The Mann-Stewart westerns are some of the most violent, if not sadistic, of the decade with the hero not far removed from the type of villains he pursues in his neurotic quest for vengeance. It would redefine Stewart's career, taking him from his Capraesque nice-guy image and turning him into a hard-bitten, snarling, unreasonable hero or anti-hero. The pair would go on to have one of the most successful working relationships in westerns but the cherry on top is that one of their three non-westerns was among the most financially successful films of the entire decade.
As a director of westerns, Mann is right up there with John Ford. Both were cowboy poets, revered by lovers of western movies. Both provided a visual splendor to their outdoor dramas... Ford had Monument Valley and Mann had everywhere else. The visual beauty (often in hostile landscapes) of his films is one of those things that makes his work so compelling.
Mann was born in San Diego in 1906 to a Jewish mother who was a drama teacher and an academic father with an Austrian-Catholic background. Shortly after his birth, his parents joined a cult with a focus on religious, artistic and military training and where children were raised separately from parents. Mann's father returned to Austria to receive some specialized help for a medical condition and never saw his son again. Mann did not reunite with his mother until he was 14 when they moved together to New Jersey.
He took on a number of odd jobs during his teenage years because his mother had few funds. Some of his happiest moments during these years were when he appeared in several school plays. He already had the notion that he would one day have a career in show business, probably as an actor.
After graduation from high school in New York, he secured work on Broadway as an actor but sometimes as a set designer and a production manager. He progressed to directing and realized after a short time this was his true calling. Like most directors, he was drawn to being the boss.
In 1939 he came to the attention of mega-producer David O. Selznick who moved Mann to Hollywood, hiring him to do some multi-tasking... scout for talent, direct screen tests and aid in casting. Much as he liked his job and the knowledge he was acquiring, when an assistant director's job came up at Paramount, he was, like, gone with the wind.
After a few years he had impressed the Paramount chieftains to such an extent that they offered him the chance to steer his own movie. Being an assistant anything was not particularly in character for him and he jumped at the chance. In six years he churned out a dozen low-budget thrillers, some of which were decidedly noirish.
Two good noirs with Dennis O'Keefe, T-Men (1947) and Raw Deal (1948) garnered Mann the kind of attention he was seeking. Some of it came from MGM who hired him to helm two even better noirs, both in 1949... Border Incident with Ricardo Montalban and Side Street with Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell, both of whom had just enjoyed success in Nick Ray's They Live by Night.
Mann would never forget 1950. It was the year his career would change and his acclaim guaranteed. It was the year of his first western or, more to the point, the year of his first three westerns.
Devil's Doorway is likely one of those little throwaway projects MGM did just to keep one of its top stars, Robert Taylor, working. But it turned into something more with its sympathetic portrayal of Indians and an uncompromising look at the Indian-white disputes. Its resistance to being cliche-ridden is most noteworthy considering Mann had never directed a western. It introduced the Mann adult western to the world.
That may indeed be the key to the Mann-Stewart success. The actor saw Devil's Doorway and knew that was the approach he wanted in a new Universal-International western he was going to do. It's funny, you know, that actor and director had to sign up with U-I for most of their collaborations whereas most of the talent left that studio to do better work.
Winchester 73 is an utterly watchable piece of noirish western... a perfect blending of two genres. Done in black and white to add to the moodiness, the story follows the rifle as it passes through many hands. Stewart has it stolen from him and is determined to get it back. Audiences of the day didn't usually experience this type of violence in a western and word-of-mouth jacked up the sales. One could rejoice in the scenery-stealing villainy on tap from Dan Duryea and Stephen McNally.
The Furies (1950) was not a great success probably because it was too talky for a western. On the other hand, I liked it because its Freudian twist makes it a most unusual oater. I have confessed to loving watching Indians circling wagon trains in westerns but it was always nice to see something different. This guy, Mann, was on to something. He liked his heroes being trapped in a world that they didn't understand. Here, it's a heroine (although not really) superbly played by Barbara Stanwyck... queen of the western, hands down. She plays a spoiled, rich girl who severely clashes with her overbearing father (wasn't their relationship a little iffy?) when he marries a woman she cannot stand. Veteran character actor Walter Huston is dynamic in his final role.
Mann and Stewart's second pairing came with Bend of the River (1952) and Stewart would star in Mann's next six films. Here Stewart is the leader of a wagon train traveling to an Oregon mountaintop. Along on the trek is Arthur Kennedy, a former Stewart friend, who plans to rob the travelers. This movie, aside from its stunning color photography, boasts a bang-up band of western actors including Julie Adams, Rock Hudson, Lori Nelson, Jay C. Flippen, Harry Morgan and Royal Dano. Great fun.
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| The five stars of The Naked Spur |
Okay, I'll just step up and declare The Naked Spur (1953) is the best of the Mann-Stewart movies. It concerns a bounty hunter in the wilderness who is trying to bring a murderer to justice with the outlaw's girlfriend and two mysterious strangers in tow. They are ace movie villain Robert Ryan along with Janet Leigh, Ralph Meeker and character actor Millard Mitchell, who was also in Winchester 73. Mann loved to show anguished closeups of men and it's done throughout this one. Stewart probably never played a lead role as someone so obsessed, crazed and enraged. The entire movie is filmed outdoors in the Rockies. If I were to name the 10 best westerns ever, regardless of director, this one would be among them.
My guess is the next two films are the ones that were the least and the most financially successful of the partnership. And the funny thing is neither is a western. The first, Thunder Bay (1953), used a number of western actors, too (Flippen, Morgan, Duryea, Joanne Dru and Gilbert Roland) but the story of Louisiana shrimpers duking it out with oilmen didn't excite audiences. I was excited. I love shrimp.
