CTVA 319 Readings: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Dr. John Schultheiss
Department of Cinema and Television Arts
[email protected]
Table of Contents
Reading #1. Brian Dauth, “Joseph L. Mankiewicz,” Senses of Cinema, April 2005
Reading #2. Philip Kemp, “Joseph Mankiewicz,” World Film Directors:
Volume I––1890-1945, John Wakeman, ed. (H.W. Wilson Company, 1987)
Reading #3. Gore Vidal, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Case,” The New York Review of
Books, 1 May 1980
Reading #4. Donald Lyons, “All About Cicero,” Film Comment, SeptemberOctober 1990
Reading #1. JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ by Brian Dauth
b. February 11, 1909, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA!
d. February 5, 1993, Bedford, New York, USA
I’ve been in on the beginning, the rise, peak, collapse and end of the talking picture – Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Mention Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s name to filmgoers and they might recall All About Eve, Bette Davis, and a
line about seatbelts and a bumpy night. Mention his name to film critics and you might encounter scoffing,
tempered with grudging respect for his ability to turn a phrase. Mankiewicz’s verbal facility will then be
pointed to as evidence that he possessed gifts more suited to the stage than the screen.
This essay has two main purposes: (a) to augment the limited information many people have
about Mankiewicz’s artistry so they might watch his films with greater insight and pleasure; and (b) to serve
as a corrective to the generally uninformed critical response his work has received up until now. For me,
Mankiewicz is one of the giants of twentieth century moviemaking who consistently displayed cinematic
mastery, whether he was crafting dialogue, directing actors, or composing shots. The complexity of his
work is astounding, and his movies remain fresh and vital.
Mankiewicz’s théatre du filmé. Despite an oeuvre comprising only 20 feature films, Joseph L. Mankiewicz
explored a number of genres and styles in his work: gothic (Dragonwyck, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Suddenly,
Last Summer); film noir (Somewhere in the Night); musical comedy (Guys and Dolls); Shavian comedy (All
About Eve, People Will Talk); Shakespearean tragedy (Julius Caesar); espionage (5 Fingers); the Western
(There Was a Crooked Man…); race drama (No Way Out); mystery (The Honey Pot); Roman epic (Cleopatra);
thriller (Sleuth); family melodrama (House of Strangers). Moreover, he often combined genres within a
single film. House of Strangers (1949) and All About Eve (1950) have a film noir ambience (both films are
concerned with ambition and its consequences), while There Was a Crooked Man . . . (1970) combines a
Western with a prison drama.
No matter the work, however, the one genre shared by all his films is what French critics termed
théatre du filmé. In a long and important interview in Cahiers du cinéma, Mankiewicz said of his own film
making style:
I do not speak of the geniuses who go about, camera in hand, and bring you a semblance of film that offers you a semblance
of knowledge. I speak to you of people who make films about something. Of those who approach human beings
analytically, whether they do so in depth or superficially. (1)
Théatre du filmé was the genre he created and perfected in order to “approach human beings
analytically . . . in depth.” This genre pays equal attention to the verbal, the visual, and the human, carefully
crafting and interweaving all three elements in order to achieve maximum effect––both expressively and
analytically. Most importantly, théatre du filmé is a self-conscious genre populated by self-conscious
characters. Mankiewicz overlaid this personal genre on top of conventional genres popular at the time of
filming. In this fashion, he arrived at his unique style of filmmaking: Mankiewicz movies do not look,
sound, or speak like those of any other director.
Mankiewicz’s invention of this new genre has not always met with critical approval. In an article in Senses
of Cinema in 2003, Tag Gallagher wrote:
Mankiewicz’s ideal film, whether as director or producer, was something I shall call a “photoplay” – a type of cinema that
was less a “movie” than a filmed play, less a storyworld with characters than a document of actors acting the sort of acting
for which self-conscious dialogue . . . and self-conscious mime are inevitable and endless. (2)
Mistaking Mankiewicz’s théatre du filmé movies for filmed plays is the most common error critics
make. Mankiewicz needed to invent the genre of théatre du filmé in order for his type of storytelling to work.
Movies emphasizing characters’ autonomy require reflexive, self-aware performances from actors.
Mankiewicz wants the audience to focus on the choices his characters make, and how these decisions
determine everything that follows.
Gallagher praises the approach of Wyler and Lubitsch who, when working with Margaret
Sullavan, “subjugated her presence to their movies’ storyworlds.” (3) While this may be a valid approach
for Wyler and Lubitsch, it would never work for Mankiewicz since he is interested in exploring his
characters’ free will and how it determines narrative, rather than in subjugating them to a preplanned
storyline. From the Cahiers interview again: “I try not to distort the life or the conduct of human beings by
conferring on them, by means of technique, a preconceived form.” (4) Mankiewicz’s théatre du filmé
approach may not be to Gallagher’s taste, but that doesn’t make it an inferior or invalid way of making
movies.
For this new genre of théatre du filmé, Mankiewicz adopted a narrative approach Gilles Deleuze
describes as “neither straight line nor circle which completes itself,” (5) but instead is comprised of
“perpetual forks like so many breaks in causality.” (6) He adds that Mankiewicz movies demand flashbacks
so that these forks––pivots––can be exposed, since “forking points are very often so imperceptible that they
cannot be revealed until after their occurrence, to an attentive memory.” (7)
This concept of pivot moments underlies the structure of all Mankiewicz films. He builds his
movies out of scenes that foreground characters making those decisions that will determine the actions that
follow, where more choices will be presented and new decisions made. Autonomy is a paramount virtue in
Mankiewicz’s world, and he investigates both its possibilities and its limitations. As a result, his films
contain an abundance of dialogue as characters face up to, wrestle with, and finally choose among the
options confronting them.
In his Cahiers du cinéma article on The Quiet American (1958), Eric Rohmer wrote: “From the
moment that human will is established as a major part of the intrigue, the heroes must no longer be the
vegetables destined by unchangeable coordinates that they are in the [Graham Greene] novel: Outbursts,
changes, become natural to them.” (8) While Rohmer is referring to one specific film, his analysis of
Mankiewicz’s approach applies to all of his characters. The cold, implacable hand of fate does not guide
Mankiewicz’s men and women. As Porter Hollingsway (Paul Douglas) says at the end of A Letter to Three
Wives (1949): “A man can change his mind, can’t he?” He certainly can, and Mankiewicz’s films faithfully
report (just as Addison DeWitt’s newspaper columns do) each and every turn of the wheel.
Whether it is a backstage dressing room (All About Eve) or a suburban living room (A Letter to Three
Wives), a mystery writer’s mansion (Sleuth [1972]) or an Egyptian throne room (Cleopatra [1963]),
Mankiewicz movies are movies of interiors. For his films, which focus so intently on the inner lives of his
characters, Mankiewicz developed a mise en scène that emphasizes and complements this interiority. Despite
his success in developing this personal mise en scène, Mankiewicz has had no end of trouble with the critical
establishment who believe his work devoid of a personal visual signature.
Since the first movies were made, filmmakers have taken advantage of the medium’s ability to
capture the beauty of landscapes, and used the outdoors as both backdrop and character in their work.
Mankiewicz with his théatre du filmé style, however, approaches film differently. While he may not have
been interested in composing lyrical landscape shots, Mankiewicz did create sharply delineated,
multilayered interior shots. It was serendipitous that he began his directing career at Twentieth CenturyFox where the house style––crisp, hard-edged photography––was well suited to his approach and
intentions.
Mankiewicz creates a series of spaces to contain his characters as they navigate the pivots of their
narratives. Although it does not take place on a dusty Western street or war-ravaged battlefield, Addison’s
(George Saunders) confrontation with Eve (Anne Baxter) is one of the most dramatic showdowns in all
cinema. It just happens to occur in a hotel room in New Haven, Connecticut. Part of Mankiewicz’s genius
is his ability to stage such scenes in ordinary, non-mythic places. By setting his confrontations in spaces that
are commonplace––living rooms, gardens, hotel rooms, theatres––Mankiewicz illuminates the tensions and
conflicts that occur on a regular basis in these familiar spaces. His deliberate choice to eschew pictoralism
and lyrical camera work should never be construed as visual indifference or, worse, inability.
Mankiewicz reached a personal peak of interiority with Guys and Dolls (1955). Instead of
awkwardly combining location filming with studio-shot sequences, Mankiewicz set his film in a studio reimagined Times Square: dozens of markers, signifiers, symbols and artifacts are re-arranged and re-named
to create a simulacrum of New York. Neither a generic urban set nor a meticulous recreation, the world of
the film is a heightened rendering of a few city blocks.
Mankiewicz opens the movie with an overture during which the camera (led along by Michael
Kidd’s choreography) explores this reconfigured world. Having thus provided a geographic orientation,
Mankiewicz can start the film proper, and when three gamblers begin to converse in song, it seems a most
natural occurrence in this version of New York. By setting Guys and Dolls in what is essentially one large
interior with several subdivisions, Mankiewicz is able to play with the presentation of songs. Some are
delivered in straightforward Broadway fashion such as “Pet Me Poppa” and “Take Back Your Mink”, both
performed by Miss Adelaide (Vivian Blaine) and her all-girl chorus on stage at The Hot Box. On the other
hand, “Luck Be a Lady” is transformed by Mankiewicz (in tandem with Marlon Brando) from a belted
ballad into Sky Masterson’s private passionate prayer that luck be on his side for this most important roll of
his life. In this scene, Mankiewicz portrays two realities simultaneously, one layered on top of the other: (a)
the inner hopes and fears of Masterson as he covers bets and prepares to roll the dice; and (b) the frenetic
action of the gamblers as they put up their souls against Sky’s money. Scenes such as this are standard in
Mankiewicz’s work. Forsaking landscapes and lyricism, Mankiewicz developed a cinema of layered
interiors that delineated and probed inner psychological space rather outdoor physical space.
