Anthony Mann Double Feature: T-Men (1947) vs.
Raw Deal (1948)
Like
The Hitchhiker, these are two examples of simple stories well told. While Lupino does it by stripping her story down to its bare essentials, Mann piles on the style. Enough has been said about the Mann/Alton combo - one of the greatest director-cinematographer teams in all of cinema - that saying anything more seems redundant. Yet, in the realm of
mise-en-scène, no one spoke the language of what would become identified as
film noir more fluently. Alton's inexhaustible invention in framing and brilliance with light; Mann's masterful ability to navigate the murky, turbulent waters between morality and violence ("the use of violence by thoughtful men") - in a segment of filmmaking that required practical ingenuity to compensate for the lack of budgets, these were two rising talents that found each other in a moment of perfect serendipity. Alton would lend his visual mastery to many more
film noirs (
The Big Combo being on the shortlist for my top 10) and Mann would examine his thematic concerns in the perhaps more appropriate framework of the Western, but I feel neither ever found a better visual-thematic compliment than they did with each other in their brief four year partnership.
The guiding visual principle of these films is Alton's masterful "single-bulb" lighting: patches of violent bright whites tearing through a world of impossible pitch-blackness. Form being content, this could also describe the subjects of both films - whether the two t-men, trying to navigate an insulated-but-boundless world of crooks and corruption; or Joe Sullivan, torn between revenge and redemption in his journey back to the infernal chaos of Corkscrew Alley - it is this conflict that the films describe: flickering beacons of morality and justice maneuvering across a dark night of crime and violence.
T-Men (1947)
How appropriate that a film about duplicity is itself deceptive in regards to the subject of genre.
T-Men begins in a setup that is pure docudrama, situating the scenario firmly in the territory of
House by 92nd Street and the rest of its ilk which emerged from the shadow of
March of Time: bright sunlit montages of the various landmarks of Washington D.C.; stirring but non-descript patriotic music; a booming, monotonous Westbrook Van Voorhis-esque narrator. We're even greeted by the Treasury Department’s own Elmer L. Irey, ensuring us of the veracity of the story we are about to see. But all this falls away as we’re immediately emerged into the antithesis of the semi-documentary realism which the opening promises us: the grey-drabness of the opening is replaced with hyper-stylization, the opening murder of a stoolie being filmed with all the bizarre angles, violent cutting, and baroque lighting that characterizes the rest of the film.
From then on, the only thing to remind us of the trendy docudrama that Edward Small was certainly expecting is the occasional jarring and intrusive appearance of the film’s narrator. Sticking out like a sore thumb, its certainly the one major flaw of the film, and possibly what lends critics to so often overlook the film in comparison with the following Mann/Anton achievement. But even this element has its own, possibly unintentional, charms. A major tension in the film is the t-men’s role as upstanding agents in real life versus the ease with which they embrace the appearances and brutality of gangsters. As such, this voiceover itself embodies the contrast between the films face-value glorification of law enforcement on one side, and the deeper acknowledgement of both the allure of criminality and the cruelty of the war on crime. Docudrama voiceover versus film noir filmmaking. The emotionless, just-the-facts tone of the narrator’s voice versus the expressionism of the
mise-en-scène and the intensity of the drama. The voice-over’s steadfast belief in the agents’ cause versus the ambiguity and complexity of their actions and performances.
This dilemma is certainly nothing new in the movies. Since then (and likely before) we have seen many movies in which an undercover cop walks the line between pretending to be a criminal and becoming one, to the point it has become cliché.
