Word: docudrama
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...Railroaded!, T-Men, Raw Deal, He Walked by Night and Border Incident - that lifted Mann from the bondage of B-minus musicals, got him hired by a major studio (the major, MGM) and form the bedrock of his current furtive eminence. Higgins had written several Crime Does Not Pay docudrama shorts for MGM in the '30s. And when the police-procedural docudrama became a popular feature-length genre in 1945 with the success of The House on 92nd Street (produced by Louis de Rochemont, who had fashioned miniature versions of the genre for the dramatized newsreel series The March...
...Higgins' twist was to wed the docudrama to the crime romance (film noir, as the French later called it). For the docu part of the story, an authoritative off-screen voice would set up parallel narrative tracks: a criminal's m.o. and the dogged work of government sleuths to catch him. Audiences were assured that not only could this felony happen, it did happen, for it was "based on case histories in the files of" some federal agency. But that was just half of it. The veneer of authenticity allowed Higgins and Mann to display more rotten behavior, more thugs...
...question that for Mann, and the genre, the docudrama approach was mostly an excuse to show lowlifes in low lighting. And if Higgins supplied the craft of Mann's noir films, cinematographer John Alton surely served up the art. Before hooking up with Mann, Alton had a nomad's r?sum?: born in Hungary, an assistant in Hollywood silent films, shooting pictures in Argentina in the '30s, then B and C movies back in America. The two men clicked as collaborators, sparking with extreme visual tropes, each instantly elevating the other's work. "I found a director in Tony Mann...
Michael Winterbottom, who co-directed the movie with Mat Whitecross, has fashioned a most adventurous filmography. He has made period tragedies (Jude) and comedies (Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story), but his true métier is the political docudrama set in lands scorched by war: Bosnia for Welcome to Sarajevo, Afghanistan for In This World. The Road to Guantánamo is his most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer...
...Subsequent to 9/11," says Greengrass, an Englishman who directed the superb docudrama Bloody Sunday, set in Northern Ireland in 1972, and the gritty espionage film The Bourne Supremacy, "we all had to make decisions about the world we live in, about the courses of action that we take. This film is saying that, before we got to that, there was this event: this extraordinary work of fate, mired in confusion, with the passengers gaining knowledge of 9/11 as they went. What that did was create a debate on the plane: What are we going to do? Are we going...