The filmmaker Wim Wenders called one of the “greatest underrated film directors”
As a pivotal figure in the New German Cinema movement that brought Volker Schlöndorff, Wolfgang Petersen, Werner Herzog, Margarethe von Trotta and others to mainstream attention, Wim Wenders became one of an entire nation’s defining cinematic voices for a generation.
Equally adept at both narrative filmmaking and documentaries, his factual projects have been nominated three times for an Academy Award in the ‘Best Documentary Feature’ category. At the same time, he’s also shown himself to be skilled as a playwright, author, and photographer. A multi-talented creative mind, even at a young age, his tastes leaned towards movies that hadn’t been enthusiastically greeted elsewhere.
Specifically, Wenders’ adoration for Anthony Mann’s Man of the West stands apart from the initial consensus, with the Western being largely trashed by American critics following its 1958 release. One of the very few glowing reviews it received at the time was from then-critic Jean-Luc Godard, who maintained that it was the finest film to hit cinemas that year.
It’s since been reappraised, but Wenders was won over from the start. As he explained to A.Frame, it was a pivotal experience during his formative years. “The first retrospective I saw was an American director called Anthony Mann, and the first film where I consciously understood how movies are made was a Western he made called Man of the West,” he said. “It starred Gary Cooper. It’s one of my all-time favourite movies because I had this revelation while watching it.”
At the time, Wenders “wanted to be a painter in Paris,” but his home was so cold that he “discovered that the cinema was a warm place where I could see three or four movies if I stayed in the toilet between showings.” Further celebrating his revelatory first viewing of Man of the West, he admitted that “I could have had it with any other film, but I had it with this one.”
He would then call Mann “one of the greatest underrated film directors in the history of cinema,” which is something many of the director’s supporters would no doubt agree with. Despite collaborating with many of the biggest names in the industry, including eight Jimmy Stewart movies, Charlton Heston’s El Cid, and star-studded epic The Fall of the Roman Empire, he never found himself regarded as one of the most prominent auteurs working at the peak of their powers during that period.
That was admittedly a difficult thing to accomplish during the 1950s and 1960s when such heavyweights as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Elia Kazan, David Lean, William Wyler, and Fred Zinnemann were all operating at the top of their game and churning out classic after classic. However, Mann was hardly a slouch by comparison. Wenders knew from the start that this was somebody to be admired, though, and he never forgot Man of the West.
