Alton and Mann: A Partnership in Post-War Noir

Dennis O'Keefe, Marsha Hunt, Claire Trevor, "Raw Deal" (1948). 

They made only a handful of films together, but John Alton and Anthony Mann’s work threw a new light on film noir, police procedural dramas and documentary filmmaking

Silhouettes, fog, great pools of inky blackness — that’s a king-sized portion of the visual drama in store when viewing films made by both the ace of noir lighting, John Alton, and the master of dramatic action, Anthony Mann. 

With his supremely choreographed action scenes, Mann could be directing silent pictures, and that’s not a slight. His control of emotional tension through moving images makes dialog all but superfluous. Alton’s masterly touch with lighting gear and cameras makes the action sequences eerie, threatening and irresistible. Together they achieved a kind of alchemy that set a new pace in post-World War II film noir. 

A handful of features

The duo had a six-picture association, producing some of noir’s essential titles, including “T-Men” (1947), “Raw Deal” (1948), “He Walked By Night” (1948) (Mann was uncredited) and the thrilling masterwork “Border Incident” (1949). They also crafted spy thriller “Reign of Terror” (a.k.a. “The Black Book”) (1949) and western “Devil's Doorway” (1950).

Here’s a rundown on the noirs produced in that partnership:

 Alfred Ryder, Dennis O'Keefe, "T-Men" (1947) — raking light.

“T-Men” (1947)

Crime dramas shot documentary style were popular in the 1940s, and “T-Men” is one of the best of its breed.

It opens with U.S. Treasury Department official Elmer Lincoln Irey detailing a bit of Treasury Department history and law enforcement capabilities of the federal department, lending a brass tacks newsreel-like quality to the film. 

We meet two treasury agents, Dennis O’Brien (Dennis O’Keefe) and Tony Genaro (Alfred Ryder), who go undercover to bust a Detroit a counterfeiting ring. Undercover work is a jittery business, and the two operatives must work with care and agility to avoid detection, all of which ratchets up the tension as the two make their way to the inner reaches of the crime operation.  

Scorsese offers high praise

“T-Men” has had a powerful influence on filmmakers ever since its release, and at least one prominent director cites Mann and Alton’s craftsmanship as playing a defining role in post-war noir.

As he prepared to shoot “Casino” (1995), Martin Scorsese screened “T-Men” for the film’s star, Robert De Niro. 

Scorsese remarked, “It’s one of the quintessential films noir, and certainly one of the best photographed. Alton’s photography on that film is the very essence of film noir.” 

Admittedly, using theatrical lighting in a film with the tone and texture of a newsreel documentary may be confusing. Documentarians strive for veracity and they don’t shoot reenactments, or so the theory goes. “T-Men” is among the wave of films that includes another Alton-Mann film, “He Walked By Night” (1948) — see below — that blends fact with fiction. 

A mix of fact and fiction

The use of actors and non-actors, practical locations as well as the staccato narration common in newsreels all add up to a hybrid that’s neither purely fact nor fiction. 

The film implies that it’s a creative and not totally reliable retelling of the truth, and likewise the supposed ethical division between cops and crooks may not be all that we may think it is.

Alton’s high-contrast noir lighting and off-kilter compositions visually underscore O’Brien and Genaro’s metamorphosis. The two undercover officers become enmeshed in the criminal world that they’ve infiltrated, but in that shadowy environment the boundaries between criminality and the law become blurred.

A landmark for Mann

Anthony Mann considered “T-Men” to be his first film because he had more influence on the development of the story and its characters than he had in his previous Hollywood pictures. The film’s “semi-documentary” style was fashionable after World War II when an increasing number of crime melodramas used practical locations to achieve newsreel-style realism for increasingly jaded moviegoers. “T-Men” marked Mann’s second collaboration with screenwriter John C. Higgins and his first with Alton.

Alton’s employment of highly stylized low-angle camera shots, deep focus, and high contrast black-and-white cinematography was an apt visual foil for the film’s gritty realism. Alton found an ideal collaborator in Mann, who also believed that lighting could be a crucial dramatic element.

