Tuesday, September 16, 2008
A Fifties Filmmaker With Intelligence & Classic Sensibilities
My favorite writing, discussion and criticism on film is by filmmakers and those who later became filmmakers. Academics and popular press criticism certainly has its place, but the ebullience and admiration of the art and craft of film in Truffaut's writing in Cahiers du Cinema, for instance, reflects the intensity and impact the art form has made on him. This is also the case with the early criticism of Wim Wenders. More recently, interviews with the likes of Quentin Tarantino or the long form film lectures of Scorsese where he demonstratively rolls through clips that show his admiration for American and Italian Cinema are engaging introductions to what films and filmmakers matter to these artists. What one learns about in these resources like these or the journal, Projections, which was edited by John Boorman who are the filmmakers for filmmakers.
Anthony Mann and Douglas Sirk are certainly filmmmaker's filmmakers. In the television-plagued Hollywood of the fifties, they both prospered as journeyman artists in the system who were able to create personal, visually oriented entertainments that have proven to be highly influential and still stand out as visions individual and impressive. I'm finding myself getting hooked on their work and that a Mann western or a Sirk melodrama is a great way to kick back on a Sunday afternoon. These are more than storytellers, they also possess the ability to tell stories in highly individual ways.
Mann is noted for his westerns of the fifties that have psychological content and character studies, as well as solid plots with loads of cinematic action and as much location shooting as he can include. Many of these starred Jimmy Stewart. I'm most familiar with Bend in the River, which I once watched in a Forest Service cabin along the Willamette River, and it felt like I was almost near the set of this film that was shot on the east and south side of Mt Hood. Probably the best known of the Mann/Stewart collaborations is Winchester 73.
Most recently I viewed the Criterion Collection release of Mann's The Furies starring Walter Huston in full coot mode and Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck has a heck of a time. She has a repressed love a long time Mexican sqautter who has been on her father's ranch for a long time, falls head over heels for a dandy who is more interested in settling a long time score over land with Huston, and is thrust into a major Electra complex conflict further when Huston announces his intent to marry a fairly awful urban socialite gold digger. This 1950 film may not be groundbreaking, but this is not the kind of stuff one routinely saw in the first twenty years of talkies.
"You can have patricide, every kind of 'cide' in a western and get away with it because its sort of where all action took place" Mann says in an interview included on the DVD for British television in 1967, the year he died. In the interview he talked about the immediacy of film which he attributes to its nature of being a medium of sight. "Everything has to be a picture," is how Mann stresses the visual nature of film. He talks about how his films are filled with men with a purpose who gets somewhere (or in the case of The Furies, a woman.) These are not necessarily heroes but individuals an audience can identify with.
Another DVD featurette, a contemporary interview with Mann's daughter, Nina, gives insight into Mann's origins. Between 1906 and 1919, his early years were spent in Point Loma at the Theosophical Institute, a non-traditional commune-like utopian experiment where children were removed from their parents. But this is also where he received an education in the Greek classics and Shakespearean plays that were performed in an outdoor Greek amphitheater for the local community.
I found a great deal of satisfaction and entertainment in The Furies and look forward to serving up Mann's body of work down here in the bunker buffet. I imagine there will be more comments on Mann to come in future blog entries.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:36 PM
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