THE USES OF DISENCHANTMENT: HOW MICHAEL MANN’S ‘THE KEEP’ FELL INTO NEGLECT
In early 2016 BAMcinématek held a major retrospective of all Michael Mann’s filmography, throwing up a few surprises, such as a fresh and one-night-only exclusive showing of a new “Director’s Cut” of Marmite hacker movie, Blackhat, and a great conversation with the director, moderated by New York Magazine critic Bilge Ebiri. But although it also screened, fans were out of luck if they expected the director to announce any kind of restoration of, or illumination on, the oddity in his back catalog, the self-proclaimed “World War II Fairy Tale,” The Keep. The film, Mann’s second feature which followed his ice cool heist drama Thief, is his one attempt to delve into the truly fantastical, an expressionistic foray far removed from his standard template of Pinteresque, self-reliant and solitary professionals, on each side of the law. Loosely based on F Paul Wilson’s novel, The Keep has Nazi soldiers in 1941 unearth an ancient evil locked deep within the eponymous sepulchral Keep, buried in the Carpathian mountains. A small unit of war-weary Wehrmacht soldiers led by Woermann (Jurgen Prochnow) set up base there. The local village priest warns him that it is an evil place, and not to touch any of the 108 nickel crosses embedded in the rock. Two bored and greedy soldiers pry one out of the wall, unleashing the evil being within, Molasar, who kills them. This action alerts Glaeken (Scott Glenn), who is the guardian of The Keep, who hops on a boat from Greece to confront the creature. Meanwhile, more vicious Nazis led by Major Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne) arrive and take reprisals against the villagers for the deaths of the soldiers. He finds an inscription of an ancient language (a spell to imprison the creature?) and summons a wheelchair bound elderly Jewish scholar Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellen) and his daughter Eva (Alberta Watson) from Dachau to translate. They see Molasar as the embodiment of an ancient Golem. Molasar carries on killing Nazis, and proposes to Dr. Cuza that if he removes the Talisman that imprisons him within the stone walls, he will kill all the remaining Nazis for him. Glaeken knows Molasar won’t be satisfied with that, and the stage is set for the final confrontation. Oh, by the way, Glaeken is a vampire. But you’d never know it. Perhaps because Mann’s three-hour supernatural fairy tale was slashed to 93 minutes after going wildly over time and budget, with abrupt edits and cuts that make no sense.
It is telling how in this 1983 Film Comment interview with Harlan Kennedy Mann is pulling away from some of the very elements that appeal to die-hard fans of the film, like German soldiers exploding, Scanners style (hilariously in slow-motion, and very obviously dummies). Elements which have also influenced other war horror, such as 2001’s The Bunker. “The idea of making this film within the genre of horror films appealed to me not at all,” he said. “It also did not appeal to Paramount. That doesn’t mean the movie isn’t scary. It’s very scary, very horrifying, and it’s also very erotic in parts (Glenn and Watson get it on with barely an introduction, the seduction another victim of the cutting room floor). But what it is overall is very dreamy, very magical, and intensely emotional. It has the passions that happen in dreams sometimes when you’re grabbed in the middle of a dream and yanked into places you either want to get out of or you never want to leave.” He studied Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Uses of Enchantment—Bettleheim believed fairy tales were complex moral fables—“The myth is pessimistic while the fairy tale is optimistic, no matter how terrifyingly serious some of the story may be.”
Mann dismissed the presence of the Nazis as incidental to the central three-way struggle between Glaeken, Molasar, and the “Golem’s” temptation of unearthly power offered up to a newly revitalized Dr. Cuza. Yet when researching, Mann also boned up on Otto Skorzeny, the Nazi Brandenburger officer who rescued Mussolini by daring glider assault in 1943. Mann was drawn to “the specific kinds of aberration that explain why a lower middle-class bourgeois in Munich would be attracted to the Waffen SS in 1933.” To what end this particular research manifests itself in Gabriel Byrne’s performance is debatable.
The director gave Glaeken his surname of Trismegistus, Greek for “harvest”—a reaper of evil spirits? In fact, he seems to have made up half the film on the spot, changing the script on the day, often rewriting dialogue. Then, he would storyboard and change his mind again, because he was struck by how the light had changed and evoked a different feeling to him. “Once I’ve written the screenplay I’ve finished the movie, in the sense that I have a complete evocation of it on paper, then it’s a whole new film again when I start shooting. It doesn’t change that much, but now the words are plastic, flexible. So I’m constantly rewriting bits of dialogue before I shoot, which drives the actors really crazy.”
