ABSTRACT
Anthony Mann's 1947 film T-Men confronts the problems of nationalism, gender boundaries, and space in a diegetic world whose actions unfold almost uniquely between and among men. As Paul Willeman put it in a seminal essay (1981), the structure of Mann's films "is pivoted on the look at the male figure: the male 'in context', as it were. The viewer's experience is predicated on the pleasure of seeing the male 'exist' (that is, walk, move, ride, fight) in or through cityscapes, landscapes or, more abstractly, history." (16)
T-Men, which distills to perfection the pleasures and threat of "looking at the male," is a complex treatment of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has termed, in her book on the English novel (1985), "male homosocial desire." In this chapter, I will use close textual analysis and historical
contextualization to examine the social and political implications of this homosocial desire and its repression in Mann's film.
