The Maze editor-in-chief Scout Tafoya’s latest book The Black Book: An Anthony Mann Reader is available now at Amazon and at Scout’s patreon. The book pieces together a year’s worth of writing on the greatest B-movie director of all time, who also happened to become an A picture director, a maker of epics so enormous you can’t see where they begin or end. Here a preview of the book, the entry on his 1948 rescue job on the Alfred L. Werker movie He Walked By Night with Richard Basehart, who would become a key player in Mann’s ensemble, and which inspired Jack Webb to create the TV show Dragnet, the cop show that launched a thousand cop shows.

He Walked By Night - 1948

"The names have been changed to protect the innocent..." Yes, this was the movie that inspired Dragnet. Co-star Jack Webb was so inspired by conversations with technical advisor Marty Wynn that he started jotting down ideas for a police procedural unlike any other, where the real nitty gritty of solving crimes takes precedence over spectacle and personal drama. The show is still fun to watch in small doses, but the film could have used a little more of both. I blame original director Alfred L. Werker (Mann was brought on midway through production, though when and where is hard to determine) for the film's straightforward presentation of the facts when Mann's harrowing abstraction would have paid richer dividends. The only Werker film I've seen is a patch job (he directed a third of The Reluctant Dragon, and like a lot of this it's dryly procedural. Robert Benchley taking a tour of the Disney studios before meeting Uncle Walt himself - hardly the stuff of abrogated reality that had lately come to seep into Mann's work and would rip the roof right off Reign of Terror, his next movie).

Starts magnificently, I must say, with Richard Basehart shooting a cop on a dark street, precipitating one motherfucker of a car crash. But the dry direction of the investigation just doesn't sing like Mann's earlier T-Men, this movie's obvious inspiration. It's tempting to say all the scenes with good compositions and eerie, productive use of silence are Mann's, but in fairness I have no sense of Werker's style, if indeed he had any. The only film of his I can claim to have seen is The Reluctant Dragon, of which he only shot a couple of dry minutes, and that's a movie with no dramatic plot at all. The important factor here is John Alton, Mann's new favourite cinematographer, the man who perfected American noir lighting. Even if the film was all Werker's doing it was still going to look great, and it does, despite a couple of bafflingly dull blocking and framing choices, like the one of Basehart patching a gunshot wound, shot with his heaving chest and face the only things visible above a bowl of steaming water. Odd stuff...

The cast is magnificent, all in-fielders who never took the spotlight. Webb and Basehart, of course, but also Scott Brady, Roy Roberts, Whit Bissell, James Cardwell, Byron Foulger, John Dehner, Frank Cady and Kenneth Tobey; men with ten pounds of face each. Werker and Mann do occasionally frame for maximum sweaty paranoia. A scene of witnesses identifying a sketch of Basehart recalls the newspapermen debriefing after the newsreel in Citizen Kane. If the film were freer with space and tone, it could have touched Welles' coattails, like the best of Mann (the two seemed in conversation and sometimes Mann even bested him, which is no mean feat). The scenes in the LA sewers are awe-inspiring (though could do without all the damned narration) and they pre-empt Them!, Joseph Losey's M remake, and The Third Man the following year. It's a work smack dab in the middle of generic invention, not quite coining enough to become notable, but reaching its tendrils in every direction and feeling some interesting texture. It'd be a good film to screenshot to highlight what it gets right, but it only gets a head of steam going once every fifteen minutes, usually when Basehart kills. His interrogation of Bissell in his home is pretty heart-stopping, and the film's relative lack of music becomes a virtue.

This, like some of Dragnet, was based on a real case, the insane story of Erwin Walker, or "Machine Gun" Walker. He'd been at Leyte during the Second World War and had seen a lot of his friends cut to pieces by enemy bayonets, which seems to have snapped a spring in his head. He started stealing guns when he got back to the states, then stealing any and everything he could to pay for his biggest scheme yet. He had a cockeyed idea he was going to build a kind of laser out of movie sound equipment and radar pieces and hold the government hostage until they raised solder's wages, kind of like Ed Harris in The Rock. He tried to sell a lot of microphones and stuff to a sound engineer, who knew it couldn't have been gotten legally and called the police. It took a year for police to put an end to his reign of terror. He plead insanity, but the judge wasn't having any of that, so Walker and his father both tried to commit suicide; Walker's attempt wasn't successful, his father's was. The suicide got his death sentence postponed, and by the time they got around to re-scheduling they commuted it to life in prison, but that was also commuted, and he was released in 1974, at which point he changed his name and became a chemist. He died in 2008. I think he warranted a weirder movie, but the one he got was pretty good.