Director Mann brought some of the characteristics of his previous film-noirs to this modernized western, borrowed from his own gritty, low-budget classics such asT-Men (1947)andRaw Deal (1948).It includes about hirty years in his life, from his teen years as a Brooklyn Irish neighborhood kid to maturity as an adult gangster, covering the years from the 1950s to the drug-saturated 1970s when married to wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco).Anticipating personal assassinations, he thwarted such efforts and conquered much of the land.Realizing that his ambitions outweighed his life-span, he sought immortality through the supernatural powers of a sorceress/witch:Long ago, a mythic battle between good and evil played out in ancient China.They both escaped by driving away in the truck (with the dog) filled with the crates of weapons and ammunition.The success of the balletic themes that combined dance with design and music in Powell and Pressburger""s British film inspired director Vincente Minnelli to follow suit in his own masterpieceAn American in Paris (1951)- he had experimented with shorter ballet sequences in his earlier filmsYolanda and the Thief (1945)andZiegfeld Follies (1946).