![Waterloo Bridge (1940) Vivien Leigh, Robert Taylor [All Region, Import, B & W]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/616RtDzvJ1L._AC_UL140_SR140,140_.jpg)
"Where are the rest of you?"
"We're all gone."
Only available in the US in a manufactured on demand DVD-R, Devil's Doorway is easily the least seen of all of Anthony Mann's Westerns - not surprisingly, since it's also the darkest by far, the extraordinary The Naked Spur included. All the hallmarks of his later classics are there, but without any commercial compromise. In most of Mann's westerns, the hero is redeemed kicking and screaming in spite of himself. In Devil's Doorway alone it is not the hero who is in need of redemption, but the country, an idea he wouldn't return to until 1964's The Fall of the Roman Empire. You know that there is no way this one is going to have a happy ending: against all expectations for major studio fare of its day, it doesn't.
It constantly goes against the grain, even the casting playing against expectations, with a monumentally miscast Robert Taylor, replete with none-too-convincing make-up as the Native American hero, gradually managing to shrug off his matinee idol image to turn in his best screen performance - headstrong, angry and surprisingly impassioned - in a role that must have been surprisingly relevant when the film was shot only four years after the end of WW2. Like many GIs returning from the war (be it WW2 or Korea), his character has spent the past few years fighting for the American dream in the Civil War only to find out that he's not eligible, in his case by virtue of his color. The notion of a truly United States that he fought for, a utopia where people "didn't die for nothing," proves a lie. The sense of post-war disillusionment that fuelled the film noir genre constantly drives both the story and the remarkable visual style of the film in ways almost unique in the genre.
In a curious but highly effective inversion of traditional lighting techniques, in the night scenes the foregrounds and interiors are darkly lit, rendering the players silhouettes, while the valley that dominates the action is clearly visible. The film noir connections go beyond John Alton's lighting. Like the traditional noir hero, Taylor finds that nothing he does can avert the deepening nightmare that ultimately destroys him. He tries to act within the law, but finds himself frustrated by it at every turn. Despite fighting for the United States and earning a Congressional Medal, he finds that in the eyes of the law he is not even an American citizen. It is illegal for him to homestead his own land. It is illegal for him to buy it back from homesteaders. Even a petition from the few sympathetic townspeople is dismissed out of hand.
Yet surprisingly, instead of reducing his plight to black and white moral issues, Guy Trosper's screenplay deals in shades of grey. The sheep men who persecute him are not the caricatures you might expect - their problems are just as pressing as his. Nor is the racial prejudice overdone or driven home with sledgehammer pontificating: the hate is there, so ingrained that it doesn't need to be emphasised. Even Louis Calhern's tormenter-in-chief regards hating `redskins' as such a natural thing that he never descends into overstated melodramatic villainy, the actor responding with a skilled performance that makes him all the more immoveable and unyielding for being the human incarnation of the way things have always been. Mann underplays his `comeuppance,' placing it well before the film's finale (remarkably similar to the pitched battle at the end of Cimino's `Heaven's Gate) and its tragic conclusion. It is inevitable, unsatisfying and ultimately resolves nothing. Like everything else Lance does on both sides of the law, it is totally futile. From the moment he returns, he has no control over his fate.
There is no doubt that the film would never have been made without the influence of Dore Schary, the liberal at King Louis' court at MGM, but with this and his later, bitterly disillusioned Men in War, it is surprising that Mann did not come under the kind of unwelcome scrutiny by the HUAC enjoyed by many of his contemporaries. Perhaps it was because even when it came out it was so under the radar that, in many ways, it missed the boat. A nervous MGM shelved it until the later, and lighter Broken Arrow was released and took all the critical and box-office laurels and gave audiences a more hopeful ending than the still shockingly stark and bitter one Mann delivers in a remarkably uncompromising film that was decades ahead of its time. Incredibly powerful, it deserves to be so much better known.
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Top reviews from other countries
Dr S S Nagi (NYROBE)
DEVIL'S DOORWAY
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 24, 2011
Robert Tilden
... classic fan and a collector of movies i really enjoyed
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 4, 2017