Poor Ian McKellen suffered the most. The exterior location for The Keep was an abandoned Welsh slate quarry. It was 150 feet deep requiring crew and equipment to be lowered in, working 16 hour days in the cold and rain. The actor recalls being made up to look 30 years older, a process that took five hours. At one point, for twelve days in succession, he was put through make-up, but never called to work. The producer sent him home to recuperate, fearing a nervous breakdown. Mann seemed driven by a vision, but whatever it was, it was elusive, almost as much as the feeling evoked by Tangerine Dream’s anachronistic score. Incidentally, copyright around the score is one reason (apart from Mann’s unwillingness) why you won’t see a home release on DVD or Blu-ray of The Keep anytime soon.
Yet the film is undoubtedly striking and evocative, channeling a feeling of underlying strangeness and oppressive dread. Mann dresses his sets and location in fog and very specific lighting, utilizing arc lamps from the twenties and thirties to achieve a certain hard blue shaft of light emanating from the openings in the keep, recalling the German expressionism of the period. “Creating a kind of Albert Speer-Mussolini monumental quality.” The village outside, by contrast, is very bright, white, overexposed, yet naturalistic enough to seem grounded, to represent innocence. Before its truncated form, the film would have shown the disturbance from the keep’s released prisoner disturb and disrupt the villagers—one character can briefly be seen drinking a dog’s blood. Critic Matt Zoller Seitz recently tweeted in reaction against the current “absolutist” appreciation projected by “Film Twitter” about how one can find redeeming qualities in films that one doesn’t love outright, or even in films dismissed as flawed:
There are films I’ve seen multiple times that I don’t love unreservedly. I love them in part, or I am impressed by them.
There are films that do very little for me emotionally that I cherish because of their brilliant technique. The reverse is also true.
Interestingly, Mann didn’t see Molasar as a simply evil force, but rather a pure distillation of power, to be used for good or ill. A kind of metaphor for the forces shaping the world during the war. “He’s just sheer power, and the appeal of power, and the worship of power, a be*lief in power, a seduction of power. And Molasar is very, very deceptive. When we first meet him, we too believe that he is absolute salvation. And it’s all a con. Now when Glaeken shows up, the first thing he does is seduce Eva Cuza. So my intent in designing those characters was to make them not black-and-white.”
It’s a pity Molasar is such a disappointing presence in the film, first manifesting as a cloud of particles, then gradually becoming what looks like a muscle-bound version of one of German anatomist Gunther Von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibits, with two glowing red balls for eyes. Special effects chief Wally Veevers died two weeks into post-production, leaving no clue to his method. The ambitious finale planned out by him also had to be scrapped, another reason perhaps why Mann is reluctant to have the film released on disc in its butchered, imperfect form. He later said, “The Keep was really hard because I went into pre-production without a completed screenplay,” conveniently forgetting how much he chopped and changed it to his producer and cast’s dismay. Author Wilson scoffed at this. “The film followed his script pretty faithfully.”
Or maybe it’s also because Mann finds that, looking back, he really wasn’t sure what he was trying to achieve, becoming lost in the night and fog of The Keep‘s black heart.
Written by Tim Pelan
A 1983 interview with Michael Mann about filmmaking and The Keep, from The Electric Theatre Show: “Mann talked about the power of dreams, and moving The Keep story out of the horror genre of the novel and into a dream reality. He felt it was not necessary to try and explain non-natural events or causes because they are states of mind in an expressionistic dream reality, which is what he was attmpting to do with in his film version.” —The Keep Score by Tangerine Dream
It isn't ideal, but I still have my laserdisc copy and I have backed it up onto a dvd. I really enjoyed this movie and I am glad I have any version to watch.
It would be awesome to see it expanded back to Mann's intended cut. I retain hope that this will get a proper release in high definition, however unlikely that may be.
Thank you for the article. It was very interesting.
The book is fantastic and the movie is so awful. The cast and soundtrack are the only redeeming factors about the movie. Another knock against it is that it soured author F. Paul Wilson on Hollywood so we've never gotten a Repairman Jack movie or TV series. That being said, if Mann's original longer cut ever showed up one day, I would be interested in seeing it (a remake that is closer to the novel would also be ideal) I guess what I'm trying to say is go out and read the original novel. It's great.
The book is fantastic and the movie is so awful. The cast and soundtrack are the only redeeming factors about the movie. Another knock against it is that it soured author F. Paul Wilson on Hollywood so we've never gotten a Repairman Jack movie or TV series. That being said, if Mann's original longer cut ever showed up one day, I would be interested in seeing it (a remake that is closer to the novel would also be ideal) I guess what I'm trying to say is go out and read the original novel. It's great.
