Celluloid Sounds - Thief (1981)

As The Celluloid Highway appears to be undertaking something of a mini Michael Mann retrospective (and I stress the word mini, Mann has done little that has interested me after Manhunter [1986]) I thought it only appropriate to return to his debut picture Thief, and the contribution to it, of the German progressive electronic group Tangerine Dream. At this point in the bands history they were relative novices to the world of soundtrack composition. Their first soundtrack was for William Friedkin’s haunting and often beautiful, but ultimately misguided, remake of Clouzot’s Wages of Fear (1955) which went under the name Sorcerer (1977). Without a doubt the textured soundscapes of Tangerine Dream were a major creative highlight of the troubled production. In these early formative soundtrack years for the band their type of cosmic electronica was often used as a counterpoint to the unfolding narrative. Their cold and clinical tones would seem wholly inappropriate for the sweat and dirt of a poverty stricken area of South America, but time and again the music saves Sorcerer from becoming little more than a mild distraction.

The Keep (1983)

Dir: MICHAEL MANN
Country: USA/UK

The gothic horror fantasy The Keep had everything going for it when pre-production began in 1982/3. The novel by F. Paul Wilson was a bestseller, and the director Michael Mann was coming into his second film off the back of a critical and commercial success with his debut effort Thief (1981). The film had a respectable budget of $6,000,000, and a solid and dependable cast that included Scott Glenn, Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, and Ian McKellan. The casting however is very instructive; while all these actors are respectable in their own right, none of them were stars. The Keep was clearly the Michael Mann show, and the writer/director is both the worst and the best thing about the film. The novel represents a challenge too adaptation, and Mann was clearly not up to the task. His initial cut of the film ran to over two hundred minutes -  somebody should have reminded him his name was Michael Mann not Francis Ford Mann! And much of the controversy around the film centres on the studios decision to cut the film down to a more palatable one hundred minutes. The question of whether Mann’s cut would have made any more sense is moot, the film exists as it does. And in its present form it is untidy, chaotic, incoherent, and confused. The Keep fails dismally as a story; plot development lacks even the most basic sense of continuity and the narrative is a mangled mess. But from a visual perspective The Keep is a stunning success; it overflows with one striking image after another, and is stylistically at least, one of the most beautiful horror/fantasy films of the 1980’s.