Mankiewicz and Women. From the first scene of his first film as a writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz
has been concerned with women and their realistic, three-dimensional representation on screen. When
Miranda Wells (Gene Tierney) in Dragonwyck (1946) urges her mother to open a just-arrived letter instead of
waiting for her husband (“It’s for you. You’ve got the right.”), Mankiewicz sets out on a quest to reshape
the conventional portrayal of women in Hollywood movies. Mankiewicz women are autonomous, selfreliant, intelligent decision-makers who will not be bound by the conventions and strictures of their times
and circumstances. Mankiewicz’s women are defiant and confident, seeking control over their lives and
accepting the consequences of their actions. Mankiewicz set out to challenge the prevailing portrayal of
women in cinema, and capture on celluloid the complexity he believed comprised their reality.
Mankiewicz ends Dragonwyck with another scene that runs counter to the Hollywood conventions
of the time. Having survived her husband’s drug addiction and attempts to kill her, Miranda is set to leave
Dragonwyck. Dr. Turner (Glenn Langan), her ally throughout the film, asks if next week might be too soon
to call on her. Without answering, Miranda drives off, leaving Turner to gaze after her with desire, an
inversion of the typical situation where the woman is left looking after a retreating man. Mankiewicz’s
Miranda is not the typical Hollywood heroine, eager to jump into the embrace of the nearest heroic male
rescuer.
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) is also the story of a woman taking control of her life. The film
opens in medias res (a favourite Mankiewicz technique) with Lucy Muir (Tierney again) announcing to her
shocked in-laws: “And now my mind is made up.” She has decided that with her husband dead for over a
year, she wants to lead her own life and not live under their roof any longer. Her mother-in-law and sisterin-law argue that it is not the proper thing for a woman to do, but Mrs Muir insists and leaves, ending up in
Whitecliff-by-the-Sea and Gull Cottage, which happens to be haunted by the ghost of Captain Gregg (Rex
Harrison), its former owner.
Mrs Muir and Captain Gregg’s ghost fall in love, and he dictates his memoirs to her so that she
might publish them and use the profits to stay on at Gull Cottage. At the midpoint of the film, the ghost
departs, leaving his beloved Lucy to the world of the living so that she might know human love again. Mrs
Muir has a serious flirtation with a writer of children’s books, but when she goes up to London to surprise
him at his home, she discovers not only that he is married, but also that theirs is not the first affair he has
had. The rest of the film chronicles Mrs Muir growing older and her long love affair with Gull Cottage and
the English seaside. After she dies, Captain Gregg’s ghost re-appears, and he and the ghost of Mrs Muir
walk arm-in-arm out of Gull Cottage and into a life of eternal love and romance.
Once again Mankiewicz defies the conventional depiction of women and, specifically, women in
love. Mrs Muir is in charge of her life and her decisions. She is not unfulfilled without a man; at the start of
the film she says that she wants to have her own life, having already had a life with her husband, then one
with her in-laws subsequent to his death, but never one of her own. Also, it is the hero who makes sacrifices
for love and not the heroine.
Two of Mankiewicz’s most famous treatments of women and their lives are his back-to-back Oscarwinning films, A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. Not only are the films concerned with life as
experienced from a female point of view, both films turn narrative control over to women. (9) In Letter, the
framing narrative is supplied by Addie Ross who has left town, and, in a letter, told her three best friends
that she has taken one of their husbands along with her. The body of the film is comprised of each wife’s
flashback in which she recalls incidents that might hold clues as to whether it is her husband who has chosen
to run off with Addie.
All About Eve (1950) begins with Karen Richards (Celeste Holm) recalling the night she decided to
bring Eve Harrington back to see Margo Channing (Bette Davis). This choice on Karen’s part sets in motion
the action of the film. At the end of this sequence Karen says in voice over: “Funny, the things you
remember––and the things you don’t.” Mankiewicz believes that it is these pivot moments that people
recall, moments of choice that shape the future direction of their lives.
The rest of the film is a series of remembered scenes during which crucial decisions are made: (a)
Margo’s bringing Eve home; (b) Margo extracting from Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff) a promise to give Eve a
job in his office; (c) Karen promising Eve she will speak to Max about hiring her as Margo’s new
understudy; (d) Karen deciding to play a trick on Margo that allows Eve to go on stage in her place; (e)
Margo deciding not to star in Lloyd Richard’s (Hugh Marlow) new play; (f) Addison DeWitt’s decision to
put the screws to Eve and consolidate his power over her. Once Mankiewicz returns to the present tense, he
ends All About Eve with a final choice––appropriately enough, one made by Eve herself: she decides to let
Phoebe (Barbara Bates) spend the night. True to his belief that choices have consequences, Mankiewicz ends
his film with a shot of Phoebe standing before a three-mirrored cheval bowing to imagined adoring fans.
This image is reflected and replicated into the receding distance (and the far future as well). By allowing
Phoebe to stay, Eve––the mother of us all––has initiated the process whereby our world will eventually be
populated (overrun?) by an army of Phoebes, all seeking their own award-winning moment (a prediction
Mankiewicz made more than 50 years ago that has proven prescient in terms of twenty-first century reality).
Cleopatra may be Mankiewicz’s boldest creation in female-centered cinema. Tackling the epic, a
genre not noted for complex and assertive female characters, he crafts a film centered around a woman and
her power. From her first entrance, hidden in a rug and carried over the shoulder of her servant, Cleopatra
(Elizabeth Taylor) takes command. She engineers her coronation as Queen of Egypt, and urges Julius
Caesar (Rex Harrison) to fulfill Alexander’s dream of a united and peaceful world. At the end, she denies
Octavian (Roddy McDowell) his victory by killing herself and having her servants lay her out in all her
royal finery, controlling her image until the last, never becoming the puppet or trophy of anyone, especially
a man.
While I could discuss in detail numerous scenes, one deserves special mention: Cleopatra’s
entrance into Rome, a grand exception to Mankiewicz’s usual style of visual interiority. As far as screen
spectacle is concerned, it measures up with the greatest and demonstrates what a versatile artist
Mankiewicz is. The sequence begins with the following exchange between Sosigenes (Hume Cronyn) and
Julius Caesar:
SOSIGENES: According to reports the reception in the streets has been extraordinary.
instructions for the procession to move as slowly as the people wish, for their full enjoyment.
The Queen has given
JULIUS CAESAR: One might almost believe that Cleopatra set out to capture the citizens of Rome.
SOSIGENES: One would have every reason for believing exactly that.
At the end of this eight-minute sequence, Cleopatra descends from the giant sphinx she has entered
on, approaches Caesar, and bows deeply as the citizens erupt in cheers. Cleopatra then looks Caesar in the
eye and winks. Cleopatra is aware that she has given a rapturously received performance, but remains in
control, un-seduced by the adoration. Even when he worked on the grand scale of the epic, Mankiewicz’s
théatre du filmé approach found expression.
Mankiewicz’s last film centering on women is The Honey Pot (1967). (10) Though not a success, it
does contain a telling moment at the end when, with all mysteries unraveled, Inspector Rizzi (Adolfo Celi)
declares: “I salute the Anglo-Saxon woman.” (11) One could expand this statement and assert that much of
Mankiewicz’s cinema is a tribute, not only to Anglo-Saxon women, but to all women and their lives as
actually lived, not as imagined by the Hollywood machine.
Mankiewicz and Men. While Mankiewicz has always been noted for his treatment of women, his
depictions of men are equally astute and penetrating. Paralleling his cinematic chronicles of women are
films focusing on men and their behaviors.
In House of Strangers Mankiewicz portrays the ambitions of Gino Monetti (Edward G. Robinson)
and his four sons. Gino Monetti is an Italian immigrant who has made good as a banker. He is also a strict
and controlling father who expects absolute obedience from his sons despite the abuse he inflicts on them.
When Gino runs afoul of banking regulations and loses control of the bank he founded, three of his sons
take over and exclude him not only from the business he built, but from their lives as well. The fourth son,
Max (Richard Conte), is sent to prison for trying to bribe a juror in the hope of obtaining his father’s
acquittal. The film begins with the release of Max from prison after serving a sentence of seven years. Now
free, he wants revenge against his brothers for the years he spent behind bars. The brothers, who have their
own plans, agree to meet Max at the old family house. Max arrives early, and in flashback remembers the
events that have led to this moment.
Max’s flashback represents one of Mankiewicz’s most remarkable uses of mindscreen. Mankiewicz
not only supplies the audience with the plot information it needs, but also presents the emotional texture of
the events as experienced by Max. The scenes between Max and his girlfriend Irene (Susan Hayward) have
the high gloss of sophisticated comedy, while the scenes with his family are done in the exaggerated style of
the Italian operas Gino loves so much. Through language Mankiewicz differentiates between the two
worlds that Max inhabited before going to prison: the patriarchal world of his father and the more equal and
modern world he shared with Irene: two different worlds; two different value systems; two different modes
of speech.
