By Bob Clark
I have a personal theory when it comes to cinema, that a director’s most important effort over the course of their early career usually tends to be their third. Great debuts are important, no doubt, but by no means definitive. Sophomore slumps are excusable, and in some cases maybe even to be expected. But if a director can clear past both those humps and climb the learning curve of filmmaking to successfully deliver a knockout on their third time, then the charm is most certainly with them. Many of my own personal favorite films tend to be a director’s third (Star Wars, Blade Runner, Jaws, Heaven’s Gate), and even in the cases of directors who don’t necessarily deliver something absolutely perfect, the results tend to be somewhat telling. David Lynch’s Dune is by no means definitive of his talents, but it put him together with Kyle MacLachlan for the first time, paving the way for future greatness with Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, and gave the director a chance to flex his creative muscles at a bizarrely blockbuster scale. Very often a third film can be something of a headscratcher, that moment a director attempts to push themselves out of their creative comfort zone if for no other reason than to discover what their true limits are, and there’s probably no better example of a filmmaker lost in an alien artistic landscape so completely divorced from their element than Michael Mann and his 1983 disaster The Keep.
By this time, the man who would go on to revolutionize television with Miami Vice and inject a new dose of intelligent machismo to movies with Heat had only one theatrically released feature to his name, and one made-for-TV movie prior to that beyond his seasoned experience writing and directing for campy cop shows like Starskey & Hutch. Both The Jericho Mile, telling the real-life story of a prison inmate attempting to qualify for the Olympic sprinting standard, and Thief, starring James Caan as an expert criminal walking away from any semblance of a normal life, established him as a smart and dedicated director of high-end, but authentic takes on the fundamental noir archetypes– the jailbird with a heart of gold, the crook with a Samurai code of honor. Later efforts like Manhunter and Collateral would fit in picture-perfect with this exacting set of criminal themes, which found their definitive expression with the modern classic of Heat, but imagining the director branching out into any other genre would at first seem an almost impossible leap in logic. To his credit, Mann would go on to prove himself an able hand with the historical epic of Last of the Mohicans, the expose-biopics of The Insider and Ali, and even a kind of synthesis of the two with Public Enemies, which also stood as another of his comfortably typical crime-sagas. But anything resembling science-fiction or supernatural horror? Even to the most dedicated of Mann fanatics, that would seem to be a bridge too far even for his inestimable talents.
And yet that’s exactly where we find the director working in The Keep. Sure, there’s some comfortable bearing in the historical setting of World War II, and at first it even seems to be an ideal ground for the director to dig in with all his favorite masculine obsessions. All of his best crime dramas had a hint of war to them, after all– Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer blasting their machine-guns in the glass canyons of Los Angeles or Tom Cruise busting into close-quarter combat moves in a night club, any of them candidates for prior military experience, maybe burning out overseas and racking up some time with a handful of mercenary armies afterwards before plying their trades in the private sector. Last of the Mohicans gave us a wartime epic of the pre-Revolutionary calibre, breaking all the static formations we learned from Barry Lyndon for a more rough and tumble pell-mell sweep. There’s potential to be had, then, when we see how Mann photographs the column of tanks that drives into a quaint village surrounded by the Romanian Alps, so picturesque and rich in atmosphere it looks as though film crews might roll in and out routinely to shoot one fairy-tale story after another. That looming, ancient fortress at the center that all the townspeople go out of their way to keep out of doesn’t bring to mind the tales of the Brothers Grimm or Perault, though, as much as it reminds one of Kafka’s Castle, with perhaps a bit hint of his Penal Colony thrown in once you realize that the soldiers that we’re watching belong to the Third Reich. It takes a while for it to dawn on you, though, seeing as these are mere grunts of Hitler’s military, the army regulars in rather innocuous ponchos with camouflage flack patterns, far from the typical black uniformed SS thugs we’re used to seeing on film. Those jackboot stormtroopers show up eventually, of course, and put these ordinary soldiers into a stark contrast. Like Das Boot, that other great WWII epic with Jurgen Prochnow, The Keep is one of those rare movies that makes a distinction between “good” and “bad” Germans, between the ones who embraced the immoral horror of Hitler’s grand design with full embrace and the ones who would’ve rather fought back against fascism in Spain and elsewhere if only they’d had the balls.
