Good news, you Michael Mann devotees waiting with bated breath for Blackhat: we have some three hours of material to occupy you between now and this weekend. Said devotees are at least aware of TV productions The Jericho Mile and L.A. Takedown (from 1979 and 1989, respectively), the former significant for being his first feature-length endeavor, the latter best-known as an 80-minutes-shorter precedent to Heat.
Although that would make them sound like curiosities and very little else, both yield worthwhile insight into Mann’s origins and developments as an artist — sometimes to mixed results, yes, but never at the sake of basic entertainment. The Jericho Mile may supersede Thief as an inception point, anticipating both the struggles of maintaining a crime network and Mann’s penchant for establishing relationships via shot-reverse-shot dynamics. (He’s not one to disregard the segmentation that comes with being locked in a prison cell, for one thing.) Look closely for an early version of a key line from the director’s oeuvre, while you’re at it.
L.A. Takedown may work best as a tool for appreciating Heat, considering how it compromises almost all of that film’s grace — adapting longer material for TV clearly forced him to break this story down into its most essential plot strands — and it very much feels like a great filmmaker on autopilot (or, if we didn’t know who made it, a bad one giving this their all). But watching a stripped-down and more primitive version helps make sense of how Mann ticks. It’s first and foremost a worthwhile object of auteurist study, which is far more than we should ever ask of a meatheaded TV movie.
Watch both below:
What did you think of both films? Do they complement your understanding of Mann?