T-Men’s striking accomplishment is the manner in which it is able to make the dilemma seem so potent, understating it by necessity instead of shouting it out. The two agents’ descent into the criminal underworld is only excusable if we understand the mantra that the film’s opening and narration ensures us of: that these men are doing a job and their doing it for us, the law and Uncle Sam. This mantra is the anchor that ensures the moral certainty of the characters. Yet the film is structured and filmed in a manner that the anchor is often left far from sight. In its economical structure and characterizations, the film nearly denies the two agents all hints of a personal life beyond their job, so that they begin and end to exist only as so far as the immediate task at hand. Not only is the personal denied, but the film is structured in such a way that once they enter the heart of the criminal underworld, the film is wary to acknowledge anything beyond its borders. The world of morality, decency and lawfulness that they’re supposed to be defending disappears completely from view, and even the debriefings with their superiors become rarer as the film progresses. The manner in which the methodical operations of the police are echoed in the methodical operations of the counterfeiter, and the obvious glee, early in the film, with which the two leads take on their roles, like two actors preparing for a role, in their new expensive clothes and in their new license to use force and graft, points towards this. More than any other film of its type, it is easy to forget we are watching two officers of the law, being so swept up in the succession of scenes that we need to be reminded by the narrator that these are agents of the government, and not simply criminals attempting to outmaneuver other criminals. The film doesn’t write their characters as obsessives, but their obsession to their job emerges from a complete absence of anything beyond work. It doesn’t obviously
tell the loss of identity between cop and criminal, but subtly
shows us it, by emerging us deep enough into the world of crime that even the leads shaky identities as cops seems to vanish. Furthermore, in the wide gap between the murder, mayhem and psychological trauma that the characters suffer, and the identity of those they are pursuing – not murderers or drug pushers, nor even dreaded fifth-columnists, but simple “victimless” counterfeiters – the film subtly hints at a question which it can never literally acknowledge: is it worth it?
This is all raised subtly and economically. Mann and Alton’s work completely transforms the material and takes it to a completely different level. Its
mise-en-scène is so transformative that its easy to ignore just how normal its procedural scenario is (and alas, my main caveat with
He Walked by Night is its inability to transcend the procedural). It’s a stylistic tour-de-force. In fact, all things being relative, the films stylistic flourishes seem even more flashy and bombastic than those of
Raw Deal. Whether it came from a concerted effort to overcome the drab material, or from the pent-up energy released by Mann and Alton finally finding the perfect collaborator, the film constantly astounds with its visual imagination. The sharp-contrast lighting is starker and more immediately stunning than the next film; the set-ups and compositions more insistently flashy and bizarre; the pace is quicker and more economical; the material is tougher and more relentless.
Try to recall the visual prowess of the film, and your mind is confronted with an almost endless of barrage of moments of visual ingenuity. Of course, everyone remembers the bath-house murder, but even the earlier sojourn into the steam-baths is palpable with heat. At one point, O’Brian (Dennis O’Keefe) is ambushed by two thugs, and the scene plays out in a pitch-black room, the only visible light coming from the occasionally flashing neon sign off-screen; each flash of light reveals O’Brien in a further state of incapacitation. At one point, O’Brian tails the Schemer (Wallace Ford) into a restaurant, and the entire methodical surveillance plays out from the reflections of a glass phone-booth door. The finale plays out aboard a ship, and its low-ceilings and claustrophobic hallways point towards the chase at the end of
He Walked by Night. O’Brian and the Schemer examine a dollar bill with a lamp, and the scene plays out low-angle, shot between the lampshade, with its single bulb as the only source of light. Later, that exact shot finds its echo when O’Brien has to steal the counterfeit plates – the very used to create the earlier bill – from beneath a bathroom sink, this time with Moxie (Charles McGraw) in the place of the Schemer. Another noteworthy shot is when O’Brien intentionally has himself thrown out of a gambling joint: the shot is deep-focus and low-angle, shot from pavement-level across a back-alley, with the door of the gambling joint in the background. Silhouettes appear in the door, it swings open, O’Brien is thrown into the middle of the alley/shot, and in a dangerous looking stunt, rolls away towards the foreground just as a car plummets through the alley, narrowly missing being run over. The shot ends with O’Brien’s battered face in the foreground, practically a close-up, and his grimace-smile expresses a wide-range of contradictory emotions: the physical fatigue and pain of having been beaten up; the bruised ego and petty grudge towards those who did the beating; and the joyful satisfaction of having accomplished his plan.
