Press release
Dark Streets and Vast Horizons: The American Vision of
Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann, born Emil Anton Bundesmann, began his career in show business on the New York stage, first as a child actor, then as a production manager, and finally as a director.
He was brought to Hollywood by David O. Selznick, and he shot many of the screen tests for Gone with the Wind and Rebecca. He left Selznick in the mid-40s and began his movie-directing career making a series of visually distinctive B pictures, each one more inventive than the next.
Of his film noirs of the late 40s, most of them made with the great cameraman John Alton, Manny Farber wrote: "The films of this tin-can de Sade have a Germanic rigor, a caterpillar intimacy, and an original dictionary of ways in which to punish the human body." You can lose yourself in the velvety shadows of those films, and in their beautifully, almost geometrically precise action.
Then, in the early 50s, Mann went outdoors with James Stewart and quietly altered the Western genre. Until they quarrelled during the production of Night Passage in 1957, Mann and Stewart made eight marvelous films together, the last seven in a row. The best of them introduced a new frankness to American cinema, thanks to the boldness of Stewart's often dangerously neurotic characterizations, and to the almost supernatural acuity of Mann's eye for the great outdoors. No one — not Ford, not Hawks, not Daves — had made such creative use of the American West.
Few filmmakers anywhere have dramatized space itself so excitingly. And in his last great films, including MAN OF THE WEST and EL CID, that feeling for open space rises to an almost abstract level. A brilliant craftsman, the likes of whom we will not see again, and a fiercely intelligent artist, Anthony Mann more than deserves his place in the pantheon of great American filmmakers.
[The above citation was used to promote a 25-film retrospective in NYC / August 11 – 29, 2004]
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Dark Streets and Vast Horizons: The American Vision of
Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann, born Emil Anton Bundesmann, began his career in show business on the New York stage, first as a child actor, then as a production manager, and finally as a director.
He was brought to Hollywood by David O. Selznick, and he shot many of the screen tests for Gone with the Wind and Rebecca. He left Selznick in the mid-40s and began his movie-directing career making a series of visually distinctive B pictures, each one more inventive than the next.
Of his film noirs of the late 40s, most of them made with the great cameraman John Alton, Manny Farber wrote: "The films of this tin-can de Sade have a Germanic rigor, a caterpillar intimacy, and an original dictionary of ways in which to punish the human body." You can lose yourself in the velvety shadows of those films, and in their beautifully, almost geometrically precise action.
Then, in the early 50s, Mann went outdoors with James Stewart and quietly altered the Western genre. Until they quarrelled during the production of Night Passage in 1957, Mann and Stewart made eight marvelous films together, the last seven in a row. The best of them introduced a new frankness to American cinema, thanks to the boldness of Stewart's often dangerously neurotic characterizations, and to the almost supernatural acuity of Mann's eye for the great outdoors. No one — not Ford, not Hawks, not Daves — had made such creative use of the American West.
Few filmmakers anywhere have dramatized space itself so excitingly. And in his last great films, including MAN OF THE WEST and EL CID, that feeling for open space rises to an almost abstract level. A brilliant craftsman, the likes of whom we will not see again, and a fiercely intelligent artist, Anthony Mann more than deserves his place in the pantheon of great American filmmakers.
[The above citation was used to promote a 25-film retrospective in NYC / August 11 – 29, 2004]
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