Far removed from the gritty, urban milieu of Thief<\/em>, The Keep<\/em> takes place in a tiny village in Romania\u2019s Carpathian Alps in 1941, when Nazi Germany was at the height of its power and reach. That matters little to those with their boots on the ground, however, as embodied by J\u00fcrgen Prochnow\u2019s weary Wehrmacht Captain Woermann, who is emphatically not a party member. The exact opposite is true of Gabriel Byrne\u2019s zealous SS officer, Major Kaempffer, who arrives with his own troops when Woermann\u2019s soldiers start getting picked off while they\u2019re guarding a mountain pass. (In such a self-serious film, a line like \u201cWe found the rest of Steiner\u201d is a welcome bit of comic relief.) What neither man realizes is this is not the work of the villagers or the partisans they\u2019re suspected of harboring, but rather an ancient evil that has been imprisoned for centuries, waiting for someone foolish enough to release it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Woermann and Kaempffer\u2019s ideological clash isn\u2019t the only one Mann highlights in his screenplay. There\u2019s also the lively theological debate between Father Fonescu (Robert Prosky, returning from Thief<\/em>), the local religious authority, and Dr. Theodore Cuza (Ian McKellen), a Jewish professor of medieval history Fonescu gets out of a concentration camp (along with Cuza\u2019s daughter) by convincing Kaempffer he\u2019s the only one who can translate a cryptic message found on the wall of the Keep where the Germans have been staying, despite the dire warnings not to. Then again, Woermann\u2019s men were explicitly told not to touch the 108 nickel crosses lining its walls and within minutes of rolling their equipment in, one of them starts prying a cross loose. (That he\u2019s the first to die is a given, and since most of the film\u2019s casualties are German soldiers, this relieves the viewer of having to care about their fates.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The third axis of conflict is more obscure, and likely suffered the most from Paramount\u2019s post-production tampering. This doesn\u2019t become truly evident until roughly an hour into the theatrical cut, when Scott Glenn\u2019s mystical stranger Glaeken arrives in the village \u2013 after riding his motorcycle through multiple fairy-tale forests \u2013 and almost immediately beds Cuza\u2019s daughter Eva (Alberta Watson). That he was awoken at the very moment the being in the Keep was unleashed casts them as two sides of the same coin, but Mann keeps the nature of Glaeken\u2019s sinister counterpart ambiguous, waiting until the 45-minute mark (when it explodes a couple of Nazi heads and uses its powers to rejuvenate the frail Cuza) to give it physical form: an amorphous, smoke-enshrouded body with red, glowing eyes and mouth. By the time of its second encounter with the scholar, the being \u2013 named Molasar in the credits, although this name is never spoken in the film \u2013 has taken on the countenance of a golem, with visible veins and muscles, so naturally Cuza believes Molasar will be his instrument of revenge against Hitler and all the evil men who put him and his kind in concentration camps. Things have to get downright biblical, though, before he realizes the enemy of his enemy isn\u2019t necessarily friendly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With so many heady themes in play \u2013 war, the Holocaust, faith vs. reason, good vs. evil \u2013 it\u2019s hardly surprising that The Keep<\/em> got away from Mann. While it\u2019s been widely reported that his original cut ran three and a half hours, it\u2019s more likely the version screened for test audiences had a running time closer to two, as he was contractually obligated to deliver. What got lost during the pruning process was exacerbated by the studio\u2019s hack-and-slash approach, which did serious damage to the film\u2019s third act. Even in its hobbled form, though, what\u2019s left of Mann\u2019s The Keep <\/em>(in particular. the impressive production design and Tangerine Dream\u2019s moody score) is worth seeking out by his fans and horror junkies interested in a monster movie that\u2019s a little off the beaten path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since its 1983 release, during which the film received a critical drubbing and failed to make back its $6 million budget, The Keep<\/em> has remained an outlier in Mann\u2019s filmography, one he intentionally talks little about. The film has also been MIA on home video in the US since its pan-and-scan VHS and laserdisc, which at least presented the full widescreen image. A 2020 Australian DVD marked The Keep<\/em>\u2019s debut in that format, and that year also saw the belated release of Tangerine Dream\u2019s soundtrack in a boxed set of the band\u2019s Virgin recordings. Since the rights to their music have long been considered one of the stumbling blocks preventing a DVD\/Blu-ray release, Criterion streaming the film with the soundtrack intact is indeed cause for celebration. It would be inadvisable to hold one\u2019s breath for a restored director\u2019s cut, however, in spite of the extra material seen in various trailers and television prints. For 39 years, Mann\u2019s adherents have been able to blame The Keep<\/em>\u2019s failure on studio interference. All things considered, it may be in his best interests to continue to let them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Keep\u201d is now streaming on the <\/em>Criterion Channel<\/em><\/a>, and is available to rent or purchase (in standard definition only) from <\/em>the usual outlets<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/keep2-1024x576.jpg\")
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