In fact, this last example is of particular interest. While many people talk about the lighting and inventive framing that Mann and Alton employ, rewatching
T-Men reveals them to be unheralded masters of the close-up. Alton’s framing of the close-up and Mann’s talent with his actors have brilliants results, allowing his characters to show a range of emotion, conflict and ambiguity which simply isn’t there in the actions and dialogue. Two examples stand out:
1) The scene where Tony Genaro (Alfred Ryder) is nearly outed as Undercover by his wife’s friend. To cover the situation, his wife (June Lockhart) must disavow him. In a film with a near lack of female characters, and an even less in the way of romance, this scene already stands out. That it’s the only brief moment of the “personal” in a movie that seems to deny its protagonists a life beyond their work makes it especially significant. The manner in which Mann/Alton rings tension and heartbreak through such economic makes it remarkable. In dialogue and action, it’s quick and simple: Genaro is confronted by his wife, and she denies ever meeting him (“My husband is taller and much more handsome”). Mann’s ability to get understated, quietly emotional (almost non-verbal) performances from his actors, and his ability to bring out the subtleties of those performances with close-ups, makes it emotionally powerful. Lockharts’s mix of stoicism and emotional torment, Ryder’s dumbstruck paralysis, Ford’s calculating, suspicious leer. The most remarkable shot, however, is Lockhart’s final glance back as Ryder and Ford walk off. In a brief but quick close-up, Mann/Alton is able to draw a wide range of emotion from Lockhart: loneliness, longing, alienation, fear, guilt, resentment, resignation, sacrifice and ultimately a premonition: that it may be the last time she sees him, and furthermore, it may very well be this episode that causes it..
2) The other significant creation of an unbearable tense and moving scene through close-ups is the direct answer to the earlier scene: Genaro has been discovered, and the counterfeiting ring, O’Brien included, go to rub him out. It’s a brief scene – only about 30 seconds long – and a common one: the undercover cop torn between stopping a murder or maintaining his cover. Mann/Alton’s use of successive close-ups turns into a powerhouse of tension and emotion. The first close up is of McGraw: already captured in a tight CU, he steps forward a few more inches, bringing his face closer to the camera, highlighting the emotional coldness in his face, lit so that his entire eyes look pitchblack. Then there are the suspicious, prying glares of his two henchman. Ryder is filmed so that the only thing lit in his shot is his own sweaty, exasperated, but stoically resigned face. O’Brien starts in a medium close-up in the doorway, but throughout the shot is propelled farther into the room, until he leans-in to a very tight shot of his face, capturing the conflict and ultimate shameful resignation. A strong example of Alton’s ability to contrast bright whites and pitch blacks is the final shot of the scene after Ryder is shot: O’Brien bows his head in shame, an with only a small tilt of the head, his face goes from being completely lit to being completely drowned in darkness.
Raw Deal (1948)
Watching these back to back, it is easy to spot the differences that exist behind the stylistic and thematic consistencies. Starting with the script. With
T-Men, Mann often seemed hamstrung by the docudrama scenario and its unfailing belief in the t-men. Despite his accomplishment in transcending it, the government-approved prologue and jarring narration still remains on the film, a blemish that it can’t erase. Whether by a newly earned freedom from its success, or pure luck,
Raw Deal is a more dramatically well-rounded script, closer to the moral and philosophical dilemmas that concern Mann. In
T-Men, Mann had to walk a thin line in presenting a morally ambiguous portrayal of his “glamorized” agents. In
Raw Deal, he can embrace the ambiguity, his character being a criminal.
T-Men was a claustrophobic film, taking place in a succession of shady hotel rooms, night clubs, warehouses and offices.
Raw Deal is a road film covering the entire west coast.
T-Men denied its lead a life beyond their work.
Raw Deal is preoccupied with its characters past, and puts a love-triangle front and center.
T-Men were more stylistically forceful, relentless with its scenes of tension and brutality.
Raw Deal is a comparatively quieter film, more focused on mood and atmosphere sporadically punctured with moments of shocking violence.
Raw Deal is perhaps the ultimate expression of a trope common to
noir, and one for which it is especially indebted to
poetic realism: the doomed man ensnared in the mechanics of a fate that he is tragically destined to fulfill. Fatalism is one of the key ingredients of
noir, but
Raw Deal, more so than any other film in the genre, makes the inescapable pull of fate tangible. At the end of this fate lies Corkscrew Alley, where Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Brien) came from, and which he feels destined to return to. Probably more so than any other of the Mann
noirs,
Raw Deal points towards his Westerns. Joe Sullivan, like the James Stewart of later years, is a compromised hero with a troubled past, who sets out on a journey following both a call of justice and a call of vengeance. The way these two parallel callings mesh, contradict and clash provides the moral and psychological anguish of the hero, their sense of morality fighting against their inner violence.