Max’s flashback also dramatizes events that occurred while he was in prison that he could only
have heard about. In one such scene, Irene goes to Max’s father and pleads with him to stop writing Max
hate-filled letters in an attempt to turn him into an instrument of revenge. In Max’s reconstruction of the
scene, Gino rises from his desk, walks to the doorway, and orders Irene to leave his house. This scene is not
only a depiction of an event, but also a symbolic representation of the inner conflict Max is experiencing as
he remembers the past. Irene represents Max’s compassionate nature that wants no part of his father’s
revenge, while Gino embodies Max’s patriarchal heritage that demands that Max seek vengeance. Gino’s
dismissal of Irene is both a narrative fact and a metaphor for Max’s attempt to silence his compassion so that
he can go forward and avenge his father. Since Mankiewicz makes the audience privy to this inner struggle,
Max’s forgiveness of his brothers at the end appears genuine, rather than seeming a plot twist contrived by
the writer-director.
In Julius Caesar (1953) we find ourselves a long way from Karen Richard’s statement in All About
Eve that men will do as they are told. In fact, it is Caesar’s (Louis Calhern) and Brutus’ (John Hoyt) choosing
to ignore the warnings of Portia (Deborah Kerr) and Calpurnia (Greer Garson) (brilliantly visualized by
Mankiewicz) that helps bring about the ensuing tragedy. Mankiewicz’s conspirators are men who try to
manipulate the masses through speech that denigrates their enemies even as it compliments the speakers.
Cassius (John Gielgud) is not even above manipulating the written word in order to bring Brutus over to his
side. Deceptive and forged speech can be used on and against anyone in pursuit of a goal. As the film
unfolds, one feels that Mankiewicz is drawing a parallel between the actions of the conspirators and the
contemporaneous reality of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Red Scare, and the blacklist. (12) For
Mankiewicz, Brutus’s tragedy lies partly in his being swayed by the verbal and written seductions of
Cassius, and partly in his failure to listen to Antony’s (Marlon Brando) funeral oration and respond
immediately. (Quick and decisive action on the part of Mankiewicz and his allies defeated the coup that
Cecil B. DeMille launched against Mankiewicz when he was president of the Directors’ Guild of America.)
Though on the surface Mankiewicz’s next film, The Barefoot Contessa (1954), is the story of one
woman’s rise and fall as an actress, it can more interestingly and rewardingly be viewed as a chronicle of
men and how they perceive, respond to, and interact with women. In contrast with A Letter to Three Wives
and All About Eve, The Barefoot Contessa is narrated by men only: Harry Dawes, Oscar Muldoon, and Count
Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini. We are not permitted to enter into the mind of Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner). She
is not only the subject of these male narratives, but the object of men’s desires and machinations as well.
Maria’s attempts to be the author of her own story, defying the narratives of men, eventually leads to a final,
fatal conflict: when she chooses to deviate (pivot) from the script authored by her husband the Count
(Rossano Brazzi), he murders her. At the end of the film, Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart), who has been
Maria’s protector, champion, and confidante, can only comment impotently that with the funeral over and
the weather clear, he can get in some good work on the new film he is shooting. This sense of despair
would grow and have its final flowering 18 years later in Mankiewicz’s last film.
While Sleuth would turn out to be Mankiewicz’s swansong, I doubt he had any idea it would be
when filming began. After the disastrous reception of Cleopatra and the mostly negative response to The
Honey Pot, Mankiewicz had given up writing scripts, deciding instead to film the work of others (though it is
clear that he had a hand in shaping the screenplays of his last two films). While There Was a Crooked Man . . .
was at best a qualified success, (13) Anthony Shaffer’s stage hit Sleuth provided Mankiewicz with the perfect
vehicle to explore many of his lifelong concerns: the nature of men; class relations; life and film understood
in terms of theatre and spectacle; the battle of wits; and the importance of pivot moments in people’s lives.
On one subject, however, Sleuth is silent: women. Sleuth unfolds completely in the world of men, and a
dark world it is.
Sleuth is set at Cloak Manor, the home of mystery writer Andrew Wyke (Laurence Olivier). He has
invited Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), his wife’s lover, over for what starts off as a conversation about Milo’s
financial ability to satisfy her tastes, but is in actuality an elaborately staged game of humiliation with
Andrew as author and Milo as victim. The “first act” ends with Milo dead on the staircase in Andrew’s
mansion. The “second act” chronicles Milo’s revenge. Milo (who was not killed) returns disguised as
Inspector Doppler to question Andrew about the murder of Milo Tindle. After thoroughly unnerving
Andrew, Milo reveals his charade and begins a second game: he says he has committed a real murder and
left clues around Cloak Manor identifying Andrew as the killer. Andrew has 15 minutes to find them before
the real police arrive to investigate. Andrew finds the incriminating objects and is preparing to meet the
police when Milo reveals that this has been only another charade. The movie ends with Andrew shooting
and killing Milo (for real) in an attempted replay of the first game. Unfortunately, the police are coming up
the driveway as Andrew shoots Milo. Ensnared by his own game, Andrew stands helplessly in the centre of
his living room as the curtain falls––literally! Mankiewicz’s last shot is of a curtain descending on a diorama
of this final image.
As Bernard Dick pointed out in his study of Mankiewicz, (14) Sleuth is yet another battle between
commoner (Milo Tindle) and aristocrat (Andrew Wyke). Class relations and conflicts were a longstanding
interest of Mankiewicz’s––uncommon for a Hollywood director of his time and stature. A Letter to Three
Wives engages in class analysis as it focuses on three women, their marriages, and the repercussions class
issues have on their lives. Deborah (Jeanne Crain) is a poor farm girl who weds the son of one of the town’s
leading families, Bradbury Bishop (Jeffrey Lynn). They met oversees during World War Two, where,
according to Debra, she was “Pretty cute in that uniform. That uniform––it is the great leveller. You
couldn’t tell me from Vassar, Smith or Long Island.” Rita Phipps (Ann Sothern), described as “on (her) way
up, that is if Rita has her way. And that’s the only way she’ll have any part of, thank you,” is married to
George (Kirk Douglas), a schoolteacher. She supplements his modest income and pays for the better life she
desires by writing radio soap operas. The third wife, Laura Mae (Linda Darnell), is a girl from the wrong
side of the tracks (a fact revealed with great visual wit) who sets her cap for Porter Hollingsway, a chain
store magnate. Each of the three stories reflects and comments on class conflicts and ambitions in midtwentieth century America.
In Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor) is a poor relation invited by her
cousin Sebastian to join him on his travels where she will act (unbeknownst to her) as bait for the young
boys he desires. After witnessing Sebastian’s death and cannibalization by the young men he craves,
Catherine has a mental breakdown. Sebastian’s mother tries to blackmail Catherine’s mother into allowing
her daughter to be lobotomized so the true story will never be told. In adapting this play, Mankiewicz
superimposed his concerns with class relations on Tennessee Williams’ gothic horror story. He muted the
play’s tone of homophobic self-disgust, refocusing the work on the battle between two strong women––a
rich and powerful aristocrat and the commoner who threatens her authority and privilege. The resulting
film is more than an adaptation; it is a refinement of and improvement on the original play.
In Suddenly, Last Summer, the commoner threatens the aristocrat with a story that must be repressed in order
to maintain the status quo. In Sleuth, the commoner invades the aristocrat’s world and takes up residence
there (in the deliciously named Laundry Cottage). Milo is more than an adulterer sleeping with Andrew’s
wife. He is an emissary from the nouveau riche who, along with others of his class, is challenging aristocratic
privilege as defined and defended by the British class system. Milo’s class aspirations and impertinence are
a much greater danger to Andrew than the seducing of his wife.
Being the democratic auteur that he is, Mankiewicz arms both men equally with bons mots and wit,
but Sleuth is more than just a battle of wits between class adversaries. It is also a profound tragedy, and one
that, like so much in Mankiewicz’s world, is caused by the choices characters make. For Milo, that choice is
to refuse Andrew’s offer of a truce. After being bested by Milo in the second game, Andrew suggests that
they team up: “We know what it is to play a game, you and I. That’s so rare, two people brought together,
equally matched. Having the courage, and the talents, to make of life a continuing charade of bright fancy,
happy invention.”
Milo rejects Andrew’s offer and insists on another game, since being even is not satisfaction
enough for him–––he must defeat Andrew decisively. For his part, having lost to Milo twice, Andrew
cannot allow him to leave Cloak Manor alive to spread the story of what has happened (echoes of Suddenly,
Last Summer). He chooses to replay the first game again, this time with live ammunition. Like most
Mankiewicz men, Andrew and Milo cannot resist the lure of the game. Max Monetti in House of Strangers is
one of the few willing to walk away and give up everything (as he must if he is to survive). (15) By contrast,
women seem to be better able to pivot away from tragedy––Lora Mae in A Letter to Three Wives choosing not
to hear her husband Porter’s confession that he was the one who ran off with Addie Ross––and, thereby,
detour from a collision course with disaster.
Twenty-first century Mankiewicz. With his emphasis on existence as performance, as well as his deep
concern about the centrality of autonomy in the lives of women and men, Joseph L. Mankiewicz can be
considered a proto-postmodern filmmaker.
