Michael Mann: Ranking His Films From Worst To Best

By Benjamin Brown /

11. The Keep

Every filmmaker has at least one: the early €œunmentionable€; the movie that they did back when they were new to the filmmaking scene, doe-eyed and unjaded, still trying to carve out their artistic identities, that now sits on their otherwise respectable filmography like a hula figurine, stubbornly refusing to be forgotten. For Spielberg, that film is 1942; for Scorsese, it€™s Boxcar Bertha; and for Mann, it€™s 1983€™s The Keep, which follows a squad of Nazi soldiers who accidentally awaken a long-dormant monster/ghost/demon-thing and find themselves in the awkward position of having to turn to a Jewish priest to help combat the threat. Yes, you read all of that right. Had The Keep been his first film, one could easily write off the movie€™s faults as merely being typical directorial debut snafus, but The Keep is actually Mann€™s second film, preceded by his real cinematic entrance: the masterful crime drama Thief. How Mann managed to go from such a thoughtful, self-disciplined film as Thief to something as absurdly awful as The Keep is beyond baffling.