moments. The Great Flamarion, with Erich Von Stroheim as a jilted, jealous lover, begins with a 1 min. 42 sec. opening shot, in which the camera perches outside a Mexico City vaudeville theater, pauses courteously while customers buy their tickets and present them to the doorman, then tracks slowly down the center aisle for the climax of a cape-twirling act and the beginning of a clown routine. We hear gunfire, and the scene changes; the shot ends the shot. Toward the beginning of another 1945 film, the musical Sing Your Way Home, there's a shot, a full minute long, that gracefully zigzags backward, with the confidence of an Olympic skater, eventually revealing 14 kids singing, dancing and playing "Heaven Is a Place Called Home."

Most of the early Mann films, though, show how dependent he was on Hollywood clichés. In the 1946 Strange Impersonation, scientists Brenda Marshall and William Gargan (we know they're intellectuals because they both wear nerdy spectacles and have bad posture) are engaged to be married, much to the vexation of lab assistant Hillary Brooke. Through some strenuous plot exertions, Marshall has a fight on her penthouse terrace with another scheming scheming woman, who plunges to her death on the sidewalk below. "Fell right on her face," a bystander observes. "They wouldn't be able to tell who it is." Marshall, lurking out of sight, overhears this: cue the identity switch! It's one of those movies where a slight style change keeps people from recognizing the lead character. Superman had his spectacles; Marshall has a new hairdo. The movie needed a makeover.

Mann's early films also needed performers with snazzier screen presence. These movies had the noir plots and attitude, but neither the actors to give the stories a fatalist heft nor the actresses beautiful and seductive enough to play a plausible femme fatale. In The Great Flamarion — a triangle drama in which a woman misuses the two men who desire her —Dan Duryea says of his wife, "Any guy who wouldn't fall for you is either a sucker or he's dead." Unfortunately, the wife is played by Mary Beth Hughes, who's pretty deficient in the allure category.

It's not that stars in the making weren't available to Mann. Gorgeous young Jane Greer was an RKO ingénue when Mann was there, just two years before her breakthrough role in Out of the Past. In fact, she had her first billed role in Mann's Two O'Clock Courage, where, at 20, she is already sultry and spoiled; and she appears again in his The Bamboo Blonde. But Mann apparently didn't see what Greer had: the high forehead, full lips and amoral aura that gave her a drop-dead-with-a-smile-on-your-face sexual charisma. The director let this budding femme fatale languish at the edge of the frame, while the not-so-hot Hughes and Frances Langford took center-screen.

If some Hollywood tout were to have set a morning line on B-list directors of the mid-'40s, he would have put his money on Edgar G. Ulmer, who with such no-budget films as Bluebeard and Detour was spinning gold out of Poverty Row dross. But fate had a couple of twists in store. Ulmer never graduated to A-level movies. Mann did — after making some remarkable killer Bs.

DARK MANN

Few people noticed it at the time, but in 1947 Mann vaulted from nowhere to the top rank of directors. His filmography seems to explode, with movies as lurid and paranoid as their names. Desperate. Raw Deal. Railroaded! Great pulp titles, suitable for a trashy paperback, though they were all original screen stories. (The studios Mann worked for couldn't afford to option novels or plays; their writers had to make it up as they went along.)

Mann's first successful noir, Desperate sets the mood for the whole cycle. It's about one of those days when everything goes wrong. Steve (Steve Brodie), a decent Joe who's been married to loving Anne (Audrey Long) for four months, gets a call one evening to make some easy money driving his truck for Walt (Raymond Burr), a guy he used to know. The truck, Steve learns, is to be used for a heist, and when he protests he's forced into it, and spotted by the police. He gets away, but Walt's brother Al is picked up. Now Steve is on the bad side of the cops and, worse, Walt. The big man has an unattractive side: sadistic psychosis. He breaks a liquor bottle and hulks toward Steve (the camera). "Say, I'll bet that bride of yours is pretty. ... If Al doesn't walk out of that police station by midnight, your wife ain't gonna be so good to look at."