Michael Mann: Ranking His Films From Worst To Best
11. The Keep
Every filmmaker has at least one: the early unmentionable; 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, its Boxcar Bertha; and for Mann, its 1983s 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 movies faults as merely being typical directorial debut snafus, but The Keep is actually Manns 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.
