A contemporary of Martin Scorsese, John Milius and Michael Cimino, Michael Mann didn’t take on the big screen until 1981, so it’s no wonder that his theatrical debut, Thief, exudes more than a hint of the elegiac. It’s tempting to connect the melancholy of that film’s protagonist, a safecracker yearning for some idealized time before crime was a corporate business, to that of a director who missed the so-called New Hollywood of the 1970s, but that would be inaccurate. Far from soaking in nostalgia, Mann was looking forward to the expressive possibilities of the new decade’s fascination with surface slickness. For many important filmmakers, the plastic gloss of the 1980s was about as artistically accommodating as a straitjacket; for Mann, it was a vessel for exploring his cinematic obsessions—a good deal of it done, incidentally, on television.
Born in Chicago and a London International Film School alum, Mann directed a few shorts before becoming involved in various crime shows in the 1970s, including Police Story, Starsky and Hutch and Police Woman. Shot on location at Folsom Prison two years before Thief, the TV film The Jericho Mile already showcases plenty of his stylistic and thematic concerns. From the very beginning, an impressionistic overture that mingles weight-lifting inmates, baleful murals, and a fuzzy instrumental riff on The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” it’s clear that Mann’s grasp of screen space and drive is way beyond that of the typical movie-of-the-week journeyman. Directing his first feature, Mann locates the first of his Zen athletes: Murphy (Peter Strauss), a lifer who spends his days sprinting in circles in the sandy yard, escaping the walls around him by withdrawing within himself. Glimpses of the outside world pierce through as he trains toward an Olympic goal, though bruised soberness remains the presiding mood. (As his doomed friend bluntly puts it: “Dreams! Expectations… never gonna happen.”) Even stuck with TV’s blocky frame and the general artlessness of network storytelling, Mann manages to create a strikingly mature and resolutely non-uplifting view of the folly and defiance of hope in the face of purgatory.
It was another five years before Mann returned to TV, and then it was for the pop epoch-defining series Miami Vice. An adjustment of Starsky and Hutch’s buddy-cop formula to the Me Decade’s infatuation with synthetic flash and sizzle, the show offered a cannily aestheticized world of tribal malice, designer suits and burned-orange sunsets. Though he didn’t direct a single episode in the six-year run, Mann as producer and occasional writer was largely responsible for shaping the series’ stylistic format as a glittering netherworld of masculine collisions, with Miami detectives Crockett (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) slithering through Art Deco panoramas week after week. Incorporating Thief’s use of opulent cinematography and liminal zones between order and crime for the small screen, Miami Vice is often acknowledged as the moment when cinematic style was brought into American television, introducing pulsing visual splendor to a medium where plot and characters had long been primary, meat-and-potatoes concerns. As Mann moved on to other films (Manhunter) and TV projects (Crime Story) in the late 1980s, the show dissipated into increasingly impersonal kitsch. See Mann’s remarkable 2006 film Miami Vice, then, as an attempt to reclaim and expand the series’ original concept for the big screen with experimental headiness, just as David Lynch did for his own 1980s program with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
Urban centers perched on the edge of liquid vastness have long beguiled Mann, so it was only natural for Mann to follow Chicago and Miami with Los Angeles. The city would be the setting for his 1995 masterpiece Heat, though an earlier study of the West Coast came in L.A. Takedown, a 1989 TV movie that plays like a blueprint for the later film. Splitting the macho psyche along burning and icy divides on opposite sides of the law, it charts the contrasting obsessions of doppelgangers, a police lieutenant (Scott Plank) and the leader of a bank-robbing ring (Alex McArthur). Full of amped-up confrontations and alternating frenzied glimpses of highways and nightclubs with languid moments in which plaintive desire peeks from under tough-guy façades, the film finds Mann refining several of the elements he had introduced in episodes of Miami Vice and Crime Story. Comparison with Heat is inescapable, and of course Plank and McArthur are no match for the iconography that Al Pacino and Robert De Niro would later bring to the same characters—hampered by network censors, casting and running times, L.A. Takedown is a rough draft to the later film’s sprawling fresco. Still, when a character compares the neon-drenched cityscape to gelid Icelandic terrain or when the camera notices a palm tree set aflame in the midst of a shootout, the film achieves its own modest poetry.
L.A. Takedown marked Mann’s farewell to the 1980s, though certainly not to TV. While reinforcing his cinematic reputation into the new millennium with a slew of distinguished releases, he kept an eye firmly on the small screen. After producing Robbery Homicide Division in 2002, he directed the pilot of the short-lived HBO series Luck in late 2011. A vision divided between its two auteurs (David Milch wrote the teleplays, Mann oversaw the rest), this drama of racetrack gamblers played by the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Nick Nolte, and Dennis Farina runs on a potent blend of desperation and hope, and the camera, in the more fluidly emotive style developed in Miami Vice and Public Enemies, is always there to plug into the characters’ emotions. There’s no mistaking the connection between the allegorical implications of horses running in circles here with the protagonist’s own marathon routines in The Jericho Mile, though the most pleasing circularity really lies in Mann’s entry into the current “Golden Age of Television”—an age he helped start decades ago.
