Director Anthony Mann’s near-perfect ouevre represents a three-genre hat-trick unequaled in the history of the movies. In his visually extravagant and psychologically eccentric crime films, westerns, and historical epics, Mann’s inexhaustible pictorial imagination and unwavering feel for physical and emotional violence are constantly on display. The Film Society of Lincoln Center is currently presenting a 25-film retrospective that stretches from his B-picture beginnings in the 1940s until his death in 1967.

Born in 1907, Mann was a child actor before coming of age as a director and stage manager in New York theater. Summoned to Hollywood by David O. Selznick, Mann directed screen tests for “Gone With the Wind” and “Rebecca” before helming a string of archtypically dark crime films mostly shot by the ingenious poverty-row Rembrant, cinematographer John Alton.

Mann and Altons’s films depicted steam-room executions, fog-shrouded street chases and furtive back-room beatings with a thrifty painterliness and that subverted pseudo-documentary “crime doesn’t pay” awkwardness and low-budget production values. Perhaps Mann and Alton’s most irresistibly bizarre collaboration was 1949’s “Reign of Terror” (aka “The Black Book,” screen ing Aug 22, 23 & 24), a lurid, exuberantly facetious period thriller set during the French revolution.

The following year Alton was lured away to MGM, and Mann went up a budgetary rung to Universal Studios. Mann’s A-picture debut, 1950’s “Winchester ’73” (Aug 14), became an enormous hit for its star Jimmy Stewart, whose career had drifted into postwar eclipse. As Lynn McAdam, a neurotic, revenge-driven gunman following a stolen rifle, Stewart forged a dark new characterization only hinted at in his previous film roles.

Mann directed Stewart in four more Westerns before actor and director quarreled and parted in 1957. Their films together, notably 1953’s “The Naked Spur” (tonight) and 1955’s “The Man From Laramie” (Aug 14 & 16) fused sensitivity for landscape with candid glimpses at the anxiety and obsessivness that underlie heroism.

Mann’s career topped out in Spain in the early 1960s, where he made two elephantine epics. “El Cid” (Aug 20 & 21), from 1961, remains one of the most abstract yet personal epic films ever made. In a scene later wickedly parodied in “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren pause in their flight into exile to spend the night in an abandoned hayloft. Free of betrayal and intrigue at last, the Cid and his wife vow to live out the rest of their lives as anonymous peasants. Yet in the morning, when they step outside the barn, they’re hailed by an exile army of The Cid’s followers insisting he lead them into glory.

It’s an electric moment, one that underlines the peculiar intersection of the mythic with the personal – as if two statues were granted the wish to live and love for a single night before becoming monumental again. This humanity amid the mythic, the pictorially precise alongside the pruriently violent, make Anthony Mann’s films as unforgettable and vivid now as they were when they premiered.