It slowly transforms into a story of revenge versus redemption. Will he escape the life of crime with either Pat (Claire Trevor) or Ann (Marsha Hunt)? Or will he return to Corkscrew Alley, with its certain violence and likely doom? Ultimately, the two paths become ensnared, and to choose one means to carry out the other. The love triangle at the center of the film embodies this conflict. Pat belongs to his world of crime, an old flame and accomplice. Ann is a symbol of normalcy and morality, a social worker. Ann means a clean break from his old world, and a possible promise of a new beginning. While Pat would want nothing more than the same, she will forever link him to the past, and to the unfinished business in Corkscrew Alley. Pat grows to want to escape the world of crime and tries to compel Sullivan to make a run for it. Ann is pulled in unwillingly, and ultimately becomes corrupted, learning her own capability for violence. Pat is masculine, hardened, deglamourized, from an actress certainly capable of being feminine. Ann is completely feminine, beautiful, almost pure. Even their names mark the difference – one is ambiguously gendered, the other is clearly female.
This later trait reveals an undercurrent of sexuality running under the film (such as Nancy Steffen-Fluhr highlights
here). While I can try to avoid the questionably homophobic undercurrent here, all too common to the genre, there is no denying that Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr) and his henchmen are perhaps the most depraved and perverse of all his noir heavies. With their ambiguous sexuality, pathological perversity and penchant for misogynistic violence, it could be easy to read an unpleasant queer subtext here, a “defeating the fag within” allegory much like
Strangers on a Train. While I’m certainly not the person to tackle such a claim, I must also point out it ignores some conflicting information. You can’t look at the homoerotic undercurrent in the villains of
T-Men, without acknowledging the homoerotic bond between O’Brien and Genaro. And likewise, here, Sullivan doesn’t triumph like Farley Granger, but it is in fact left incapable of escaping the underworld. It’s a fact worth pointing out, although heterosexual anxiety is only one part of the moral confusion that propels Sullivan.
Like I mentioned, its stylistically a quieter and more atmospheric film, although no less brilliant in its style than the previous film, just more assured. While the masterful lighting and framing is here, Mann/Alton does a stronger job of stringing together recurring motifs to drive the film. The use of fire is compelling, with Sullivan’s history as a boy who saved someone with a fire, Coyle’s pyromania, and the two coming together at the end. The continuous use of “bars” to signify entrapment appear in practically every scene starting literally at the prison, and then continuing on from there. The most obvious one is the use of Venetian blinds in Ann’s apartment, but Mann and Alton continually find more ingenious ways to include them. Two of my favorites: in the forest, a shot of trees perfectly lined up, with shafts of light drifting from the roof of the trees, echoing a similar shot earlier in the prison. There is also the close-up, near the masterful clock scene near the end, of Pat, in a mesh veil, entrapped just as much as Joe Sullivan is. And it difficult no to reiterate the scene with the clock as a master-class of noir photography in itself, and one of the ultimate expressions of noir fatalism.
In fact, this fatalism is so potent in the film precisely due to fact Mann and Alton seem to imbue the film with a supernatural edge. They seemed to be somewhat under the spell of Hitchcock making this film: the theremin score echoes Miklos Roszas score for
Spellbound, and the uncharacteristic use of female narrator, and even the use of miniatures at the beginning, point back to
Rebecca. But neither of these are simple swipings. Mann uses both of these excellently, and manages to give the film an edge to is completely its own. The theremin and Alton’s luminous photography gives the film a ghostly quality, as if the film emerged from a half-remembered dream, a ghost play from a past-life meant to be relived over and over again. The opening prison break is an especially compelling example of this. Pat waits outside of Joe’s prison in a car silently. Suddenly, a passing car comes toward Pat, and the headlights grow to a blinding light, taking on the properties of a ghostly apparition, a contact with something not of this world. As it recedes, the entire world seems to erupt into a cacophony of industrial sounds, the mechanics of destiny at work.
