Something to watch tonight: Thursday 18 January
The Keep (Mann, 1983)
In 1982, Michael Mann was a director on the rise. He’d been making stylish episodic television and one very well-regarded feature, Thief with James Caan.
Wanting to capitalise on his heat (so to speak) Mann took on an ambitious adaptation of a bestselling World War II horror novel called The Keep. The supernatural story of a bunch of Nazis stationed in a Romanian village during 1941, occupying a mysterious tower because it looked like the easiest building to defend, then unleashing a terrifying and powerful monster because of their greed, was going to require all of the special effects talent the British film industry could muster and for Mann to be at his most focused. It got neither of those things.
The shoot went relatively well. An abandoned quarry in North Wales stood in for the exteriors of the village and the keep. Shepperton Studios could handle the rest.
Mann got a top cast, many of whom would go on to bigger and better things: Jürgen Prochnow (fresh off Das Boot) played a ‘good German’, Gabriel Byrne played a bad one, Scott Glenn would make The Right Stuff in the same year and Ian McKellen was launching a screen career to parallel his stage one.
Then things started to go wrong. Two weeks after principal photography finished, special effects maestro Wally Veevors passed away leaving 260 shots still to complete and no notes on how he intended to do it. (Mann had to do the work himself.)
Mann’s director’s cut was 210 minutes long. (For reference Avatar: Fire and Ash is 197 minutes.) Paramount baulked at that, understandably, and demanded he get it under two hours. Test screenings of the two-hour version were disastrous so the genius suits demanded further cuts and offered no money for reshoots to cover the holes in the story.
They also decided to cut their losses in the sound department meaning that a final mix couldn’t be completed. The Keep is the worst sounding major studio film of the 80s.
For a long time there were rumours that Mann had used his considerable influence to supress home video releases of the film — it does his reputation no favours — but the truth is that hardly anyone thought there was a quid in it until recently.
The extraordinary collector’s package of the film (from Imprint) is not only a testament to what might have been, it is the only way I think to watch the film and have it be remotely comprehensible. If you were to stumble across The Keep online (usually as a rental but also occasionally on a subscription streamer) and thought to yourself, “Woohoo a Michael Mann film I haven’t seen before” you’ll be totally baffled.
But the extras in the box — especially Buck and Piter’s exhaustive documentary, A World War II Fairy Tale — show us what Mann was aiming for and also what Paramount thought they were selling before the wheels fell off the project. Facsimiles of Mann’s original script and Paramount’s press kit, the five-part graphic novel adaptation of the book, the CD of the Tangerine Dream soundtrack and a (literally) heavyweight metal cross embedded in the box, make it the most stunning collector’s edition of a terrible film in the history of home entertainment.
A testament to director overreach and studio interference, The Keep is a bizarre and tragic chapter in motion picture history.
