AUG. 11-29
THE TITLE OF this series encompasses the widely varied realms in which director Anthony Mann worked. Beginning as a dependable producer of gritty low-budget noirs, Mann hit his creative peak in a set of westerns starring James Stewart before wrapping up his career with a series of blockbuster historical epics.
Though every aspect of Mann's career is intriguing, his collaborations with Stewart are remarkable, one of the finest meldings of director and actor in American film history. Mann gave Stewart the opportunity to break out from aw-shucks leading-man gigs, while Stewart gave Mann the star power and intensity his parables of spiritual, emotional and physical conflict demanded. Stewart is outfitted similarly in each of the westerns, creating a common thread between the films; his silver hair and battered, furled hat bespeak long, harsh experience. In addition to being some of the best westerns ever made, Mann-Stewart collaborations like The Naked Spur, are also utterly devoid of fluff.
Mann brooked no excess baggage in his lean, unrelenting films. Bad becomes worse without fail, as if Murphy's Law were the cornerstone of the universe. Like a composer fiddling with different variants on the same theme, each of the Mann westerns features Stewart as an ethically compromised hero single-mindedly focused on his task, dueling with an unreconstructed baddie for bragging rights and the heart of the slightly mysterious woman who must choose between them. Stewart is also often partnered with an older man who serves as a counterpoint to his frazzled fervor, a ballast in the rough waters of struggle.
Early films like T-Men and Raw Deal bear a similar flavor of paranoia, hostility and violence, but Mann is out of his element on the mean urban streets. Surprisingly, his pessimistic vision of human avarice and cruelty works best in color and in the wide-open vistas of the American West. Mann's later epic phase is also slightly askew.
A little-known gem from 1957, Men in War is probably Mann's most successful non-Stewart film. Starring Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray as Korean War infantrymen, this unbearably tense story of one platoon's desperate efforts to return to friendly territory is a razor-sharp depiction of the soldier's lot. When one of his men dies, Lt. Benson (Robert Ryan) takes out a safety pin from his kit, removes the dead man's dog tag and adds it to the fistful he already carries. Mann's war film is too intimate with the minute-to-minute quest for survival of the infantry soldier to be called antiwar. Rather, like a telescope providing views of far-off planets, it focuses on horizons distant to the viewer, believing that with seeing comes understanding.
Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, 165 W. 65th St. (B'way), 212-875-5600; call for times, $10, $7 st.
