Noir Alley: T-Men (1947) intro 20170709
Вставка
- Опубліковано 11 вер 2024
- Noir Alley: T-Men (1947) intro by Eddie Muller shown on Jul 9, 2017
From TCM's Noir Alley (Saturdays at Midnight ET and Sunday 10am ET) hosted by the Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller.
Great intro !
Noir Alley/TCM is such an amazing resource.
He needs to view T Man's intro as a multi genre compilation akin to David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest or Citizen Kane. Don't take it at face value. Mann subverted it.
The infallibility part is correct, yet it's reflected in the virtually infallible performance of the two protagonist undercover T-men themselves, as well as the entire team. Meanwhile, in the real world today we have a lot of ineptitude and laziness, and 60% of murders go unsolved in many cities.
What Eddie leaves out about the narration is the scope of the power the treasury department wields against citizens. It comes off pretty totalitarian, and oppressive against the common men and women in the post-war world of noir. Note how post-narration, the clerk gets blamed for not having the expertise to spot a fake bill, and is stuck with the loss. In my experience as a criminal defense lawyer, it's often the words out of the government's own mouths that's the best evidence for the defense. So what they intended as propaganda needn't be perceived the way they intended at all. Finally, we know that it's propaganda and no doubt audiences at the time knew it too. That's an assertion of government power right there that can seen as abusive. No need to take it at face value.
I don't really see any effort to make government seem totalitarian in this film. IRL? Oy yeah. I can see you and I have much in common when it comes to our low regard for government! Still, I find your take on this film interesting.
I do agree that there is more beyond the surface. What I saw is Mann's reoccurring theme in his Noir and Westerns, men occupy a brutal world and one must be brutal in order to survive. He doesn't erase the line between good and evil in his films but he blurs it.