#t men

[theartofmoviestills]

T-Men | Anthony Mann | 1947

NOIRVEMBER 27.

[chaptertwo-thepacnw]

anthony mann |1947|

[filmstruck]

Tales of T-MEN (’47) & a STRAY DOG (’49) by Thomas Davant

Going undercover was never for the faint of heart. Even those bosses on TV have to combat the shaky knees, sweaty palms and stifled stammers that hide beneath fabrications to be detailed, sewn and aligned in the head. One false step and the gig’s up. The stakes are higher for those working in the name of justice.

FilmStruck has delivered an exciting bundle featuring heart-pounding tales of cops donning fake identities and descending into the criminal underworld. I’ve selected two fast-paced police procedurals, both made around the same time but on opposite ends of the earth and under different national circumstances.

First up is a noir classic from Anthony Mann. Highly prolific, he helmed some forty pictures, working right to the end, when he suffered a fatal heart attack during production in Berlin. Mann made a name for himself with tough-guy thrillers in the Forties before pivoting to tough-guy westerns in the Fifties, carrying his noir sensibility with him. He didn’t just give Jimmy Stewart a career makeover: he beat the George Bailey right out of him and left him in the desert for dead. But rewind: in the late 1940s, he was in the thick of noir and delivered a few great pictures. T-MEN (’47) is one of them.

With a stern-finger wag, the opening title condemns counterfeiters. Fade in to a glorious Washington, DC and a pan to the brightly-lit bastion of the U.S. Treasury. We’re introduced to one Elmer Lincoln Irey, director of the investigative unit that nailed Capone (for tax evasion, ironically). Irey delivers a quick run-down of the six “shock units” on hand to be deployed for clean-up. These departments make up a “fist that hits hard but fair.”

The set-up plunges us into the dark, dangerous depths of a case. The imagery is fast and disorienting: menacing shadows, footsteps, flash of a pistol, a blast—a body lying in the mud. Who, what, why? The short of it: there’s a counterfeit ring on the rise. The Treasury Department is sending in two of their best—T-Men, they’re called—to go undercover and infiltrate from the inside.

At the insistence of the studio, Mann employed an overly helpful narrator to walk us through the plot. According to Senses of Cinema, this was an exciting and innovative trend for the time, on full display in THE NAKED CITY (’48). In a series of “preparation” montages, we watch the agents get ready. The narrator provides us with observations to show us what we’re seeing (“They’re making little notes…memorizing those notes…”) and to emphasize the danger of the job (“Failure would mean a bad grade later on…in the form of a bullet, or an ice pick.”)

It’s a quality which instantly ages the film but makes for a great watch. Noir has found itself the source and subject of parody since its inception and the seeds for future comedy writers are planted here. In one sequence, Agent O’Brien (the perfectly cast good guy/bad guy Dennis O’Keefe) searches for a man who enjoys Turkish baths. He spends ten days steaming until he’s a dehydrated bean pole. You might catch Frank Drebin taking notes in the corner.

The lighting is full of contrast and viscous shadow thanks to John Alton. The Mann-Alton collaboration made its name on low budget Poverty Row pictures, shooting quickly and efficiently in and around tight spaces. Set-ups are exaggerated, faces cut in half for symbolic effect, Dutch angles suggesting a world turned inside out. The on-location photography allows noir to spill its oily tendrils into the real world.

The film flaunts a shameless patriotism: this is a dangerous job, but it’s what these men do—fight, survive and sometimes sacrifice—to keep their nation safe.

On the opposite side of the globe, Akira Kurosawa’s STRAY DOG (’49) made glorious use of its Tokyo setting to paint a much grimmer portrait of a nation on the losing side of the war.

Made on the brink of a streak which launched him into the international spotlight, this hot to the touch cop drama revolves around a policeman who loses his pistol on a crowded streetcar. Now faced with saving face and honoring his duty as a policeman, he takes it upon himself to recover the firearm and journeys into the heart of the Tokyo underworld.

Kurosawa sought to capture the physical and intangible aspects of nature in his work and blurs the line between human and beast. He wrote the story as a novel then transferred it to script form. In his memoir Something Like an Autobiography, Kurosawa explains: “I attained a new awareness of what screenplays and films consist of. I was able to incorporate many peculiarly novelistic modes of expression into the script.”

The backbone of the procedural film is in place. The narrator’s words present to us rather than talk at us in the stern, self-assured style of American noir. It’s the hottest day of the summer and at once we recall the feelings of frustration, hopelessness and animal impatience that arise when squeezed among a crowd. At once we understand the cop’s helplessness and panic.

The production was one of Kurosawa’s smoothest. When they weren’t shooting on stage, he sent a team into the neighborhoods flattened by the firebombing (historically nicknamed the “Night of the Black Snow”) for exterior footage, most of which made it into the film and lend the final product the confusion of a postwar nation struggling to re-define itself after defeat. The setting with its reminders of the past and lingering ghosts make the film more accurately “noir” than American films of the genre.

A fight scene set in a swamp ranks among the greatest physical confrontations on film, for its sheer brutality, messy choreography and disarming beauty as a group of innocent schoolchildren walk through the tall grasses, the cop and criminal bleeding and panting in the brush out of sight.

No matter the time or place, going undercover is a daring, dangerous job. It’s still chilly outside, but both of these films will have you reaching for the air conditioning.

[startingplace]

[filmpostersatoz]

T Men

Released 1947

[theartofmoviestills]

T-Men | Anthony Mann | 1947

[theartofmoviestills]

T-Men | Anthony Mann | 1947

NOIRVEMBER 24.

[jenny-jingle-berry]

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