It’s an odd move, and especially coming from Mann, who was raised Jewish, his father a Ukranian who came to America after being wounded in WWII, although this is the only movie in his oeuvre that would seem to acknowledge any part of that experience. Perhaps that’s part of why it all becomes so muddled and unclear, and why the director is so uncomfortable about acknowledging it in his body of work all these years later. While it’s true that it’s a rather horrid mess at times, and obviously the sort of thing that a maddened perfectionist like Mann would be loathe to admit responsibility for, it also displays all the tell-tale signs of being an incredibly creative, achingly personal mess, the kind that reveals far more about an artist’s true nature than all the plain mercenary efforts that auteurs usually try to distance themselves from. Sometimes it comes to life in sly moments of gallows humor, especially when he puts words into the mouths of the SS officers (“The people that go to these resettlement camps, there are only two doors: one in and one out,” says Gabriel Byrne’s Nazi scumbag. “The way out is a chimney!”) from the first moment the German officers occupy the ominous keep and try to steal the silver crosses (which look like the pin-ball crucifixions from Ken Russel’s Tommy) lining the granite walls, we get to watch so many of these sieg heil shouting fascists being pulled into the blinding abyss of what looks like some underground necropolis, blasted violently onscreen like that poor schmuck at the start of Scanners or the elite names of the German High Command at the end of Inglorious Basterds.
Indeed, at times with all the bright lights and exploding Nazis early on, one gets the impression that you’re not watching a Michael Mann film but extended outtakes from Raiders of the Lost Ark (with bits and pieces of Hangmen Also Die thrown in), and later on when good and evil begin battling one another with long bolts of blue lightning and Pink Floyd lasers in a foggy, rocky landscape that looks like something gleaned from a heavy-metal album cover, it’s hard not to think of Star Wars. The Lucas/Spielberg connection is apparent throughout, with all the odd gnostic mysticism and anti-fascist F/X pyrotechnics, making it feel like a demo-reel from Industrial Light & Magic composed using nothing more than a spread of Tarot cards as a narrative outline. At times like those, the movie almost succeeds as a kind of baroquely abstract take on the blockbuster genre, using all those special-effects not to create an impossible vision of easy to grasp things like spaceships in the midst of daredevil dogfights or lightsaber duels on a distant star, but some of the most perversely surreal imaginings of the supernatural and unknowable committed to the visual arts this side of an illuminated manuscript by William Blake. For most of the picture, there’s a decidedly Old Testament feel to all the bizarre happenings. Nazis are blasted out of this world by a creature made of nothing but thick clouds of sulphur and a burning glow, which looks like either the offspring of a fog-machine and a traffic light or an ill-begotten attempt by the producers of Lost to create the Smoke Monster without resorting to CGI (The Keep should be required viewing for all those practical-effects fetishists who think that everything can be done in-camera or with models and miniatures without looking ridiculous).
