Macho Mann: The Hollywood director who still loves a cold-hearted killer

In movies like ‘Heat’, ‘Thief’ and ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, filmmaker Michael Mann perfected the art of digging into the souls of fatalistic men. As the director’s biopic of Italian entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari hits the Venice Film Festival, Geoffrey Macnab salutes his career so far

Robert De Niro in Michael Mann’s 1995 crime thriller ‘Heat’ (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

There is a cult of macho individualism that certain movie directors can’t seem to shrug off, whatever their age. Michael Mann is one such director. “Have no attachments. Allow nothing in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner.” So goes the philosophy of master thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) in Mann’s epic crime thriller Heat (1995). While it is among the most memorable lines of Nineties action cinema, the words would be equally believable uttered from the lips of John Wayne as vigilante Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the lone cowboy “doomed to wander between the winds” as Martin Scorsese once described him.

Cary Grant’s Geoff, the air freight boss in a remote South American outpost in Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings (1939) is another character cut from the same hardy cloth. “Joe died flying, didn’t he? That was his job. He just wasn’t good enough,” Geoff reacts after yet another of his young pilots, and close friend of his, is killed in the mist. Emotional attachment is a serious no-go for these men.

For better or worse, Mann is unreconstructed in his view of masculinity. The heroes of his films, who are always men, are defined by their professionalism and their ruthlessness. They don’t crumble in a crisis and they seldom give vent to their feelings.