Richard Basehart, "He Walked by Night" (1948) — low camera angles.

“He Walked by Night” (1948)

With its staccato voiceover narration and stone-faced reporting style, “He Walked by Night” fits snugly within the boundaries of documentary-style crime dramas. It’s based on a true story and the filmmaker wants us to feel the sharp edge of the brutal facts behind the case. 

Lighting effects are minimal at first and so is the music. It’s not until later in the film, in action sequences particularly, that Alton’s touch is felt. His distinctive ballet of shadows betrays a desperate criminal wreaking terror on the sprawling cityscape of Los Angeles.

A visual feast

Alton’s delicious handling of light is most notable whenever bullets fly. Dim light emanating from street lamps rakes through venetian blinds, casting horizontal bars of shadow on the walls of darkened offices, slicing those rooms into layer cakes of chocolate and marzipan strata. Silhouettes of heaving bodies charge into the darkened void, at times illuminated only by muzzle flash and hazy reflected light.

Anthony Mann took over the directing reins from Alfred Werker near the end of production, but Werker gets the directing credit. 

In the film, a thief turned cop-killer (Richard Basehart) eludes a police dragnet by hiding in the sewers of Los Angeles.  

Dum, dee, dum, dum

“He Walked by Night” helped launch the “Dragnet” radio and television series. Jack Webb plays a supporting role as a police forensics officer, and the film provided inspiration for the popular L.A.P.D. drama of the airwaves that would become Webb’s crowning achievement.

While "He Walked by Night" is held together with the loose thread of documentary-style filmmaking, those parts are no match or the last 20 minutes or so of the film that prowls the lower reaches of the city — dramatic footage that is widely assumed to be Mann’s handiwork.

Basehart as the killer who terrorizes L.A., can't be stopped. Few have ever seen him, and for a while the investigation goes nowhere.

Factual and dramatic

Make no. mistake about it, “He Walked by Night” is police procedural through and through. It cycles through rational, fact-based reportage until Alton’s dramatic lighting effects make us wonder if we’re watching a German Expressionist art film. When the camera moves into the subterranean world of storm drains of Los Angeles it’s hard not to think of Orson Welles running for his life through the sewers of post-war Vienna in Carol Reed’s “The Third Man.” But “He Walked by Night” predates Reed’s the better known film by a year.

Inside the darkened cavern, the only sources of illumination is that of flashlights and the dim glow of street lamps filtering down into the subterranean world through storm drain portals. Caught like a rabbit in a snare, the killer’s luck and ingenuity run out. And that leaves him in the dark. 

John Ireland, Marsha Hunt, “Raw Deal” (1948)

 “Raw Deal” (1948)

Subtle touches help tell the story and draw us into the frame and that’s part of what makes “Raw Deal” an exhilarating viewing experience. Pat Regan (Claire Trevor) walks toward a prison’s gates and in voice-over begins to narrate the story. The frame subtly switches from a wide establishing shot to handheld footage from her point of view as she approaches the entrance. The slightly jittery frame informs us that for a brief moment we’re seeing through her eyeballs as she treads the path to the big house. Although her boyfriend, Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe), is the escaped jailbird driving the story forward, this is going to be Pat’s story. 

Prison gloom

Inside, the prison hallways are shrouded in shadow. Pat speaks with the desk officer and the camera is placed low, a bit less than shoulder-high to the seated jail keeper. He looms large in the frame, dominating the action. He’s the one Pat must get past, and it so happens that she’s blocked temporarily from the visiting room. Joe has another visitor and Pat is perplexed and dismayed. It turns out that social worker Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt) is making a habit of visiting the convict and that becomes the crux of the story.

She’s believes he’s reformable and is visiting him for the second time. But there’s no denying that there’s a hint of romantic tension between the two — she’s aware of it and so is Joe, and soon Pat catches on, as well.

