Some directors takes years to find their authorial voice, if ever, with a number of false starts before zeroing in on who they are as an artist. Part of what makes The Jericho Mile, now available on Blu-ray thanks to Kino Lorber, so striking is the way the film is recognizable as a Michael Mann film down to its very pores. Originally debuting as a TV movie in 1979, The Jericho Mile is of a piece with later masterworks like Thief and Heat. As with those films, The Jericho Mile is centered around the nature of obsession, the systems of control and language deployed by and between men, and Mann’s evergreen fascination with loner men incapable of articulating their emotional needs except through their work.
Set (and shot) inside Folsom Prison, The Jericho Mile stars Peter Strauss (a mainstay of ‘70s TV) as Rain Murphy, known as “Lickety Split” by his fellow inmates thanks to Murphy’s unusual habit. He doesn’t work, he doesn’t train, he doesn’t compete. He just runs. Runs every day, doing endless laps around the prison yard. While he’s running, Murphy is dead to the world, not even aware of how fast he’s going.
Turns out, he’s going very, very fast, and that brings him to the attention of the prison staff, including Dr. Janowski (Geoffrey Lewis, whom I recognize from the time he got the crap murdered out of him by Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter) and the prison warden (Billy Green Bush). The higher ups at the prison have the idea to let Murphy train with Olympic hopefuls, maybe even qualify for the team himself. From that idea springs both triumph and tragedy, as Murphy’s reluctance to allow himself to dream clashes with the suddenly very real possibilities in front of him.
The story unfolds against the backdrop of Folsom Prison, and here you can see the first signs of Mann’s signature obsession with details and reality. In Thief, they actually taught James Caan how to break into a safe, and he did it live on camera. To this day, no one has ever topped the big gunfight in Heat (which is especially impressive given how much most action movies desperately want to be Heat). With The Jericho Mile, Mann not only shot in Folsom but used actual prisoners in the movie. That attention to detail pays off in tiny visual grace moments that underline these characters and their relationships to each other and imprisonment, details like an early shot that contrasts the cells of Murphy (completely stark, devoid of any and all reminders of the outside world) and his neighbor Stiles (Richard Lawson), who has packed every inch of his walls with pictures of the wife and child he is counting down the days to rejoin.
The prison black market that Stiles becomes embroiled in gives Mann the chance to explore an ecological system, using the same rigorous procedural eye that he would later bring to titles like Manhunter and Heat. We see the way merchandise and money move through the various gangs, including White Supremacists, black, and Latino crews, and the ways that interpersonal conflicts come to affect all prison life. Obviously, prison life has been sanitized for the sake of the TV standards and practices of the 1970s, but Mann still manages to portray a version of prison that feels true to life, and a about a million miles removed from the cartoonish hells of dropped soap and melodramatic plotting that we normally get whenever TV or movies visit the big house. Part of that is down to an ensemble that includes Brian Dennehy, Miguel Pinero, and Roger E. Mosley, all of whom exude authenticity and help sell both the ever-present danger of these circumstances, and the sense of fellowship and community that can spring up between people in circumstances where there is ever-present danger.
If any element of The Jericho Mile seems bound to the film’s origins as a late ‘70s TV movie, it’s unfortunately the central performance by Strauss. Strauss’ weathered features, plus his Jesus-y locks and porn ‘stache, make a compelling strong-but-silent presence, and in the scenes in which Murphy is one the outside looking in on the goings on in the prison, Strauss is quietly magnetic. But Mann’s script (co-written by Patrick J. Nolan) also demands that Murphy have an explosive, temperamental streak, and those scenes, Strauss can’t quite crack. Especially given how understated much of The Jericho Mile is, later scenes that demand Strauss rage or cry or rage-cry feel all the more telegraphed in from another, broader movie. Strauss won an Emmy for his performance, and given just how hard he is playing to the backrows, it’s not difficult to understand why the performance got attention.
The new transfer from Kino Lorber is absolutely gorgeous, and I can’t imagine the film has ever looked better. Most of the imagery available for this film is fuzzy and dark, where the Blu’s image is sharp and clear. The disc also comes with an audio commentary by film historian Lee Gambin.
Mann would return to many of the themes and ideas present in The Jericho Mile again and again throughout his career, including his other sports-related character study, Ali. As a character drama, The Jericho Mile is engrossing and involving, with the kind of perfectly bittersweet climax that was a such a specialty among sports-related films in the ‘70s (think Rocky, The Bad News Bears, etc.). As a key stepping stone in the creative evolution of one of the most important and influential filmmakers in modern American cinema, The Jericho Mile is an even richer experience, allowing you to see an artist coming into their own and zeroing in on the interests and obsessions that will come to define them. The Jericho Mile is a good movie that portends great ones.