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.

Where to watch The Keep

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Worldwide: 4K UHD Cross Replica Limited Edition

Aotearoa: Digital rental

Australia: Digital rental

Canada: Digital rental

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

UK & Ireland: Streaming on Paramount+

USA: Digital rental