The Jericho Mile at 45: Michael Mann's Lingering, Potent Debut

Making a Mann: Revisiting Michael Mann’s Feature Debut, The Jericho Mile

To many, Michael Mann “debuted” in 1981 with the sleek, stylish, synthy and oh-so-80s crime thriller Thief. It’s an auteurist’s perfect first feature, after all, with a director storming through the theatrical gates with a fully realized aesthetic, politics and film form. It’s also, of course, not Mann’s first movie, just the first that wasn’t made for TV. With 45 years of hindsight on Mann’s perfectionist oeuvre, The Jericho Mile can at first look like a trial run for his career in the same way that L.A. Takedown was a trial run for Heat. But that would be doing Mann—a constantly resourceful, reactive and iterative artist—a disservice in favor of a neat mythos. While The Jericho Mile is indeed a prologue to his more canonical oeuvre, it is also the end of the journey that made him Michael Mann. Before Mann could really express his native Chicago on screen, he first had to find his voice.

Mann wandered to Wisconsin and London for school, and as a student found himself interviewing aspirational revolutionaries in Paris in May ‘68. Not long later, he filmed a road trip from his home city to California, where he saw the hippie peace movement come into conflict with deeper racial tensions in the United States; as an aside, both of these films are, for various reasons, unlikely to be seen again publicly, although some riot footage from the latter appears in Mann’s Ali.

Mann’s literal journey down to Hollywood was also a spiritual one as he cut his teeth throughout the ‘70s, primarily writing for TV. Midway through the decade, Mann found himself working on one of the foundational projects of his career, one that he would ultimately not be credited for: Writing a feature adaptation for Edward Bunker’s seminal first novel No Beast So Fierce. Initially, Dustin Hoffman was directing the film on top of starring in it, and according to Mann, had started production inside Folsom Prison before Hoffman decided he couldn’t direct it. Ulu Grosbard took over, and what would become the movie Straight Time started to move away from Mann’s script.

Mann describes No Beast So Fierce as “probably the best American prison novel,” although Bunker himself didn’t agree. “I wouldn’t call it either a prison novel or a prison film,” Bunker told Brooklyn Rail. Instead Bunker saw the work as about how prison affects a person mentally. And indeed, there’s only a couple dozen pages of literal incarceration in Bunker’s 300-page novel. Much more of it is focused on the psychological realities of someone who spent so much of their life behind bars trying to navigate the world outside—one as systemically against them as it was before they got released.

The arc of the book takes its protagonist Max Dembo from the gritty realism of street-side hustling and the clinically evil bureaucracy of parole officers to an operatic, globe-spanning finale following a massive robbery-turned-shootout with LAPD. The choice between turning a chance romance into something real at the risk of being locked up versus an ideological commitment to escape, which wrestles inside Dembo’s character, seems like a template for Neil McCauley in Heat. Mann revisiting Chris Shiherlis’ restlessness in Heat 2 continues in this same vein (not to mention, Jon Voight’s character Nate is literally modeled after Bunker). Suffice it to say, No Beast So Fierce has stuck with Mann for almost half a century. And it’s that opening dozen or so pages that Mann worked to extract first—Straight Time might’ve left the Folsom of the novel behind, but Mann wanted to get in.

“The first time I was in Folsom [for The Jericho Mile], my expectations of what prison would be like were totally wrong,” Mann explains. “I thought it would be an oppressive situation; that meant the men would be oppressed by a system of guards and it was exactly the opposite. The guards were scared to death of the convicts. They were basically hiding in the guntower.”

What Mann found in Folsom were what he described as “mature” inmates, ones who had gone to prison, got out and got committed again, got shipped off to San Quentin before they failed out of there too. Folsom was the end of the line. In these confines, the men knew how to build their own structures of power within the walls and false realities to keep their minds from wandering towards thoughts of the life they might be missing out on. For The Jericho Mile’s Larry Murphy (Peter Strauss), the way to hide is not in his head but his legs—he runs himself to exhaustion every day before he gets a chance to think.

The Jericho Mile opens in montage, with rhythmic cutting juxtaposing a muraled wall of faces with the activities of Black, white and Latino prisoners as they largely self-segregate in the yard. Running between them all, quite literally, is Murphy and Stiles (Richard Lawson). The two operate as natural foils, with Murphy literally running away from his thoughts, while Stiles is always too aware about the family life he is missing in the outside world. The friendship between the two in their adjacent cells exists beyond the socially segregated reality of the prison, where Murphy (white) and Stiles (Black) as individuals can be good friends, although that doesn’t give either a foot-in to each other’s groups. This, too, is borrowed from Bunker, where Dembo is only briefly able to say goodbye to his best friend in Folsom, Aaron, because neither are comfortable hanging around groups of people of different races with how high-tension the ‘60s had become.