This supernatural dimension also colors the final showdown in a completely different light, turning Joe Sullivan’s descent into the criminal underworld into a descent into a
literal underworld. First there gunfight in the streets, bathed in a world of fog were differentiation becomes impossible, and even the solidity of forms begin to vanish, a veritable chaos. Even the first image, the improbable figure of a boy skating through the fog, has a supernatural dimension, perhaps even the ghost of a boyhood Joe Sullivan. Rick Coyle rules over this underworld, and it is appropriate that Sullivan meets him in a room submerged in hellish fire. The “boy in the fire” that Joe once was returns, but he is carried along by the tide of inevitable doom. The hand of fate pulling Sullivan to his destiny is also pulling him back into his past, into moral and spiritual chaos, a redemptive sacrifice and ultimately death, a metaphorical river Styx and Hades where fate finally severs the thread.
Two Film Noirs
Inextricably linked,
T-Men and
Raw Deal form one of those pairing which often accompany a burst of cinematic genius, and which often raises the question of choosing one over the other:
La Dolce Vita or
8 1/2,
Grand Illusion or
Rules of the Game,
Rear Window or
Vertigo,
Taxi Driver or
Raging Bull and so on the game is played. Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to put aside such boyish categorizations and simply embrace both works. But a list like this, asking us to rank such works, brings back the unfortunate question. Certainly Mann and Alton made other fine film noirs (
Border Incident and
He Walked by Night), and perhaps made one better than both these (
Reign of Terror/Black Book, that is, if I can bring myself to rank a period film as
noir). Yet is these two films that are constantly mentioned in the same breath and which require some sort of answer.
Comparing these films and trying to make a judgment on them, one is face with something of a contradiction: in their own way, each film seems more
pure than the other. Let me explain:
The T-Men Argument: While it is true that there are ultimately flaws with the script which Mann can't overcome, specifically the prologue and voice-over, the film that these "blemishes" contain is purer in the fact that it is leaner, stripped-down, and a more economical film than
Raw Deal. Here the characters and conflict is stripped down completely to its fundamentals, the style is more forceful, the pace is swifter, leaving a film that pummels you with white-knuckle tension from beginning to end and doesn't let up.
Raw Deal, on the other hand, is a road film, which by design meanders (especially in the middle, with its cabin in the woods subplot). It may be more atmospheric and philosophical, but as such, it loses the bite and tension of the former film.
T-Men is categorized by a world of men, which has barely any room for women, and certainly no room for romance.
Raw Deal is anchored by romance and two female characters, and for all its achievement, it must look like
A Letter to Three Wives in comparison. It's a lean and muscular film,
film noir cut down to a diamond, and even the so-called "blemishes" serve a purpose, partitioning off the superfluous and the essential, allowing the economy of the film to become real clear.
The Raw Deal Argument: As mentioned above, the material and script is attuned to the moral and existential concerns of Mann.
T-Men may be more stripped-down, but
Raw Deal is ultimately more ambitious, more evocative, perfectly capturing the fatalism at the heart of
film noir. It may not be as lean or as swiftly paced as the former film, but its elements are no less essential, and it doesn't suffer from details like the prologue and narration. The extreme physicality of the former film is compensated by a stronger moral and thematic coherence. And the style may not be as bombastic, but it is more assured and poetic, giving the film a quiet intensity to match
T-Men's MacMahonist-like brute strength. It's one of the few
film noirs as worthy on a bill with
Le jour se lève and
Pepe le Moko as it would be with
Night and the City and
A Lady from Shanghai.
Both films have Mann raising the b-film to the level of art film. The main difference may be that
T-Men skews towards the b-film side of the equation,
Raw Deal towards the art film. They're both brilliant films, and its difficult to come to any consensus on the two, even with my own contradictory impulses. Rewatching the films, I was ready to declare
T-Men the better film, but writing this makes me love
Raw Deal all over.
T-Men hits you in the gut.
Raw Deal works over the brain and spine. Anyone who doesn't see both these films for their list is fooling themselves. You don't know what
noir is until you see these two geniuses work their craft.