Saturday, May 12, 2018

T-Men 1947








A new transfer of this hard ball little mouse dropping of a B noir movie has just been released and its a beaut. This was anthony mann’s big breakthrough film and provided him with more ease and access to make movies for the rest of his career. It was also the first meet up of him and the great cinematographer John Alton who is known for his moody black and white cinematography in many films of the noir era and beyond and who ironically won an Oscar for his beautiful color work on “An American In Paris.” Go figure. But its here in his low budget work that he really “Painted with Light” (His famous book on cinematography by the way is titled “Painting With Light)
In T-Men which stands for Treasury Men, Mann gives us for the first time in a movie the use of real money and a story about counterfeiters almost in a documentary style which was popular in the late 40’s with constricted tense intros by a member of the federal government or some other higher up who set the tone and made us know that what we are about to see really happened.
Mann and his screenwriters John C. Higgins & Virginia Kellogg put two T-Men played by Dennis O’Keefe and Alfred Ryder undercover to get the goods on these guys and gal counterfeiters which sets up the action and conflicts. O’Keefe who was a likeable but expendable sort of a guy was around for a long time in low budget movies and lots of t.v. and was underrated but in this film he gives what I can only call a terrific performance, do I dare say it’s the best male performance of the year? Watch him walk and enter a room as Vannie Harrigan one of the fake counterfeit crooks and you will understand my enthusiasm for him in this film.
There are other top notch performances in this little nugget of nastiness including the great Wallace Ford as the “Schemer” all greasy and corrupt and the equally great Charles McGraw as Moxie the head of the gang and rotten to his core. Also noteable is the look and energy of the film, small and low budget it’s full of darkness with pinches of low light and low lives that pretty much smacks us in the face with a bullying force.
The film is typical of the late 40’s down and out style of low budget crime and thriller movies both in the look and the story lines that made it to American movie screens without much fuss and fanfare. Some did good box office business (T-Men was a huge surprise hit) and some died quick deaths. The year of my birth was also the apex, the highline, the tops of Film noir with titles like Body and Soul, Brute Force, Born to Kill, Bury Me Dead, Crossfire, Dead Reckoning, Dark Passage, The Gangster, Kiss of Death, Nightmare Alley, and many others with dangerous and tempting titles.
T-Man like many of the noir films was set in a post war Los Angles, run down, mean and dingy with sinister streets, dark endless alleyways and cheap rooms in run down boarding houses. Of course low budgets was also responsible for many of the films staying home in their studio backyards along with on the cuff location street shooting which was a lot cheaper than building expensive sets.
Probably the most famous scene in the film is the nasty Turkish bath sequence where one of the characters meets his demise via being locked in a steam room and is scalded to death. There are many other intense scenes of brutal interrogations and beatings and one memorable scene where Dennis O’Keefe witnesses the death of a character and Mann and Alton slowly bring the light down on his face and the brim of his hat as we are left with a shadowy close-up outline of O’Keefe’s face. Real sweat and no make-up in this film.

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