While the race dynamics of prison life are omitted from Straight Time, those conflicts are examined at length in The Jericho Mile (interestingly, neither work attempts to adapt Bunker’s shockingly frank depictions of prison sexuality). Early in the latter film, Murphy finds out his wife just gave birth to a daughter, although he has to turn to the leader of the white gang, Dr. D (Brian Dennehy), to try to finagle a conjugal visit. When a woman he’s never seen before shows up instead of his wife, Stiles realizes he’s been set up by Dr. D to mule drugs into Folsom. Furious, Stiles backs out and the woman gets pinched. Murphy tries to warn Stiles to get himself into confinement, away from Dr. D’s gang, but it turns out to be too late. The hit is already out.

It’s an unending series of retaliation after retaliation. Stiles walks off on Dr. D, Dr. D has Stiles killed, Murphy gets back at Dr. D by getting him the only place it hurts: Dr. D’s stash of cash. While his men hold him back as he watches his money literally burn away at Murphy’s hands, Dr. D swears put an end to Murphy’s last bit of hope: He’s going to stop the inmates from building a track that Murphy can run an OAU-sanctioned (the film’s stand-in for the United States Olympic Committee) race on in his journey to qualify for the Olympics .

When Murphy’s running grabs the attention of Warden Gulliver (Billy Green Bush), seeing an opportunity for a glint of glory in trying to get Murphy the Olympics, Murphy initially turns him down. Like so many anti-institutional Michael Mann protagonists that came after him, Murphy doesn’t bite—he doesn’t run for anyone or anything. Things change after Stiles is killed. He leverages the warden’s desires to get access alone to the metal shop, which he rips up both in anger and to find Dr. D’s stash. Dr. D’s revenge on Murphy doesn’t work out—he first tries to pin Stiles’ death on Murphy, but Cotton Crown (Roger E. Mosley), one of the Black leaders, quickly finds out this wasn’t the case. This attempt at inflaming racial hatred backfires on Dr. D, as the Latino gang finds out he wasn’t striking against the track as a political action, but as a personal vendetta against Murphy (interestingly, one of the Latino inmates Mann hired to act in the movie was played by Gilbert Tewksbury, Danny Trejo’s uncle). This turns the struggle between Murphy and Dr. D from a personal battle into a fight between Dr. D’s white gang and the rest of the prison population. The violence that ensues gives way to mutual labor and newfound solidarity amongst the prisoners—they’re building the track for Murphy, and Murphy now understands he’s running for them.

During an exercise run ahead of the race, Murphy’s trainer, Jerry Beloit (Ed Lauter) passes along a gift from Murphy’s psychologist at Folsom, Dr. Janowski (Geoffrey Lewis). It’s a stopwatch with an inscription on the back. “To ‘The Jericho Mile.’ What’s that mean?” Murphy asks. “Maybe it’s got something to do with the walls come tumblin’ down.” There’s the obvious double-edged intent to the message, where running can bring down the literal walls of the prison but also the psychological ones that Janowski has been so desperately trying to break through. There is, however, a cruel irony to it too, maybe lost on all those involved: The walls of Jericho were brought down by people screaming from the outside, not the voices trapped within.

When Mann was at the London Film School in the late ‘60s, it’s possible that he might have seen Tony Richardson’s kitchen sink realist classic The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, about a teenage inmate who is offered favoritism by the borstal’s governor because he believes that the boy could win races for him against real boarding schools, bringing prestige to his carceral institution. During the heartwrenching finale, the runner quits in protest just a yard or two before winning—he’ll throw everything away just to prove to himself he won’t be used by anybody.

There’s an interesting connection to be drawn between the two films, in that Murphy starts off from that position, but slowly builds up to the idea that he can play the system, and that there is a fulfilling communal exercise in doing so. Murphy wins the race, but he still won’t get to qualify for the Olympics—the OAU doesn’t think it would be a good look to have someone who murdered their father running with them. They’re a private institution reliant on donors, after all, and people don’t care if Murphy had a good reason for doing what he did. He’s a societal reject, an outcast, and nothing he can ever do will allow him to re-enter the conservative society outside the walls.

With Murphy arriving back at Folsom, everything seems just as it started: Inmates working out in the yard, people shooting the shit in their respective corners. Over the radio plays a report of the OAU Nationals, with one runner setting a 3:50.6 in the mile. Murphy changes into his running shorts and grabs his stopwatch. As he starts his mile around the yard, the other inmates slowly start to take notice. As he comes around the final stretch, one inmate grabs his hand and checks the time: “You did it man!” In triumph, Murphy throws the stopwatch, exploding it against the unphased walls of Folsom. The physical walls don’t come down, but he did finally break the walls in his mind.

Alex Lei is writer and filmmaker currently based in Baltimore. He can usually be found on Twitter.

Making a Mann: Revisiting Michael Mann’s Feature Debut, The Jericho Mile