Ancient evil finally takes its shape as a walking monstrosity of walking flesh with action-figure muscles, a strikingly organic looking take on the Golem legend, that at first rises with the promise of avenging the Nazi persecution of the Jews. By all rights, this should be the part of the film that pushes it over the top, but somehow it isn’t. First of all, Mann is actually able to articulate this out-of-this-world substance in a way that both gives it an authentic physicality and enough room to make the most of its fairy-tale atmosphere– a bit like pairing the Cocteau of Beauty and the Beast with the Clouzeau of Wages of Fear. The only other movies that reach for this same level of freakishly hyperreal dreams are stuff like Peter Yates’ Krull or Ridley Scott’s Legend, and Michael Mann is able to outdo both their quotient of fantastical and realistic imagery while somehow concocting a digestible cinematic experience to house them (though considering the quality of those movies, that ain’t saying much). It helps that much of the supernatural part of the story is shepherded by Ian McKellan as an old Jewish archeologist (between this and his turns as Apt Pupil‘s aging Nazi and X-Men‘s Magneto, he seems to hop both sides of the WWII barbed-wire fence regularly on film), who grounds all the the visual mumbo-jumbo with enough solid conviction and motivation to keep everything onscreen from feeling like complete nonsense. Instead, what tips the movie over the edge of absolute preposterousness is what happens to his daughter (played by Alberta Watson, who seems to have arrived from a high fashion photo-shoot rather than a concentration camp train-station) upon meeting the movie’s biggest walking-talking question mark in the person of Scott Glenn’s mysterious, otherworldly stranger. With his glowing stardust eyes, green blood and suitcase carrying what appears to be a cross between a crucifix and a futuristic bazooka, it’s hard to tell whether he’s supposed to be an extra-terrestrial being or an avenging angel from the apocrypha (maybe both, in a Chariots of the Gods sort of thing). Neither would be terribly surprising, especially when he manages to leap into bed with Watson’s character for some sweaty yoga-sex almost immediately after meeting her (one wonders if the part was originally written for Sting).
And yet somehow, it all kinda works, or at least appears in character for the work of Michael Mann. Though so much of what’s happening and how it’s all edited is utterly bizarre, it carries a kind of insane magic to it– though it all occurs out in wartime Europe instead of pre-war America and there’s nary a tentacle in sight, it all carries the weight and dreadful imagination of a Lovecraft story, and you wouldn’t be too terribly surprised to see Cthullu rise up from the depths of that sunken city below the castle. It helps that Mann shoots everything with his typically beautiful style, and the fact that this represented his first foray into the wide expanse of 2.35:1 makes that visual artistry even deeper. From start to finish, the movie has a terrific eye for composition, color and movement that gives it a life far exceeding most other WWII-set stories and supernatural scarefests, both. Even at its most absurd moments, Mann’s photography has a breathtaking picturesque quality to it that’s perfectly in keeping with the spirit of its creation as any of his other works– like Manhunter and Miami Vice after it, The Keep is an 80’s marvel of style-over-substance through and through, tackling subjects as widely disparate as Nazi war-crimes, Biblical laser shoot-outs and tantric lovemaking worthy of European soft-core erotica with a equal flourish. That synth-rich score from Tangerine Dream helps flesh things out in a wonderfully moody way, as well, making it feel like an extended experimental music-video. That’s not to say that any of it makes one iota of sense, after all’s said and done, but rather that it doesn’t particularly have to in order to be enjoyed. Like many a modern-day endurance-trial of a movie from the likes of Lars von Trier or Gaspar Noe, Mann’s work here can impress upon the viewer deeply even while turning them off, a tone-poem that’s outgrown the obligation to rhyme. You may not necessarily enjoy watching The Keep, but this much is certain– you have to see it to believe it.
Yeah, this film is a mess but it is an interesting mess as your state in your eloquent review. This is probably the one film in Mann’s filmography that even his most rabid fans will admit is an abject failure. I know it’s the one film of his I’ve seen the least. One can see what Mann is trying to do with this film – he’s trying to transcend F. Paul Wilson’s horror novel to something grander. After all, Mann has always been a great admirer of Stanley Kubrick and one wonders if THE KEEP was Mann’s attempt to follow in his idol’s footsteps and do something along the lines of THE SHINING – a horror film on an epic scale. Sadly, Mann was clearly out of his depth on this film and there are all kinds of stories of the production problems that plagued filming – Mann rewriting pages of the screenplay 2 days before the scene in question was to be shot and then changing the scene again on the day of the shoot which certainly didn’t endear him to his cast. Also, the design of Molasar, the otherworldly being that resides in the Keep was also a big problem with Mann taking forever to settle on a design he liked and then the man in charge of the film’s special effects died during post-production and so much of the visual effects had to be re-done.
