Anthony Mann (Twayne's Theatrical Arts Series) [Hardcover]

Jeanine Basinger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1979 | ISBN-10: 0805792635 | ISBN-13: 978-0805792638 | Edition: First Edition

Director of such often-revived films as Winchester '73, The Glenn Miller Story, and El Cid, Anthony Mann enjoyed a lasting and important career as one of Hollywood's premier filmmakers. Mann's Westerns, noir pictures, and epics are admired and studied by fans and scholars alike, and he was an expert in the fundamental elements of cinema (movement and placement of the camera, composition in the frame, and careful editing). Jeanine Basinger's Anthony Mann, which places the director's visual style at the center of its analysis, was among the first formal studies of any filmmaker, and it set a standard in the field over twenty-five years ago. Long out of print and much in demand, this pioneering book is now available again, featuring complete coverage of those Mann films not discussed in the original work, as well as over fifty rare film stills. Wesleyan is proud to issue this expanded edition of an essential text, making it available to new generations of filmgoers and readers.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Thank the film gods that the only serious book in English about Mann is a brilliant one. I am grateful to Basinger's clear-eyed analysis for helping me go ever deeper into the work of one of my absolute favorite directors." (Alexander Payne, co-writer/director, Sideways ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

JEANINE BASINGER is Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University, founder and curator of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives, and the author of nine books on film, including Silent Stars (1999) and The Star Machine (2007). She is a trustee of the National Board of Review and a trustee emeritus of the American Film Institute. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 230 pages
• Publisher: Twayne Pub; First Edition edition (June 1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805792635
• ISBN-13: 978-0805792638
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,345,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pioneering work on an unsung auteur..., December 29, 2007

By 

Thomas Plotkin (West Hartford CT, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Anthony Mann (Wesleyan Film) (Paperback)

Director Anthony Mann rode the wave of a succession of trends in Hollywood between the '40's and the '60's, yet managed to carve out a unique personal style. His career had a pleasing upward trajectory, from grimy black and white b crime dramas,to spectacular technicolor westerns and finally to widescreen cast-of-thousands epics. As his budgets got bigger, his stories were set further and further back in time, and his theme, the capacity for violence within every man's heart as a shared impulse linking heroes and villains, became more mythic and archtypal. First he made a cycle of low-budget film noirs (T-Men, Border Incident, Raw Deal) that with their stunning John Alton lensed chiarscuro cinematography, bleak endings and shocking violence still pack a signficant wallop. Then he made two transitional noir-westerns, the pro-Native American Devil's Doorway and the "House of Atreus on the Range" The Furies, both films infusing the late '40's western with literal and metaphorical darkness.

But the best was yet to come, because the '50's ushered in a 10-film collaboration with Jimmy Stewart, the heart of which are a cycle of 5 hugely influential westerns, perhaps the first modern psychological westerns, foreshadowing the work of Peckinpah and Eastwood. In Winchester '73, The Naked Spur, Bend of the River,The Far Country,and The Man From Larmamie, Mann and Stewart took the Western hero and subjected him to such pressure and tension and stress that he was never the same again. Stewart consistently plays his lone gunman as someone poised between heroic action and possessed by a barely contained violence, usually pitted against a villain who is his double and bloodbrother, and thus the westerner-as-antihero was born. Mann traded his claustrophobic noir mise-en-scene for stunning color location photography, wherein the American wilderness becomes a savage mirror of the primitive impulses lurking beneath the folksy veneer of the Stewart protagonist. In addition, he showed an ability to stage action set-pieces unrivaled by anyone else in '50's Hollywood.

The Westerns culminated in the widescreen Man Of The West, Gary Cooper standing in for Stewart, as a prim schoolteacher whose stagecoach is highjacked by bandits that were once his surrogate family; their journey away from civilization strips away his hard-won sanity, and reveals him to be a vicious killer. Sound familiar? Eastwood has repeatedly said Mann's films are the hidden source of Unforgiven.

In Mann's final period, the early-to-mid '60's, he made a pair of giant post-Ben Hur epics of unusual intelligence, El Cid and Fall of the Roman Empire (which fascinatingly tells the tale of the evil Commodus later depicted in Ridley Scott's Gladiator -- the degree of pessimism Mann evinces is much more convincing than the peculiar and ahistorical rebirth of the Roman Republic at the end of the newer film.)In addition, he was fired off the other brainy epic of the era, Spartacus, due to disagreements with star/producer Kirk Douglas and replaced by the more docile Stanley Kubrick. (Who ended his docility by refusing to set foot in the US ever again after the Spartacus experience...)

Film scholar and educator Jeanine Basinger wrote the first (and I believe only) full length study of Mann's work back in the '70's; much material was cut for publication that has been restored and updated here. The book is marvelous, placing Mann within the context of Hollywood history, industry practices, generic evolution,and his own fascinating and enimatic tempermant. Along the way she makes a convincing argument that as a director of noirs, Westerns and epics (and I haven't even gotten to the bleak Korean War combat film Men In War...)he was the peer of Fritz Lang and John Ford; his handling of violence, psychological realism, and complex mise-en-scene were key steps on the road to the maturation of Hollywood cinema, and the idea that genre films needn't be childish. Basinger writes in a clean, witty and jargon-free style, so rare in film academia today, that the book is a pleasure to read, and should send you running out to seek the films of this simultaneously influential and unknown classical Hollywood giant.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellant, May 9, 2008

By 

Robert J. Ricci (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Anthony Mann (Wesleyan Film) (Paperback)

the book whle very good glossed over the reason for the Mann and Stewart breakup and Mann's contributions to Night Passage. It was great to see the Devil's Doorway get its due.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I wanted so much to like this book..., August 25, 2010

By 

William J. Harper (Austell, Ga. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Anthony Mann (Wesleyan Film) (Paperback)

I wanted so much to like this book. I am a huge fan of Anthony Mann and so was eagerly looking forward to reading Basinger's biography of this underrated director. What a huge let down! Expecting some insight into Mann and the making of his movies, I was instead treated to pretentious pablum passed off as a scholarly treatise. It's not a matter of being daunted by challenging writing-I have a Master's in psychology-it's having to read a constant stream of strained suppositions instead of getting to revel in the acquisition of knowledge. Ms. Basinger waxes poetically as she ascribes the deepest of meanings to almost every frame of Mann's films. In lieu of the collection of the pompous ramblings presented, some in-depth research and a readable presentation would have done a much better job of proclaiming Mann's talents to the world. A chance was missed and the film world is the lesser for it.