He anticipated many ideas––aesthetic, social, and
philosophical––that came to prominence in the last half of the twentieth century.
In one important respect, however, Mankiewicz was old-fashioned: he never displaced human
beings from the centre of his art. He remained throughout his career an astute observer of the human
condition. In All About Eve, Addison says of himself: “I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the
theatre.” Mankiewicz was also a critic and commentator, but of society and social relations, and his films
were the vehicles of his analysis. Again from Cahiers: “What interests me, I repeat, is the customs of our
time since they are those of human beings of this era. I exert myself to represent them with the greatest
possible accuracy.” (16) Mankiewicz never went down the road of posthuman aesthetics that many
postmodern artists do. Human beings, with their abilities to play roles, make decisions, and alter not only
their lives, but the lives of others as well, remained the heart of his work.
The start of cinema’s second century might be a good moment to engage in a Mankiewiczean pivot
and turn away from a posthuman cinema that conceives of people as abstract bodies moving through space
rather than as autonomous women and men engaged in the joys and trials of living and choosing. Maybe
today’s filmmakers will take up Mankiewicz’s challenge and make films that do not “distort the life or the
conduct of human beings by conferring on them, by means of technique, a preconceived form.” As more
and more artists embrace a technique––obsessed, technology-fueled aristocracy of style, and allow the
everyday and the human to recede from view, it is vital to remember that there is another approach. I will
allow Mankiewicz the final word:
I do not believe that composition is the magic password and the ultimate that cinema can attain. In my opinion, it is much
rather the intellectual depth, the deep truth of the intellectual description, the content, that matter. (17)
Endnotes
.
1. Cahiers du cinéma in English, no. 8, February 1967, p. 31. N.B. If Mankiewicz doesn’t sound Mankiewiczean, there is
good reason. The original interview was conducted in English, then translated into French for publication in
Cahiers du cinéma. Instead of reverting to the original for publication in English, the French version was
translated back into English. Mankiewicz was angered by the incident.
.
2. Tag Gallagher, “The Swine who Rewrote F. Scott Fitzgerald: Joseph L. Mankiewicz as Producer,” Senses of Cinema,
Issue 28, September–October 2003.
.
3. Gallagher.
.
4. Cahiers, p. 38.
.
5. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1989, p. 50.
.
6. Ibid., p. 49.
.
7. Ibid., p. 50.
.
8. Eric Rohmer, A Taste for Beauty, trans. By Carol Volk, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 161.
.
9. Since it is possible to view All About Eve’s lone male narrator, Addison DeWitt, as being gay, his narration can be
regarded as another example of Mankiewicz turning narrative control over to a character usually denied such
power.
.
10. After the success of Sleuth, Mankiewicz was scheduled to write and direct a film version of Dee Wells’ novel Jane.
When the project fell apart (there are conflicting stories as to why and how this occurred), Mankiewicz suffered
a severe case of writer’s block that ended his career.
.
11. In The Honey Pot, Mankiewicz’s pivot approach does not work. Since it is a mystery, the film’s pivots must remain
hidden, which conflicts with Mankiewicz’s technique of exposing and exploring moments of choice. On top of
this mismatch of genre and style, the released version is 20 minutes shorter than Mankiewicz’s final cut, further
damaging the film.
.
12. Two years earlier, Mankiewicz attacked McCarthyism with even greater directness and vigour in People Will Talk
(1951).
.
13. As were its two predecessors, There Was a Crooked Man… was cut, losing 40 minutes of its original running time.
Not as garbled as The Honey Pot, the film is a collection of well-designed and directed scenes that fail to cohere
into an organic whole.
.
14. Bernard Dick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Twayne, Boston, 1980.
.
15. Dr. Noah Praetorius (Cary Grant) and his ally Professor Barker (Walter Slezak) also renounce the game – in their
case, a witchhunt – in People Will Talk.
.
16. Cahiers, p. 38.
.
17. Cahiers, p. 35.
Select Bibliography. Michel Ciment and Laurence Kardish (eds), Positif: 50 Years, Museum of Modern Art, New York,
2002.!- A collection of articles from the French film journal Positif, it includes an interesting analysis of Sleuth.
Bernard F. Dick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Twayne, Boston, 1983 .!- The first book-length book study of Mankiewicz’s career; a
necessary text for Mankiewicz scholarship that should be brought back into print.
Kenneth L. Geist, People Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Scribners, New York, 1978.!- The only
biography of Mankiewicz; it includes critical commentary on his films.
Frieda Grafe, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, BFI, London, 1995.!- A nice study of an early Mankiewicz film; a good place to begin
an investigation into Mankiewicz’s art.
Cheryl Bray Lower and R. Barton Palmer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Critical Essays with an Annotated Bibliography and a
Filmography, McFarland & Company, Inc., Jefferson, 2001.!- Solid critical insights plus an invaluable annotated
bibliography and filmography.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Gary Carey, More About All About Eve, Random House, New York, 1972.!- An extended
interview along with the screenplay of All About Eve; essential.
Eric Rohmer, A Taste for Beauty, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989.!- A wonderful collection of Rohmer’s
writing on film; his discussion of Mankiewicz and The Quiet American is a highlight.
[Brian Dauth, “Joseph L. Mankiewicz,” Senses of Cinema, April 2005]
Reading #2. JOSEPH (LEO) MANKIEWICZ by Philip Kemp
MANKIEWICZ, JOSEPH L(EO) (February 11, 1909- February 5, 1993), American director, scenarist, and
producer, was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, third and youngest child of Frank (or Franz) and
Johanna (Blumenau) Mankiewicz. Both parents were German-Jewish immigrants who met and married in
New York. Frank Mankiewicz, a "rip-snorting atheist" with a fervent belief in education, had moved to
Wilkes-Barre to take a job as editor of a German-language newspaper, later becoming a language instructor
at the local Hillman Academy. In 1913 the family returned to New York, where Frank Mankiewicz took up
a post at Stuyvesant High School.
Since his father, as well as teaching high school and tutoring privately, was also studying nights for
his master's degree, the young Joseph Mankiewicz was raised mostly by his mother, "a round little woman
who was uneducated in four languages." He grew up "an only child in the sense that my brother and sister
were a generation older than I was, and I was a very tiny little fellow among screaming, articulate giants. . . .
We moved as many as six times a year, and I found new friends every three months. . . . There were always
new neighborhoods, new gangs of kids, new adjustments. I became skillful at taking the color of my
environment without absorbing it." Meanwhile Frank Mankiewicz completed a doctorate and went on to
become a professor at City College and editor of the prestigious Modern Language Quarterly. A brilliant man
but a demanding and authoritarian parent, he expected his children to distinguish themselves, preferably
along the path he had broken.
After graduating from Stuyvesant at the age of fifteen, Joseph Mankiewicz enrolled at Columbia to
study psychiatry. He got no further than the pre-med course. Repelled at the prospect of dissecting worms
and frogs, he flunked with the nethermost grade and switched to liberal arts. When he graduated in 1928,
having majored in English, his father rewarded him with further study in Europe. The plan was for Joseph
to enroll at the University of Berlin, proceed from there to the Sorbonne and Oxford, and then return to
America to teach. "That was my father's idea, but not mine," Mankiewicz has recalled. "When I hit Berlin in
1928, I was dazzled by the theatre." Using contacts established by his brother Herman, he quit the academic
life in favor of more exciting employment. Three employments, in fact: as a junior reporter in the Berlin
office of the Chicago Tribune, as the Berlin stringer for Variety, and––his first contact with the film world––
translating intertitles from German to English for UFA silents. "I was earning about $100 a week and living
like a king. I learned more about everything in those four months in Berlin than I think I've learned in the
rest of my life." Living in an "absolute intoxication of theater, excitement, glamor and sex," Mankiewicz
rapidly overspent his triple income, and had to leave town when the checks started bouncing. After three
miserably penurious months in Paris he was rescued by Herman, by now well established as a writer at
Paramount. Since part of Herman's job was to lure talented writers to the studio, and nepotism was a
Hollywood tradition, he saw no reason to ignore his younger brother. (A year later he also fixed his sister
Erna up with a job, but she never took to screen writing and soon resumed her teaching career.)
Mankiewicz started at Paramount on $60 a week, writing titles for sound movies that in some
venues still had to be shown silent. His first assignment was The Dummy (1929), which Herman had
scripted; other early movies included Sternberg's Thunderbolt and Victor Fleming's The Virginian. In his first
eight weeks at the studio, he titled a record six movies; his fluency attracted the attention of David Selznick,
who had him upgraded to dialogue writer for a Jack Oakie vehicle, Fast Company (1929). The film did well,
and Mankiewicz went on to script another half-dozen pictures for the comedian. Best remembered of them
today are two that also featured W. C. Fields: Million Dollar Legs (1932), an anarchic comedy, and If I Had a
Million (1932), an eight-episode movie that employed seven directors, eighteen writers, and most of the
studio's acting roster. The previous year Mankiewicz had gained his first Oscar nomination as screenwriter
on Skippy (1931), a sentimental juvenile comedy based on a popular comic strip.