Your analogy to Lynch’s DUNE is apt as THE KEEP’s commercial and critical flop convinced Mann to move on more familiar subject matter with MANHUNTER and the result is arguably one of his greatest films, much like Lynch going to make BLUE VELVET, one of his greatest films. It is also telling that both directors have refused to revisit these respective films on home video even when they were given the opportunity to restore their visions. I get the feeling that for both filmmakers the scars run deep and they would rather put both of these films behind them. It’s too bad because like DUNE, a longer version of THE KEEP existed at one point and it would be nice to see Mann revisit this film and attempt to reconstruct as close as he could to what he originally intended.
What you’re talking about regarding Mann’s constantly changing vision of the film is interesting, JD. It more or less confirms my suspicions that “The Keep” is far from a mere attempt by the director at a more commercially viable genre vehicle (sci-fi/horror) and is instead one of his most painfully personal works, and that it’s that very personal element which makes the whole affair so messy. Frequently rewriting the script or coming up with new camera set-ups is the sort of thing that’s perfectly fine for smaller films where you have that kind of low-budget freedom, but it’s just going to cause problems if you’re dealing with a huge-as-hell production unless you have enough money to pay for every additional hour on-set.
To use my constant Lucas metaphor– it’s okay for “THX 1138”, not so much for “Star Wars” (unless you’re talking the Prequels, where Lucasfilm could afford constant reshoots).
I too would be interested in a longer cut of “The Keep”, but would hedge my expectations against the limitations in place. Even with all the money in the world, at that time Mann’s vision just probably wouldn’t live up to the demands of early 80’s special effects. Certain stuff, like Molasar himself, come off rather brilliantly. Finer details, like his glowing electro-touch and his Smoke Monster form? Not so much. It would’ve been interesting if Mann had decided not to rely on special-effects so much, and just go with what he was able to put to screen in-camera. Both this and John Carpenter’s “The Fog” are kinda tainted by occasionally absurd looking special effects.
I agree. I think the best thing that can be said for THE KEEP is that it was a valuable learning experience for Mann. By all accounts, he got much more organized on future productions and even ones that were plagued by problems (LAST OF THE MOHICANS and MIAMI VICE), Mann was still able to wrangle a satisfying result… or at the very least a coherent film!
I actually enjoy the effects for THE FOG. At least they are not clumsy-looking CGI which tends to mar some contemporary films. There is something almost quaint, a hand-made personal feel to the effects in Carpenter’s film which only endears it to me more. But I understand what you’re saying.
For me, clumsy looking physical effects are just as bad as clumsy looking CGI, and in some cases even worse. Lost of people are unnecessarily condescending about CG in general, and write it off without giving it much of a chance because they’re nostalgic about the old days of mattes, models and miniatures (the worst thing a movie can become, for me, is “quaint”). For me, there’s a much greater range of kinetic realism to CG that makes it very valuable, giving a filmmaker many more options about how to present a scene, instead of having to let the effects dictate the mis-en-scene. Also, they can be a lot cheaper than work-intensive physical effects, which can really loosen up a creator’s freedom vis a vis their financial obligations to the studio.
You could put out a 6 hour version of The Keep and you would probably get the same result….. one of the most awful movies ever made. I swear this film is only slightly better than Troll 2 lol. This is a well written piece and I did enjoy reading it. I definitely agree that Mann is most likely embarrassed by this picture. I get the impression that if he could burn every reel forever and force it into extinction he would. The Fog may be slightly tainted by cheesy special effects but it is a much better movie. The Keep is not even a “so bad it’s good film” for me. It is simply an unwatchable mess.