The only music my parents ever seemed to listen to was Big Band music, with some extra attention paid to Glenn Miller. When we heard a movie was being made of his life and career, it took no effort to join my parents for a trip to see The Glenn Miller Story (1954). My mama gushed over the casting of Stewart as Miller and (for the second of three times) June Allyson as his wife. The screenplay toyed with some of the facts but few knew and nobody cared. Those two were so damned perfect for one another, the music gave me tremors and I ignored the whining about the sentimentality. It was a huge money-maker.
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| Folks wondered if they were really married |
The Far Country (1954) felt like a reworking of Bend of the River. Another trek flick, it had our heroes (Walter Brennan is the partner) being menaced by bad guys on a cattle drive through Alaska. When Brennan is killed, Stewart goes from nice guy to, remembering he's in a Mann movie, berserk. John McIntire has one of his best roles as a bad-egg sheriff and leading ladies Ruth Roman and Corrine Calvet do a little sparring.
I suspect The Man from Laramie (1955) is one of the most well-known of the Mann-Stewart movies simply because it's on the tube about 800 times every year. It's long been said the film has been structured like a western King Lear with Mann's edgy, violent, noirish feel and Stewart's uncontrolled rage in full evidence. The story pits a laconic stranger in town against a steely cattle baron, his sadistic son and snaky foreman when the stranger goes to work for a rival. Donald Crisp, Alex Nicol and Arthur Kennedy play the respective roles with great relish.
Strategic Air Command (1955) is the last pairing of director and actor... at least of a completed film. SAC is a real-life outfit belonging to both the Department of Defense and the Air Force and responsible for Cold War command. It seems an unusual choice for Mann to make a movie about but not for Stewart who was a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and a real junkie for this type of film. While filming in the skies, the film does, in fact, soar, but on the ground it's kind of sappy.
The Last Frontier (1955) deals with life at a remote fort where a scout tries to keep a war-mongering colonel from damaging a relationship with local Indians. While it is beautifully filmed and offered engaging performances from Victor Mature, Robert Preston and Guy Madison, it wasn't what the master was capable of putting out.
Serenade (1956), a Mario Lanza musical, is the oddest of all choices for this director. There were some beautiful arias, Joan Fontaine looked more stunning that she's ever looked in another film, and Spanish beauty, costar Sarita Montiel, became Mann's second of three wives.
Mann and Stewart were hired to work on a new western, Night Passage (1957) but they had a terrible argument over the direction the picture would take. Mann's condemnation of costar Audie Murphy's acting and the ridiculous notion of him playing Stewart's brother was also at stake. Mann walked off the picture and the longtime friends and collaborators never spoke to one another again.
The Tin Star (1957), the story of an older bounty hunter teaching a greenhorn the ropes of being a new town sheriff seemed like it should have been a TV movie. I found it dull. It is interesting that Stewart's buddy, Henry Fonda, starred. Mann then made two films with both Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray. Men in War (1957) was underrated and God's Little Acre (1958) overrated.
In my opinion, Man of the West (1958), with another Stewart friend, Gary Cooper, was Mann's last good western and one of his best from the standpoint of its psychological stance. Throughout the film one is tempted to ask who is this guy? Cooper is the best here of his last half dozen films in a less-than-heroic role as a reformed outlaw who comes face-to-face with his past (a Mann western staple).
If 1950 was a good year for the movie director, 1960 was decidedly not. He signed on to direct Spartacus but agreed to not continue after a major falling out with star-producer Kirk Douglas. Mann was fired toward the end of making Cimarron after a fight with its producer although he was still credited as the sole director. Based on the Edna Ferber novel, it contains exciting sequences of the famed Oklahoma Land Rush and a (too) detailed examination of the marriage of Glenn Ford and Maria Schell.
Cimarron was one of those epic-type films and so were his next two, both of which starred Sophia Loren. El Cid (1961), the story of the Spanish hero who defends Christian Spain against the Moors, is largely considered a big success. I'll defer to others on this one because I couldn't stay awake the two times I tried to watch it.
On the other hand, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) flopped with a resounding thud and yet I liked it. It surely had something to do with a gorgeous cast, including, along with Loren, Stephen Boyd, Alec Guinness, James Mason, Christopher Plummer, Omar Sharif, John Ireland and Mel Ferrer.
Mann and Kirk Douglas must have kissed and made up because there he was directing the difficult actor in The Heroes of Telemark (1965). I thought there were some exciting moments in the WWII story of Norwegian resistance fighters out to stop the Germans from making an atomic bomb. It largely failed because too much fiction was added to the true events and Douglas and his equally-difficult costar, Richard Harris, were considered to be miscast as Norwegians.
He'd excelled in film noir, he could have taught seminars on the psychological, adult western and he'd done those epics. Throw in a couple of war films and a few oddities and now he thought it was time for something new. How about a cold war thriller? Why not? Everyone else was taking a shot at them. A Dandy in Aspic (1968) is a quirky piece that folks either liked or didn't... there was no middle. As a huge fan of Laurence Harvey, I liked it.
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| Mann's final film directing Mia Farrow and Laurence Harvey |
Anthony Mann died of a heart attack in Germany while making Dandy. He had filmed most of it but Harvey took over the directorial chores without credit. Mann was 60 years old.
Bless him and his gorgeous westerns. The five with Stewart and the one with Cooper are among the very best of the genre. Mann's generally restless nature made him an ideal director for westerns. His heroes were always restless. He was often compared to another auteur, John Ford, whose example Mann did not follow. Ford preferred the big stories, steeped in myth, while Mann infused his westerns with a healthy dose of noir about ordinary men and women. They scratched and clawed to be heard and to survive, often regretting the road they chose to travel.
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A good 50's film
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