“Thief” (1981)
It’s rare that with a filmmaker’s first theatrical feature we get to stare straight at a near-perfect iteration of what he will become, but that’s the case with Michael Mann and the terrific “Thief.” It’s a film that, while wearing its influences on its sleeve (touchstones “Rififi” and “Le Cercle Rouge” are called to mind by the wordless opening heist scene), is its own animal, and went on itself to become so influential that its induction into the Criterion Collection, while certainly welcome, feels long overdue (for a while this elegant, spare, character-driven crime drama was relatively undervalued). This is doubly incomprehensible when you consider that it contains the self-judged best performance from James Caan (what, do you really need us to remind you he was in “The Godfather”?), as well as one of the greatest undersung debut performances ever from 51-year-old Robert Prosky, and a very strong candidate for the single greatest scene that Mann has ever directed: a diner scene that is mirrored by its more famous counterpart in “Heat.” In “Thief,” however, rather than Pacino and De Niro, the scene features Caan and Tuesday Weld, and delivers, through dialogue that is at the same time transparently performed and heightened beyond strictest realism, everything you need to know about these two complex characters, especially Frank (Caan). And even this early in his career, Mann shows his uncanny knack for creating something epic and tragic and sweepingly dramatic out of details that in other hands could be hammy cliches: witness Frank’s pathetic collage, culled from magazines cuttings, that depicts the dream life for which he strives. In anyone else’s hands that’s the picture of the sailboat the doomed guy’s gonna buy when he retires, but Mann and Caan make it something else, something compelling and desperate and lonely and sad. Slickly lit night driving scenes as neon reflections bounce across windscreens (prefiguring “Blade Runner” ‘s aesthetic by a year; the comparison is especially noticeable in the new Criterion version), an authenticity borne of deep research and a spartan, uncondescending attitude to the audience’s intelligence are also precursor Mann trademarks in evidence here, but this is much more than simply a film for completists. With its gory, slo-mo shotgun blasts, late-stage pyrotechnics and a Tangerine Dream score that’s either iconic or irritatingly dated, depending on your viewpoint, at the very beginning of the decade “Thief” embodied many of the earmarks of what we now recognize as ’80s cinema, even debuting such subsequently familiar faces as Prosky, Dennis Farina and James Belushi. But with its unwavering focus on character, lived-in performances and almost Bressonian interest in the minutiae of procedure—the tools, the craft, the effort—it also entirely transcends its time period to become something very close to a classic. [A]
“The Keep” (1983)
Not so much a skeleton in Mann’s closet as a gigantic hulking glowy-eyed smoke monster in his remote Romanian fortress, “The Keep” is inarguably a total shambles, but it is a kind of fascinating shambles. That Mann essayed it at all is seems in retrospect tremendously unlikely, but it’s proof that whatever the rest of his filmography suggests, Mann wasn’t always laser-focused on being the master of the low-key, pulsating, urban crime drama, and indeed, after the modest success of his theatrical debut “Thief” appears to have looked at this story of Nazis, priests, immortal demon thingies, Romanian peasants and wheelchair-bound Jewish professors of arcana and thought “Hey! Maybe that’s my wheelhouse!” The novel of the same name by F. Paul Wilson is reportedly a sweeping epic of real-world historical evil coming into contact with otherworldly evil and perhaps, in its original, reportedly 3 1/2-hour cut, the film would have been that too, but the truncated 96-minute version that got released seems to have been assembled quite arbitrarily with no thought for story coherence or character consistency. And so things happen in a bewildering, unprompted fashion: from one scene to the next people show up in places where decades of film language development suggest they can’t already be; characters change from crazy to sane and back again without apparent cause; Eva (the blankly doe-eyed Alberta Watson), the daughter of Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellen), falls into bed with the mysterious glowy-eyed avenging angel Glaeken (Scott Glenn) having known him for about 30 seconds and engages in one of those long writhy sex scenes on which the ’80s expended most of its celluloid. (But if the love story did it for you, there’s even an alternate ending where they reunite.) It’s batshit bonkers and about as far as imaginable from the cool, slick-but-gritty restraint that became Mann’s signature, though the set design and some bravura camera moves certainly hint that there’s more going on in terms of visual style, than a mere journeyman would bring. And there are flashes of something better—some of the speeches given to the ‘good German’ (Jurgen Prochnow) or to the evil SS officer played by Gabriel Byrne, actually bring up unusual philosophical questions before we abruptly cut away to something daft. With a Tangerine Dream score on hand to remind us that though the film may be set in 1941, it was made in 1983, and that occasionally feels like an extended Kim Carnes intro, “The Keep” amounts to the one thing that Mann movies can never otherwise be accused of: camp. The director’s filmography is short enough that almost every entry has some superlative with which we can sum it up, and this one is no different: it is, by a very, very wide margin Mann’s silliest film, though not without its passing, largely wtf?, pleasures. [C]
“Manhunter” (1986)
While Jonathan Demme’s 1991 masterpiece “Silence of the Lambs” popularized serial killer icon Hannibal Lecter, it was Mann who first brought the character to the screen (here spelled Lecktor) for 1986’s deeply underrated but recently rehabilitated “Manhunter.” William Peterson, fresh from his role in “To Live and Die In L.A.,” plays unhinged FBI profiler Will Graham who is brought back into the fold when a serial killer, playfully dubbed The Tooth Fairy (played, in the movie’s last hour, by a ghostly Tom Noonan), proves too elusive for the investigators who are actually working the case. Brian Cox essays the famed serial killer in this incarnation, giving the character an air of European sophistication and maintaining his British accent. All adaptations involving the character that have been released in the years since “Manhunter” (including Brett Ratner’s clumsy remake “Red Dragon,” which airlifts whole sequences from Mann’s original) owe a debt to Cox’s characterization, whether they want to admit it or not, but the real star of “Manhunter” is Mann himself, who both wrote the screenplay (from Thomas Harris’ novel) and directed the film, with a cool, detached, super-stylized aesthetic that is just as striking today as it was nearly 30 years ago. “Manhunter” is a treat for the eyes, full of sharp neon colors, lengthy static shots and frames largely taken up with empty space, so pristine and meticulously planned that it feels like the perfectly symmetrical locations are going to swallow up the characters. However with a running time of over two hours, it does occasionally drag and is often undermined by both its fidelity to Harris’ original novel (certainly his least zippy) and its oddball structure, in which, about halfway through the movie, The Tooth Fairy becomes the main character and Peterson and his family are unceremoniously sidelined. Still, aside from these issues, it’s interesting to watch “Manhunter” in context of the Lecter canon, with Dennis Farina playing a character that was later dramatized by Scott Glenn, Harvey Keitel and, on NBC’s cracking series “Hannibal,” Laurence Fishburne, and comparing the different embodiments of Lecter—Cox’s, Anthony Hopkins‘ and Mads Mikkelsen‘s is a diverting masterclass in how three brilliant actors can take the same character, and in the context of three different productions, make him their own. In retrospect, too, Peterson’s characterization works for the most part, although his somewhat wooden performance was widely lampooned when the movie was originally released. But for Mann, at least, “Manhunter,” which was his first time back in the saddle after the critical and commercial disappointment of “The Keep,” saw him regain his sure-footedness and confidence and set him back on track to becoming the filmmaker we know him to be today.[B+]
