Thanks to Glenn Kenny for alerting me (and the rest of the
world) to the fact that one of Anthony Mann’s most neglected masterpieces, Reign of Terror, aka The Black Book, is now available in a nice
new burn-on-demand DVD from Columbia Classics, which you can order through the fine folks at the Warner Archive. This is joyous news – the film has
wallowed in some strange obscurity for years, not just because it was public
domain (and hence available in a lot of crappy, fly-by-night editions but no
good ones) but also because it’s a bit of an unclassifiable oddity.
Mann would, of course, eventually gain notoriety for his corrosive,
psychological Westerns (The Man from
Laramie, Man of the West, The Naked Spur, etc.) and darkly operatic
historical epics (El Cid, Fall of the Roman Empire), but his early
career took off thanks to a series of low-budget film noirs, many of them made
with the great cinematographer John Alton. Reign
of Terror was one of these, but it’s not just a noir; it’s also a period
piece. It’s a stylized adventure set amid the chaos of the French Revolution as well as an over-the-top gangster movie where the chief baddie is Maximilian
Robespierre, and where the plot is basically a hard-boiled re-imagining of his
downfall.