Mauriz, save for its “let’s defeat the spooky evil with a magic glowing cross” ending, “The Fog” is a great flick, and one of Carpenter’s most underrated. I had the pleasure to see it for the first time not on DVD but on a big the big screen, and it was absolutely beautiful. I make the comparison to Mann’s film only because of the weird disjoint between the on-set stuff and the effects. “The Fog” only has one scene that’s kinda spoiled by FX, though– “The Keep” has something like half of the film.
If nothing else, it’s a film that demonstrates just how difficult special-effects are to do well. Lucas and Spielberg’s talent with them, both old-school and digital, are really underrecognised. Mann’s ineptitude with them makes one appreciate how difficult they really are (I might also add Lynch with “Dune”, but he got a lot closer).
I have to agree with your Lucas/Spielberg praise here. Mann is not someone that seems to know what to do with special effects. Thankfully he has stuck to other genres since, which don’t rely on such cinematic trickery. The Fog features lighthouses and widescreen shots of endless ocean water…. sort of my version of your boundless love of screen ninjas.
Yes, Mauriz. As I kinda said above, Mann’s work on “The Keep” was useful in better defining what his comfort zone was. I think it’s telling that after this film, however, he didn’t retreat to directing, but overseeing “Miami Vice” on television, which was where he kinda got his stylish mojo back, rejuvanating himself in time for “Manhunter”.
“The Fog” would be a great double feature with “Shutter Island” in that regard. Personally, I think the movie is a great ghost story, and really makes wonderful use of its setting.
And actually, there’s only one or two movies I make note of ninjas in. “The Hunted” , “GI Joe”. So my love there has bounds, clearly drawn. If they were carrying laser swords instead of mere katanas, things would be different.
This film was edited heavily by the studio. Theres at least an hour, maybe more, missing from the theatrical version of the film that is in circulation. Michael Mann presented a longer version of the film to Paramount. That much is known to be fact. The studio werent pleased with that cut, and re-edited the film to what we see today. If you watch the film, it is easy to see that the studio edited the film the way they did in order to try and turn the film into a straight genre picture, however, it is easy to see that this was not what Mann had intended for the finished film. Will we ever see a restored version? Who know for sure. My guess is; no, we wont. Mann is an obsessive film-maker. As he says in interviews, “I always like to look forward, not backward!”. Now, he has never said that in reference to the keep, but I feel that the guy would have gone there already, were it ever going to happen at all. He hasnt, and its coming up to the films thirty year anniversary, so unfortunately, I dont think we will ever see a directors cut.
[…] The Keep (Mann, 1982) – Where to begin with this rarely exhumed Nazi inflected Grimm’s fairy tale that received a rare UK screening on Film4 last month? Sandwiched between the twin urbanity of Thief and Manhunter this is the one true oddity in Michael Mann’s clenched career, a film he has completely disowned due to its butchering in the editing suite by the film’s philistine producers, consequently it’s a difficult behemoth to track down with only inferior region 1 DVD’s available to the truly committed fans of Mann. It’s very much a film of two halves, the dialogue and performances are simply atrocious, particularly Ian McKellen’s Jewish academic and Robert Prosky’s Romanian Priest out chomping each other to decimate the Lovecraftian scenery, but it eclipses these barbarities with the evocative obsidian production designs of UK legend John Box, some eerie mist drenched haunting cinematography, and a palpitating score from Tangerine Dream which has become a cult collectors item in its own right. The editing is horrendous with characters arriving with no prior explanation (Scott Glen’s Jesus inspired saviour being particularly egregious) and it’s apparent how much of this languishes on the cutting room floor, but that barbarity is what alludes to its potential as the shell of a terrific film is incorporeally evident, it has a very odd, itchy vibe, and even the old school optical printing and reverse cranking SFX hold a strangely magnetic fascination for us cult movie aficionados. It’s an angular companion piece to Prince Of Darkness (or even Prometheus for that matter) with a grinding fairy tale aura, with notions of the seduction of overwhelming power lurking over the titular citadel like disembodied charcoal clouds, a pale cult item that is obsequiously flawed yet nebulously fascinating. […]