The Great Flamarion
Erich von Stroheim, Dan Duryea and Mary Beth Hughes are featured in this story of murder behind the vaudeville stage. “Anthony Mann's achievements in the Western have blinded critics to his not inconsiderable achievements outside that genre.... (F)rom his first '40s thrillers, through the Westerns and independent productions of the '50s, to the epics of the '60s, Mann's films charted a unique course in the American Cinema. Mann's major themes are repression and neurosis. His heroes are men at odds with themselves, caught in the grip of passions and obsessions of which they are only dimly aware....
“The Great Flamarion is a decided cut above Mann's non-thriller '40s movies. Erich von Stroheim's masterful Flamarion is the prototype of the Mannian hero, a man wounded in the past who carries the scar with him into the present. More importantly, the film sees Mann beginning to develop a directorial identity, most noticeably in the striking tracking shots that open and close the film, and in the ritualistic way that the murders are signalled.” --Phil Hardy, National Film Theatre, London