What came first, the hen or the egg? It’s not like I ponder over this extremely annoying question everyday. But for me, there has always been something fascinating about beginnings. How does life evolve, how do people build up a business and how does an artist start a new painting? When it comes to film, it is always interesting to look back at a director’s first – often shaky – steps with a camera on her/his shoulders. In this feature, I will look back at a certain director’s first film every month.
I would like to be able to say that there are only two kinds of directorial debuts – the good and the bad. Unfortunately, this is not true. There are boring, great, lousy, well-thought-but-poorly-executed, poorly-scripted-but-well-executed and countless other categories that can fit a directorial debut. And then there are those movies that are just… okay. And we’re not talking about a The Fault in Our Stars kind of okay. What I mean is the solitary version of the word – the one that excludes any long explanation (although I will try to extend it a little for the sake of this article).
Admittedly, it’s sort of hard to assess a movie in relation to its director if you have only seen a single other movie of his. Remember The Last of the Mohicans? Sort of forgettable but good movie about Native Americans? That’s my knowledge of Michael Mann right there. So when I watched his first movie [that is available to watch anywhere], I really had no idea what to expect (apart from Blackhat-esque ridiculousness).
The Jericho Mile was the London International Film School graduate’s first feature film – before that, he had worked on several TV shows, a short and a documentary (both of which I couldn’t trace down). The 1979 film is an award winning made-for-tv production that centers around a prisoner’s journey to become one of America’s fastest distance runners. Larry ‘Rain’ Murphy (Peter Strauss) has been sentenced to prison for life and uses all his free time on running. Prison officials consider him eligible to attend the Olympics, however, Larry is not interested. A tragic personal incident changes his mind though and Larry pursues a dream that inspires many of his fellow prisoners.
Just like (apparently) many of Michael Mann’s films, The Jericho Mile lets the audience feel sympathy towards a criminal – Larry has done something terribly wrong but we come to understand him and empathize with him. This is achieved by slowly revealing more and more about Larry’s past instead of confronting us with it to begin with. It also helps that the final reveal of Larry’s crime is a deeply psychological scene that lets the character speak for himself and explain his motive. He is never a true hero but the film builds up just enough sympathy for the viewer to connect to him.
It’s really a shame that the film just never speeds up its pace or takes an unusual turn somewhere along the road. While well-written when it comes to dialogues and probably well-filmed (if you’re not watching the pixelated Youtube version), there is nothing truly surprising or unusual about this film. The emotional aspect of it works as well as in any good sports movie and there are some very touching scenes but in the end, you don’t get anything you hadn’t expected or seen before. I take that back: perhaps you hadn’t seen it in a made-for-tv film before. So perhaps it is relatively impressive for its own format. Other than that, this is just one for Michael Mann completionists.
… Judging by IMDB user reviews and the Primetime Emmys, I am completely wrong though.