While I disagree with you about the movie being "awful", I am intrigued about the novel. If I had read the novel first, maybe I would like the movie less.
While I disagree with you about the movie being "awful", I am intrigued about the novel. If I had read the novel first, maybe I would like the movie less.
That was the case with me. It's definitely a case of you need to see the movie first. Something similar happened with me with the movie Battle Royale. I saw the movie first because the novel had yet to be translated in to English. I showed the movie to some friends after they read the novel and they all hated it. I have since read the Battle Royale novel and it is immensely better than the movie but I can still enjoy the movie as well because I didn't have those expectations going in the first time watching it. As someone who liked The Keep movie, you'd most likely have a similar reaction after reading the novel and still be able to enjoy both.
Overall yes, once the evil appears it is laughable and as others pointed out, the book is far superior. What keeps drawing me to the movie however is the score by Tangerine Dream and the flawed take on the material by Mann. I doubt any cut of this movie will end up making sense or fix what's on the screen, but it would be interesting to see it in high def.
I've only ever seen this movie in full screen and VHS quality.
Mann probably buried the negative deep down some castle in the Dinu Mountain Pass.
This is one of my "holy grail" titles, on any format. A disjointed mess, to be sure, but a really interesting disjointed mess. The soundtrack & acting talent alone make this a must watch. Theatrical cut, director's cut, whatever... this has been dragging on for three decades, give us something.
Overall yes, once the evil appears it is laughable and as others pointed out, the book is far superior. What keeps drawing me to the movie however is the score by Tangerine Dream and the flawed take on the material by Mann. I doubt any cut of this movie will end up making sense or fix what's on the screen, but it would be interesting to see it in high def.
I've only ever seen this movie in full screen and VHS quality.
Mann probably buried the negative deep down some castle in the Dinu Mountain Pass.
I've always thought of this film as an "entertaining mess". Like you, the music and the overall atmosphere are the two elements I love about this movie that have always made it watchable to me. I bought a DVD off of eBay a few years back that appears to have been ripped from the laserdisc (it's widescreen), and I think that's about as good as it's gonna get, despite hoping for it in HD.
With that said, it does resemble a film that's been edited with a Cuisinart; how many minutes pass between Glaeken's arrival into town to the time when he and Eva Cuza are gettin' down and dirty? Three, maybe four minutes tops? A couple of scenes in between, perhaps? I know he's got some supernatural in him and all, but that's some serious game.
Last edited by BagheeraMcGee; 07-07-2017 at 10:06 PM.
Overall yes, once the evil appears it is laughable and as others pointed out, the book is far superior. What keeps drawing me to the movie however is the score by Tangerine Dream and the flawed take on the material by Mann. I doubt any cut of this movie will end up making sense or fix what's on the screen, but it would be interesting to see it in high def.
I've only ever seen this movie in full screen and VHS quality.
Mann probably buried the negative deep down some castle in the Dinu Mountain Pass.
It was on Netflix at one point several years ago in HD. One of the movie channels had it too (I think it was HDNet)
It was on Netflix at one point several years ago in HD. One of the movie channels had it too (I think it was HDNet)
All of the HD versions are upconverts of the laserdisc source. There is/was a satellite rip floating around the web that (at least to my eyes) was slightly better, but still along the levels of a dvd release.
What gets me is that there are perfectly serviceable 35mm negatives that have been played that I am surprised that no European or Asian, wealthy individual or media broadcast company, has made an HD version to play. There are plenty of movies yet to be released on blu-ray that I've seen in true HD on MGM-HD UK, Sky TV and other HD channels in Europe and Asia.
Kino came very close to releasing the film on Blu-ray (sourced from a 4K restoration), but it was pulled from them at the last minute. Not sure I buy the theory that it's down to copyright entanglements, though. I reckon Mann himself doesn't want it released for one reason or another.
Honestly...the film is HORRIBLE. Incoherent as hell. It's nicely-shot and scored, but it's still one of the worst things Mann has ever directed (although Blackhat gave it a run for its money ).
Honestly...the film is HORRIBLE. Incoherent as hell. It's nicely-shot and scored, but it's still one of the worst things Mann has ever directed (although Blackhat gave it a run for its money ).
It's incoherent, certainly, but I don't think I'd ever brand a film horrible if it had stunning visuals and music.
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Why Paramount won't re-release The Keep
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I feel like everyone on this site lately has been so negative with their opinions.
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