Mankiewicz's last film for Paramount was a prestige production of Alice in Wonderland (1933),
stuffed with stars and stupefyingly dull. David Selznick, who had returned to MGM, now offered him a
contract, and assigned him to coscript Manhattan Melodrama (1934). A routinely competent crime movie, it
achieved fortuitous fame as the movie Dillinger had been watching just before he was gunned down, and
earned Mankiewicz his second Academy A ward nomination. In May of that year, he married Elizabeth
Young, an actress, having overcome the opposition of her patrician New York family. Their son Eric was
born in 1936.
For a nominal fee, Mankiewicz provided dialogue for King Vidor's independently produced, naive
agrarian parable, Our Daily Bread (1934), before turning out two frothy studio comedies for Joan Crawford.
"It was at this time that dysentery was very prevalent . . . and whimsy spread through Hollywood in even
greater proportions. I was badly taken with it." Whimsy or not, this was evidently what the public wanted.
Mankiewicz, having scripted three hits in a row and now earning $1,250 a week, approached Louis B. Mayer
and asked to direct his own material.
Mayer turned him down; first, he must become a producer. "You have to learn to crawl before you
can walk," he told Mankiewicz, who considered this "about as good a definition of a producer as any." So
began his "black years" at MGM, during which "I produced a great many films which I am embarrassed to
have associated with my name." He had no cause, though, to feel ashamed of Fury (1936), Fritz Lang's first
American film, a harsh, dispassionate account of lynch-mob violence. He then marked time with a series of
vehicles for Joan Crawford, with whom he was currently involved. His marriage to Elizabeth Young ended
in divorce in 1937.
"If I go down at all in literary history, in a footnote, it will be as the swine who rewrote F. Scott
Fitzgerald." Three Comrades (1938), taken from a novel by Remarque, carried Fitzgerald's only screenwriter
credit, though his dialogue was extensively revised by Mankiewicz. The changes prompted Fitzgerald's
famous, pathetic plea: "Oh, Joe, can't a producer ever be wrong? I'm a good writer-honest." "You should
have seen [Fitzgerald's] screenplay," Mankiewicz later observed in his own defense. "Some novelists cannot
write dialogue and Scott Fitzgerald was one of them."
In July 1939 Mankiewicz married for the second time. His new wife was Rosa Stradner, a
prominent Austrian actress under contract to MGM. The couple had two sons, Christopher (born 1940) and
Thomas (born 1942), both now working in Hollywood. The year after his marriage, Mankiewicz produced
the comic masterpiece of his decade at MGM. (''I'm going to be fired," he remarked in the studio refectory.
''I've made a good picture.") The Philadelphia Story (1940), impeccably cast, written, and performed, was
rapturously received, and still ranks as a classic of elegant, sophisticated comedy.
In 1941, soon after Herman Mankiewicz's Academy Award for his Citizen Kane screenplay, Frank
Mankiewicz died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The fact that their father had lived to see Herman's triumph,
while he himself was still stuck in the inglorious role of a Metro producer, intensified Mankiewicz's
dissatisfaction. His remaining films at MGM were unremarkable, apart from Woman of the Year (1942), the
witty and stylish comedy in which Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were first teamed.
Mankiewicz finally quit MGM in 1943, after a furious row with Louis B. Mayer. (The immediate
cause was Mankiewicz's affair with Judy Garland, in whom Mayer alleged a paternal interest.) He moved
to 20th Century-Fox, where after a final job as producer––Keys of the Kingdom (1944), a stolidly worthy
religious piece––he was at long last permitted to direct.
Despite his fifteen-year apprenticeship, there was little that was distinctively personal––or
particularly distinguished––about Mankiewicz's first five films as director. Dragonwyck (1946) offered subBrontean Gothickry, with Vincent Price waving his eyebrows as a despotic landowner planning to bump off
his beautiful wife (Gene Tierney). The producer was Ernst Lubitsch, whom Mankiewicz revered, but the
two men quarreled disastrously, and Lubitsch took his name off the film.
Though negligible in itself, Dragonwyck does mark an early appearance of a theme that recurs in
many Mankiewicz films, through All About Eve and Five Fingers right up to The Honey Pot and Sleuth. Steve
Fagin, writing in Film Reader (1975), defined it as "the clash between patricians and parvenus"––the
challenge to a socially or culturally well established figure by a younger, brasher outsider, who often
succeeds in supplanting the other by sheer force of ambition.
Mankiewicz wrote his own script for Dragonwyck (from a novel by Anya Seton), and coscripted his
second film, Somewhere in the Night (1946), a noir-ish thriller with a tortuous plot and an amnesiac hero. For
his next three pictures, he elected to leave the scripting to someone else while he "concentrated upon
earning the technique and craft of directing––indeed, upon disassociating myself as far as possible from the
writer's approach."
His choice as screenwriter was Philip Dunne, whose urbane, literate style meshed perfectly with
Mankiewicz's. The Late George Apley (1947), from a novel by John P. Marquand, was described by a Time
critic as "a friendly, quietly amusing, rather slow picture." Most of the novel's social satire was lost in
Dunne's adaptation, which substituted a conventional happy ending for the ironic posthumous epilogue
(thus making nonsense of the title), and allowed Ronald Colman to deploy his habitual gentlemanly charm
as the eponymous Boston patriarch.
If The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) was livelier, it was thanks largely to Rex Harrison, in the first of
his four Mankiewicz films. As the ghost of a raffish sea captain, complete with nautical beard and
vocabulary (skillfully bowdlerized by Dunne to suit the prevailing censorship), his stylish brio prevented
the fantasy from sliding into whimsy––at least while he was on screen. "A thing of lightness and grey
charm," thought Gordon Gow, "[characterized by] an astringent romanticism." The movie later served as
the basis for a successful television series.
Though none of Mankiewicz's films had so far been an outstanding hit, all had shown respectable
box-office returns. Escape (1948) was his first flop. Filmed in Britain under a tax-settlement agreement, it
was adapted by Dunne from a 1926 Galsworthy play, and again starred Rex Harrison (who had suggested
the subject to Zanuck) as a convict escaped from Dartmoor. Much of the filming was done on location, but
the picture bogged down less in the terrain than in Galsworthy's trite moralizing. Some critics, though,
among them Pauline Kael, have considered the film unfairly neglected.
Back in Hollywood, Mankiewicz set about making a film that at last bore his own personal stamp.
"Sol Siegel showed me an adaptation . . . of a novel called A Letter to Five Wives by John Klempner. I read it
and knew I had looked upon the Promised Land." A Letter to Three Wives (1949)––Mankiewicz dropped one
wife and Zanuck, "in an almost bloodless operation," persuaded him to excise another––scored a hit with
both public and critics, and won Mankiewicz two Oscars, for writing and for directing. The film displays all
his characteristic virtues (or virtuosities): an intricate plot-line, woven around deftly handled multiple
flashbacks; crisp, intelligent dialogue; mordant social satire; incisively depicted characters, deployed in taut,
dramatic situations. All the qualities, in short––as Mankiewicz himself would readily concede––of the best
stage comedy. David Thomson noted that Mankiewicz "creates the atmosphere of a proscenium arch, a little
Shavian in the way he arranges action for an audience."
Letter also marks the first appearance of another Mankiewicz feature, the ironic, omniscient
commentator––although in this case, "appear" is just what she never does. Addie Ross, local siren and
writer of The Letter, remains a silky off-screen voice (that of Celeste Holm), felinely taunting the three
friends whose lives she has disrupted. She has, she informs them, made off with the husband of one of
them. Cut off from their homes on a May Day picnic, they must agonize until evening over which man she
has taken. Since all three marriages are, in different ways, under strain, each wife can indulge in a long,
anguished flashback before the final revelation. This denouement, in fact, falls rather flat, but what precedes
it more than compensates––especially Thelma Ritter, delectably caustic in her first major screen role, and
Paul Douglas as a rich businessman inflamed into matrimony by the cannily withheld allurements of Linda
Darnell.
Mankiewicz also scripted most of House of Strangers (1949), though a dispute with his co-writer,
Philip Yordan, let to Yordan taking sole writer credit. The picture did poorly in America, “because it was a
bad film," Mankiewicz remarked sourly, though he later revised his opinion. It was much better received in
Europe, where Edward G. Robinson won Best Actor award at Cannes for his portrayal of the immigrant
Italian barber-turned-banker who dominates his family and the film. House of Strangers also attracted the
attention of the young French critics, and founded Mankiewicz's high reputation among the nouvelle vague.
Jean-Luc Godard, writing in the Gazette du Cinéma, hailed him as "one of the most brilliant of American
directors," and added that House incorporated "one of the finest flashbacks in the history of the cinema."
More recently, Andrew Sarris has called it "a movie that becomes more memorable with each passing year."
Zanuck, whose carefully packaged dramas of racial prejudice such as Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
and Pinky (1949) had proved good box-office, now offered Mankiewicz another in the same tradition. No
Way Out (1950) pitted a young black intern (Sidney Poitier in his screen debut) against a psychotic racist
(Richard Widmark) whose brother's death the intern was unable to prevent. Though often vivid and
dramatic, the film stacked its cards too blatantly for conviction: deploring the persecution of saintly black
medics by white psychopaths scarcely constituted a bold attack on racism.