A divide in their relationship

The visiting room scene clues us in to the tension between Joe and Ann. The two are seated across from  each other, a glass partition diving them. We don’t see them together in the same frame, at first. But once some flirtatious banter enters the conversation the camera focuses on closeups of their faces. We’re better able to see the emotional subtlety that this turn on the conversation has taken. 

Once it’s time to end the visit they both stand and the camera shifts to  a sideview of both with the partition between them. Ann is reticent but interested, and Joe is more forthright. It’s evident that a closer, personal relationship between them is in the offing.

Light and fog

John Alton’s handiwork is evident throughout the film, from the foggy cityscape at nighttime, illuminating by diffused street lamps, to the tobacco clouded living room of mobster Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr), a debonaire sadist who lounges about in a smoking jacket and brandishes a cigarette holder, smoke curling from his nostrils. He’s one of those sophisticated college-educated crooks who surrounds himself with half-bright henchmen. Coyle has it in for Joe, and that’s the other leg of this jailbreak tale that keeps us guessing about who will come out on top.

Lynn Whitney, Howard Da Silva, Charles McGraw, Ricardo Montalban,
"Border Incident" (1949).

“Border Incident” (1949)

In “Border Incident,” Mann masterly manipulates figures, automobiles, gunmen, even farm machinery, dodging in and out of the darkness. Shards of light slice through night-cloaked landscapes. Exploited farm workers, under the jackboot of human traffickers, march toward their doom in the valley of death.

Of course the best scenes take place at night. That’s the optimal showcase for Alton’s work, as he frames intensely dramatic compositions of mind-blowing action. Mann’s exceptional direction builds drama in each sequence, barely allowing us to catch our breath as the film barrels toward a stunning conclusion.

Artistic compositions

It’s not all pyrotechnics and razzle-dazzle, though. When viewing scenes peopled with pensive Mexican farmworkers awaiting entry into the United States, it’s hard to avoid thinking of Diego Rivera’s paintings of workers toiling on sun-drenched farmlands. Alton frames a sea of humanity, all solemnly on edge — expressive faces and swooping sombrero brims, desperate, penetrating eyes focused on the gatekeeper who can send them to farms in the north. The lucky ones will be allowed to bring in the harvest for meager wages. The bosses, of course, skim off their take from the laborers’ earnings.

The old masters

The shadowy world in which the action unfolds might look disturbingly familiar. There’s a connection between Alton’s work and that of the great artists. While Hollywood had little use for “art,” the work of master painters such as Rembrandt, Leonardo, de la Tour and Caravaggio made a deep impression on Alton, especially those that display the human figure bathed in shadow.

He admitted, "When I got an assignment, I read the script — or the book and the script — and then I went out to the art museums, even to Paris sometimes, to see what the masters had done. 

“Border Incident” is set in rough bunk houses, craggy mountainous desert land and farms lined with monotonous rows of baby lettuce and and plowed furrows. Removed from the urban landscape, a more typical noir setting, “Border Incident” somehow makes the great outdoors, with its sweeping horizon and boundless territory, seem threatening and claustrophobic. It’s as if the desert canyon walls could cave in at any time and the air is too thin to support life. 

Gangsters at home on the range

This is a story of an industry built around the exploitation of the less fortunate. It’s a gangster story dressed in Stetsons and cowboy boots. Workers who cross the border legally are protected, more or less, by United States law enforcement agencies. Those who make illegal passage don’t have that blanket of protection and are vulnerable to cutthroat gangs who lay in wait for them. Early on we see the ugly side of  human smuggling. Alton’s low camera angles appropriately make the more threatening figures look like looming giants. Here, violence, as vicious as anything seen on the screen in that era, rains down on the unsuspecting.

Still relevant

Film and other artworks are often lauded when they remain relevant over an extended period of time. Unfortunately, in this case, the issues behind this story are as timely today as they were more than 70 years ago. “Border Incident” lets us consider the tension over imported labor and competing concerns about undocumented workers. It also leaves us to ponder the age-old questions of economic need, both that of the undocumented workers and the farmers, versus preserving human rights for the vulnerable — issues that will likely be discussed for some time to come.