It is often asserted that Mankiewicz's films are essentially theatrical––François Truffaut, with no
implication of disparagement, has classified him as a master of théâtre filmé. One reason for this is surely his
lifelong fascination with the theatre's "creative commune . . . the quirks and frailties, the needs and talents of
the performing personality." This fascination, deeply sentimental behind a cynical facade, informs the
quintessential Mankiewicz movie, All About Eve (1950). Widely regarded as his masterpiece, it traces the
irresistible rise to stardom of a sweet-faced young predator, Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), who attaches
herself to a great lady of the theatre, Margo Channing (Bette Davis, magisterial). The film is structured
around Mankiewicz's favorite format, the extended multiple flashback: from the ceremony at which Eve is
to receive the coveted Sarah Siddons Award, we backtrack through the voice-over memories of three
characters scarred in her climb, finally returning full circle to the presentation.
"I don't think," Mankiewicz had often responded to charges of excessive verbiage, "that there can
ever be an excess of good talk." Not all the talk in his films, unfortunately, is good; but in Eve, it rarely fails
to be less than brilliant. His script, as Neil Sinyard has commented, "seems not so much written as
detonated," sparkling with epigrams, wisecracks, and five-star bitchery. (Celeste Holm, one of the film's
leads, felt that "Joe was in love with the concept of the theatre as a wolverine's lair of skulduggery and
bitchcraft. ") Many of the best lines go, as usual, to the resident Mankiewicz-surrogate, in this case the
coolly venomous dramatic critic, Addison DeWitt––George Sanders, delicately placing the witticisms like
poisoned banderillas, gave the performance of his life and reaped a well-deserved Best Supporting Oscar.
Nevertheless, wrote Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, "what really interests Mankiewicz in All About Eve as well as
in most of his other films are the women, and through them the permanence of a certain femininity, the
archetype of a certain way of being female."
Two more Oscars went to Mankiewicz, again for scripting and directing, making him the only
person so far to win two Academy Awards two years running. Eve was also chosen as Best Picture and
gained a record number of nominations (fourteen), plus awards in New York, Cannes, London, and
elsewhere. Reviewers, with a few exceptions, frothed with enthusiasm. Those who complained of a lack of
realism, Hollis Alpert pointed out in the Saturday Review, were rather missing the point: "[Mankiewicz]
obviously knows how to get the most out of his players, but more important than this is his ability to stylize
a picture. The documentary approach is not for him; rather he likes to get as fictional a quality as possible, so
that . . . the audience remains entirely in the realm of illusion." Over the years, Eve has sustained its
reputation as a highpoint of sophisticated comedy with "the highest quotient of (verbal) wit of any film
made before or since" (David Shipman).
In 1950, soon after winning his first pair of Oscars, Mankiewicz had been elected president of the
Screen Directors Guild. He was nominated for the post by Cecil B. DeMille, who at that time had the Guild
in his pocket. However, the virulently right-wing DeMille, perhaps having overheard Mankiewicz's
opinion of his films ("DeMille has his finger up the pulse of America"), decided that his erstwhile protégé
was a dangerous lefty and initiated maneuvers to have Mankiewicz ousted from the presidency. There
followed several weeks of conspiratorial shenanigans, loyalty oaths, ballots, and petitions, culminating in
what Mankiewicz termed "the most dramatic evening in my life"––a seven-hour emergency meeting of the
Guild, at which he and his supporters, who included John Huston, William Wyler, and George Stevens,
decisively defeated DeMille and forced his resignation from the committee. Nonetheless Mankiewicz, a
middle-of-the-road liberal and "the least politically minded person in the world," felt revolted by the whole
affair. Shortly afterwards he announced his intention of "getting the hell out of Hollywood" and moving
east.
Something of his Guild experience was reflected in People Will Talk (1951), adapted from Curt
Goetz's 1933 German film Dr. Praetorius, in which an unconventional medical professor (played by Cary
Grant) suffers an assault on his professional and private life by malicious colleagues. Both plot and hero
were frankly implausible; Mankiewicz, wrote the Time critics, "tests Bernard Shaw's theory that people will
listen to anything so long as it is amusingly said." Either the theory was wrong or the talk was insufficiently
amusing, for the film did poorly at the box office, though it remains one of its director's personal favorites.
For his last film at Fox, Mankiewicz turned for the only time in his career to factual material––albeit
substantially transformed. Five Fingers (1952) was adapted from L. C. Moyzisch's book Operation Cicero,
which told how the British Ambassador's valet in Ankara sold military secrets to the Germans during World
War II. "If Hitchcock had ever collaborated with Lubitsch," Neil Sinyard wrote, "the result might have
resembled Five Fingers." As Diello, valet turned master-spy, James Mason gave one of his finest
performances, subtly conveying the cold ambition beneath a surface of urbane deference. He was well
matched by Danielle Darrieux, as an exiled Polish countess short of money and scruples. For contractual
reasons MIchael Wilson, author of the original adaptation, took sole screenwriting credit, but the dialogue,
and the sardonic slant on patriotism and loyalty, betray Mankiewicz's touch. Gordon Gow observed that
"the oblique comment upon the absurdities which are promoted by conflicting nations braced the
romanticism with a cynical wit," and Richard Corliss praised the film as "a graceful blending of political
intrigue and sexual politics, with as mordant a tone as any of the black comedies it prefigured."
Quitting Fox on reasonably amicable terms, Mankiewicz and his family exchanged the "intellectual
fog belt" of Los Angeles for midtown Manhattan. His plan was "to make my pitch for the theatre"; but an
offer from MGM, whence he had departed under a cloud ten years earlier, proved too much to resist. The
project was in any case calculated to appeal to him: a film version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1953), to be
produced by John Houseman, who had staged the famous Mercury Theatre version with Orson Welles in
1937.
Critical opinion, then and since, has divided over the Mankiewicz-Houseman Caesar. Lindsay
Anderson approvingly quoted Houseman's description of the play as "a political thriller," adding:
"[Mankiewiczl has appreciated the sensational excellence of the writing, and has filmed it directly,
powerfully and dramatically. There are no visual tricks to distract one from the marvellous words. . . . If
the later scenes in the film lack the brilliance and tension of the first half, the fault is largely Shakespeare's."
Bernard Dick, though, found the film "only occasionally cinematic. . . . Everything seemed cabined and
confined; except for the assassination and the funeral oration, there were few surprises. . . . Much of Julius
Caesar looks like the aftermath of a budget cut." Dick singled out, as have other critics, the glaringly artificial
mound on which Cassius kills himself, and the bizarre decision to stage the battle of Philippi in a canyon
"like an ambush in a B Western."
The lead performances, too, have been widely debated (with the exception of Louis Calhern's
Caesar, generally agreed to be inadequate). James Mason's thoughtful, sensitive Brutus was found colorless
by some, while Gielgud's vibrant portrait of embittered malice as Cassius struck others as over-theatrical.
Most controversial was the casting of Marlon Brando as a "thrillingly histrionic Antony, contemptuously
inspecting his hand after having it shaken in friendship by the murderers, and displaying Caesar's body to
the crowd as a bloodcurdlingly effective prop" (Neil Sinyard). Jack L. Jorgens, commending Mankiewicz
and Houseman's "refusal to sentimentalize, popularize, or oversimplify," regretted that the film contained
"memorable dramatic moments, but no memorable images. In seeking restraint and a distancing effect,
Mankiewicz often succeeded only in making scenes bland and visually dull." He concluded, though, that
"few Shakespeare films can match it for its integrity in dealing with the original, its narrative drive, and its
fine characterizations."
MGM announced a further Shakespeare project for Mankiewicz: a version of Twelfth Night, with
Audrey Hepburn playing both Viola and Sebastian. The idea fell through, and he returned to New York to
direct a new production of La Bohème at the Met, in which he tried to rid the opera of some of the
sentimental detritus that had accrued to it over the years. Reviews were lukewarm, and Mankiewicz,
disappointed, reverted to movie-making, setting up a deal between United Artists and his own newlyformed independent company, Figaro Inc.
Shortly before the premiere of Julius Caesar, Herman Mankiewicz had died at the age of fifty-five.
The mingled admiration and envy that Joe had felt towards his brother, and the guilty triumph at seeing his
own fortunes prosper while Herman's faded, perhaps contributed to the "slough of ill-humor" in which he
made his next movie. Mankiewicz's first film in color––and the first that he wrote, directed, and produced––
The Barefoot Contessa (1954) was summed up by Pauline Kael as "a trash masterpiece." Like a soured,
overripe counterpart to All About Eve, the film traces in flashback a woman's rise to fame. Maria Vargas
(Ava Gardner) is discovered in a Madrid nightclub by a Hughes-ish movie tycoon, shoots to stardom, joins
the international set, and is eventually murdered by the jealous Italian count she has married. Her story is
narrated by three mourners at her funeral: the Count (Rossano Brazzi); a publicist, Oscar Muldoon (a
sweating, sycophantic tour de force that won Edmond O'Brien an Academy Award); and the inevitable
Mankiewicz-figure, writer-director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart).
"Joseph Mankiewicz, one begins to think," observed Penelope Houston, "looks on a film as a sort of
expanding suitcase . . . and in The Barefoot Contessa the suitcase has split wide open under the strain. He has
buried this fundamentally novelettish story in an immense cocoon of verbiage." Most English-language
reviewers concurred, and Henry Hart accused Mankiewicz of "an ambivalent hatred and envy for the
aristocracy; an ambivalent distaste for and truckling to the proletariat." In France, though, Contessa was
hailed as its director's masterpiece. "This is not a film to be picked apart," wrote François Truffaut; "either
one rejects it or accepts it whole. I myself accept and value it for its freshness, intelligence and beauty."
Similar laudatory comments were made by Godard (who called Mankiewicz "the most intelligent man in all
contemporary cinema") and other French critics. Fellini later claimed Contessa as his direct inspiration for La
Dolce Vita.
Sam Goldwyn, who had acquired the rights to Frank Loesser's smash-hit musical Guys and Dolls
against fierce competition, offered Mankiewicz the chance of directing and scripting the movie version.
Mankiewicz jumped at the idea and made a very respectable job of it: if not one of the great screen
musicals, Guys and Dolls (1955) is consistently lively, likeable, and passably Runyonesque. Surprisingly, the
pair "non-singers," Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons, came off better than Frank Sinatra and Vivian Blaine,
the professional vocalists. Michael Kidd choreographed exhilaratingly, most notably in the fight sequence
when a drunken Jean Simmons takes on all comers in a Cuban bar. Brando and Sinatra, by all accounts,
detested each other, but none of their hostility came across in the picture which, as Goldwyn aptly put it,
"has warmth and charmth."
Figaro Inc.––intended by Mankiewicz "to do a little bit of every thing "––now embarked on sole
theatrical venture. It was a resounding flop: Carson McCullers's The Square Root of Wonderful, which opened
on Broadway in October 1957, received appalling notices and closed after eight weeks. This was altogether
a bad period for Mankiewicz, professionally an privately; his wife Rosa was becoming mentally unstable.
His next picture was as ill-starred as the McCullers play; he later described it as "the very bad film I made
during a very unhappy time of my life."
Even Mankiewicz's warmest admirers have reservations about The Quiet American (1958). "Such
delicacy in the scenario, so many gems in the dialogue, are staggering," Jean-Luc Godard wrote. "But is this
not a reproach rather than praise? It all looks, in fact, as though everything had been planned on paper, the
actual shooting adding very little. . . . He is too perfect a writer to be a director as well." Graham Greene's
novel, on which Mankiewicz based his script, warned with remarkable prescience of the perils of American
moral naivety in what was then French Indochina. Mankiewicz, however, jettisoned Greene's subtle
ambiguities in favor of a crassly pro-American ending. The American turns out to have been not just naive
but innocent of any harm; Fowler, the English journalist, who brings about his death, was duped by the
devious Communists. The resultant fable, far too black-and-white to be Greene, found little favor with
critics or audiences, though Michael Redgrave's "acidly intelligent playing" (Penelope Houston) as Fowler
was widely praised, as was Robert Krasker's atmospheric cinematography.
In September 1958, Rosa Mankiewicz committed suicide in a summer home the family had rented
in upstate New York. She had often threatened, and attempted, suicide; this time she had carried through.
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) had made up half of a Tennessee Williams double bill off-Broadway.
Sam Spiegel bought the movie rights and invited Mankiewicz to direct. Williams, together with Gore Vidal,
took screenplay credit but later repudiated the film, complaining that “a short morality play, in a lyrical
style, was turned into a sensationally successful film that the public thinks was a literal study of such things
as cannibalism, madness, and sexual deviation." It seems highly improbable that the public thought
anything of the sort; the film is evidently and unashamedly a roaring Grand Guignol melodrama, played
several inches past the hilt. A rich recluse (Katharine Hepburn in her nuttiest grande dame vein) tries to
pressure young psychosurgeon (Montgomery Clift) into lobotomizing her niece (Elizabeth Taylor) into
permanent amnesia. The doctor finds out what supposed to be forgotten: the niece was being used by her
cousin, a pederastic poet, to entice young Spanish urchins, some of whom had eventually torn him apart
and eaten him. "The violent poetry of the writing is given eloquent expression in every aspect of the film's
visual design," wrote Neil Sinyard, "and the performances are extraordinary." Both Hepburn and Taylor
were nominated for Oscars, and Suddenly gave Mankiewicz his biggest box-office hit since All About Eve.
His reputation restored, Mankiewicz signed a contract to write and direct for his old studio, Fox. A
planned adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benet's epic Civil War poem, John Brown's Body, came to nothing, but
Fox then offered him a project greatly to his taste: Lawrence Durrell's kaleidoscopic series of novels, The
Alexandria Quartet. Durrell's multiple-viewpoint structure and highly-colored prose offered Mankiewicz
scope for just the kind of filmmaking he liked, full of witty prolixity and complex patterns of flashbacks.
Mankiewicz later described his failure to direct this film as "the greatest disappointment of my
career. . . . If ever I were to summon up enough talent to make a definitive film about anything, this would
have been it." He had completed around half of his first draft of Justine (some 674 pages) to Durrell's wholehearted approval when he received an emergency call from Spyros Skouras, head of Fox. The studio was in
deep trouble with its ambitious epic production, Cleopatra. Would Mankiewicz take over and rescue them?
Despite severe misgivings, he let himself be persuaded. "It was, on my part, knowingly an act of
whoredom––I was handsomely paid. And, in the end, in turn, I paid. Most unhandsomely indeed." (Justine
eventually reached the screen in 1969, in a dismally inadequate version. Durrell, who had always dreaded
"a sort of Peyton Place with camels," saw his worst fears realized.)
The Fox executives had reason to be desperate about Cleopatra. It had now been two years in the
making. The $6 million budget had already been overspent by $1 million, and Rouben Mamoulian, the
director, had just ten and a half minutes of film in the can. Elizabeth Taylor, playing the title role for a
record $1 million fee, was thoroughly unhappy with Mamoulian and asked for Mankiewicz. Skouras, a
nervously impulsive man given to panicky snap decisions, readily agreed to Mankiewicz's exorbitant terms:
one and a half million dollars to buy the director's half interest in Figaro; the same again to buyout NBC,
who owned the other fifty percent; plus, of course, a generous salary and expenses.
Mankiewicz hoped to finish Cleopatra in fifteen weeks. In fact it took him eighteen months. "The
toughest three pictures I ever made," he ruefully remarked. "Cleopatra was first conceived in emergency,
shot in hysteria, and wound up in blind panic." As error piled on disaster, costs spiraled to $35 million (still,
allowing for inflation, the most expensive film ever made), and the production became a public joke,
compounded by press obsession with the increasingly overt affair between Taylor and Richard Burton
(playing Antony). Walter Wanger, the original producer, was sacked. Three weeks later Skouras was
ousted from the presidency of Fox, and Darryl F. Zanuck took over. One of his first acts was to fire
Mankiewicz from the picture. Though later rehired, Mankiewicz had no hand in the final cut.
Predictably, Cleopatra (1963) was slammed on release. No one but Andy Warhol seemed to like it,
and he liked it because it was "long and boring." Of the principal actors, only Rex Harrison as Caesar came
off with honor (and an Oscar nomination). Burton was found dull, and Taylor hopelessly under-equipped
for her role, utterly lacking in "infinite variety." Dilys Powell was more restrained than most in her
judgment: "Mr. Mankiewicz has made a film about the barge she sat in. The trouble is that there is nobody,
or next to nobody, sitting in it. The barge itself, I admit, really is something. . . . There is a kind of vulgarity
which by its own boldness becomes beautiful, and this is it." But most critics treated the picture as the
definitive Hollywood Edsel. Although commentary has become more temperate in recent years, the verdict
on Cleopatra has not been reversed.
This debacle permanently damaged Mankiewicz's reputation but clinched his third marriage.
Rosemary Matthews, an Englishwoman, had met Mankiewicz in Rome during the filming of The Barefoot
Cantessa, and acted as his personal assistant on Cleopatra. They were married in December 1962, and their
daughter Alexandra Kate was born in 1966.
In 1964 Mankiewicz directed a film for ABC-TV, A Carol for Another Christmas. An update of
Dickens in the form of a political satire, it amply confirmed Mankiewicz's claim that he was not "politically
minded." His next feature film also modernized a literary classic, Ben Jonson's Volpone, throwing in a
murder mystery for good measure. The Honey Pot (1967) is set in contemporary Venice where Cecil Fox (Rex
Harrison), a man of reputedly immense wealth, summons three women from his past to what they believe
to be his deathbed. Even for Mankiewicz, this was an exceptionally verbose film, further marred by a
general uncertainty of tone. It had its admirers, nevertheless, and Stephen Farber wrote that the two scenes
between Harrison and Maggie Smith "are as masterful examples of high comic writing as we can hope to see
in movies."
Will, a Shakespeare biopic to be scripted by Anthony Burgess, proved abortive, as did a proposed
version of John Updike's Couples. Instead, Mankiewicz rather unexpectedly directed his first Western. There
Was a Crooked Man (1970), written by Robert Benton and David Newman (Oscar-winners for their script of
Bonnie and Clyde), combined two genres in one: Western and prison movie. A richly cynical comedy, it was
structured around the dealings between a charmingly ruthless convict (Kirk Douglas with granny glasses
and unfazable grin) and the conscientious prison warden (Henry Fonda, in a parody of his own solemnly
liberal image) who tries to reform him. In support the film assembled a "parade of beautifully defined,
rounded characterizations of amiable rogues," as Tom Milne put it, adding that Crooked Man "comes closer
to the true spirit of Ben Jonson than The Honey Pot. . . . One shouldn't be too hard on a film which revels so
persistently in dry, civilized ironies." Many critics, though, found the moral ambiguity self-defeating: Paul
Zimmermann called it "a piecework movie in which individual sequences work well but contradict each
other until total moral confusion reigns."
Mankiewicz's last film to date was Sleuth (1972), scripted by Anthony Shaffer from his own stage
hit. The convoluted plot entailed an elaborate and ultimately murderous passage of game-playing between
two men, an elderly thriller-writer and the successful hairdresser who has seduced the writer's wife. The
cast of two, Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, provided virtuoso playing, but the blatant artificiality that
had seemed audacious on stage looked merely hollow on screen. David Thomson described the film as "a
grotesque throwback to theatricality, indicative of Mankiewicz's readiness to be fooled by cleverness and of
his lack of creative personality." Sleuth, nonetheless, proved his first box-office success for over a decade,
and earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director.
Criticisms of Joseph Mankiewicz have centered, inevitably, on the allegedly uncinematic priority of
words over images in his work. Comparing The Barefoot Contessa to Pandora and the Flying Dutchman,
Andrew Sarris commented, "Mankiewicz's sensibility is decidedly more refined than Lewin's, but his
technique is almost as pedestrian." "Pungent situations, witty dialogue and smart playing," wrote David
Thomson, "conceal his indifference to what a film looks like or his inability to reveal the emotional depths
beneath dialogue." For himself, Mankiewicz has always maintained that "I don't believe the word is of
prime importance. I believe that the word is worthy of equal respect," and that film is "a medium for the
exchange of ideas and exchange of comment as well as purely visual effects."
It seems unlikely that Mankiewicz will ever regain the status he achieved at the zenith of his fame
in the early 1950s. His stock remains high in France, though, where he has often been honored by festivals
and retrospectives; in 1983, he was the subject of a full-length film, All About Mankiewicz, made by Luc
Béraud and Michel Ciment. At his finest, he was an acknowledged master of "quintessential Hollywood
movies, with all the glamour and brittle sophistication of the best American high comedy" (Richard Corliss),
and some of his detractors have subsequently had second thoughts. Andrew Sarris, who had dismissed
Mankiewicz's work as "a cinema of intelligence without inspiration," later detected "a pattern of intelligence,
charm and subtlety that I had tended to take too much for granted. . . . What makes him truly admirable . . .
is his defiance of a historical process that in its viciously simple-minded way is striving to make intelligent
liberalism obsolete in a world sinking into the chaos of aimless absurdism." (Show, March 1970.)
Mankiewicz's own view of current cinematic trends is similarly damning. Modern Hollywood
films he describes as "cartoons, with balloon dialogue, for fourteen-year-old minds." As for the industry
itself: "The Mayers, the Thalbergs, the Schencks, the Goldwyns, the Cohns . . . they were the Medici
compared to the money-grabbers we have today. They were picture-makers, not deal-makers. The fleshpeddlers, the agents, are now in charge, and never before has the industry been such a con-game. The
pimps have taken over the whorehouse." Formerly known for his gregariousness, Mankiewicz is said to
have become increasingly embittered and reclusive in recent years. He lives mainly on his estate at Bedford,
New York, with his wife and daughter. Ostensibly, he remains willing to direct more films; but "the oldest
whore on the beat," as he likes to call himself, has for the last ten years fastidiously turned down all
propositions.
[Philip Kemp, “Joseph Mankiewicz,” World Film Directors: Volume I––1890-1945,
John Wakeman, ed. (H.W. Wilson Company, 1987)]
Reading #3. “F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S CASE” by Gore Vidal
I. Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota; he died 1940 in Hollywood, California, at
1443 North Hayworth Avenue, within walking distance of Schwab’s drugstore, then as now a meeting place
for those on their way up or down in what is still known in that part of the world as The Industry, elsewhere
as the movies.
Between 1920 and 1940, Fitzgerald published four novels, 160 short stories, some fragments of
autobiography. He worked on a dozen film scripts. He also wrote several thousand letters, keeping carbon
copies of the ones most apt to present posterity with his side of a number of matters that he thought
important. Although very little of what Fitzgerald wrote has any great value as literature, his sad life
continues to provide not only English Departments but the movies with a Cautionary Tale of the first
magnitude. Needless to say, Scott Fitzgerald is now a major academic industry. Currently, there are two
new models in the bookstores, each edited by Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli. The Notebooks of F. Scott
Fitzgerald contains all 2078 notebook entries while Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald includes letters to as
well as from Fitzgerald.
A quick re-cap of the Fitzgerald career: in 1920, he published This Side of Paradise and married the handsome
Zelda Sayre. In 1921, they set out for the territory—in those days, Europe. But the Fitzgeralds’ Europe was
hardly the Europe of James’s “The Passionate Pilgrim.” The Fitzgeralds never got around to seeing the
sights because, as Jazz Age celebrities, they were the sights. They wanted to have a good time and a good
time was had by all for a short time. Then things fell apart. Crash of ‘29. Zelda’s madness. Scott’s alcoholism.
As Zelda went from one expensive clinique to another, money was in short supply. Scott’s third and best
novel The Great Gatsby (1925) did not make money. Novel number four did not come easily. Back to America
in 1931: Baltimore, Wilmington. Fitzgerald made two trips to Hollywood where he wrote movie scripts for
money; he made the money but no movies.
The relative failure of Tender Is the Night (1934) came at a time when Fitzgerald’s short stories no longer
commanded the sort of magazine prices that had made the living easy in the Twenties. After a good deal of
maneuvering, Fitzgerald wangled a six-month contract as a staff writer for MGM. At $1,000 a week, he was
one of the highest paid movie writers. From 1937 to 1940, Fitzgerald wrote movies in order to pay his debts;
to pay for Zelda’s sanitarium and for his daughter’s school; to buy time in which to write a novel. Despite a
dying heart, he did pretty much what he set out to do.
In a sense, Fitzgerald’s final days are quite as heroic as those of General Grant, as described in General
Grant’s Last Stand, a book that the Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, rather tactlessly sent Fitzgerald after
reading the three autobiographical sketches in Esquire (reprinted, posthumously, by Edmund Wilson in The
Crack-Up).
“I enjoyed reading General Grant’s Last Stand,” Fitzgerald replied with considerable dignity under the
circumstances, “and was conscious of your particular reasons for sending it to me. It is needless to compare
the difference in force of character between myself and General Grant, the number of words he could write
in a year” (while dying of cancer, dead broke), “and the absolutely virgin field which he exploited with the
experiences of a four-year life under the most dramatic of circumstances.” It was also needless to mention
that despite a failed presidency, a personal bankruptcy, a history of alcoholism, Grant had had such
supreme victories as Shiloh, Vicksburg, Appomattox, while Fitzgerald had had only one—The Great Gatsby,
a small but perfect operation comparable, say, to Grant’s investiture of Fort Donelson.
At the time of Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, he was already something of a period-piece, a relic of the Jazz Age,
of flappers and bathtub gin. The last decade of Fitzgerald’s life began with the Depression and ended with
the Second World War; midway through the Thirties, the Spanish Civil War politicized most of the new
writers, and many of the old. Predictably, Ernest Hemingway rode out the storm, going triumphantly from
the bad play The Fifth Column to the bad novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (Fitzgerald’s comment: “a thoroughly
superficial book with all the profundity of Rebecca“). Nevertheless, with characteristic panache, the great
careerist managed to keep himself atop the heap at whose roomy bottom Fitzgerald had now taken up
permanent residence.
But, sufficiently dramatized, failure has its delights, as Fitzgerald demonstrated in those autobiographical
pieces which so outraged his old friend, John Dos Passos, who wrote: “Christ, man, how do you find time
in the middle of the general conflagration to worry about all that stuff?” But all that stuff was all that
Fitzgerald ever had to deal with and he continued to confront his own private conflagration until it
consumed him, while eating chocolate on a winter’s day just off Sunset Boulevard.
At Princeton, Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson were friends; they continued to be friends to the end even
though Wilson was an intellectual of the most rigorous sort while Fitzgerald was barely literate. Yet they
must have had something in common beyond shared youth, time, place, and I suspect that that something
was the sort of high romanticism which Fitzgerald personified and Wilson only dreamed of, as he pined for
Daisy.
When Wilson put together a volume of Fitzgeraldiana and called it The Crack-Up, the dead failed writer was
totally, if not permanently, resurrected. Since 1945, there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of
biographies, critical studies, PhD theses written about Fitzgerald. Ironically, the movies which so fascinated
and frustrated Fitzgerald have now turned him and Zelda into huge mythic monsters, forever sweeping
‘round to Wiener waltzes en route to the last reel where they sputter out like a pair of Roman candles on a
rainy Fourth of July—disenchanted, beloved infidels.
For Americans, a writer’s work is almost always secondary to his life—or life-style, as they say nowadays.
This means that the novelist’s biographer is very apt to make more, in every sense, out of the life than the
writer who lived it. Certainly, Fitzgerald’s personal story is a perennially fascinating Cautionary Tale. As
for his novels, the two that were popular in his lifetime were minor books whose themes—not to mention
titles—appealed enormously to the superstitions and the prejudices of the middle class: This Side of Paradise
and The Beautiful and Damned—if that last title isn’t still a lu-lu out on the Twiceborn circuit where Cleaver
and Colson flourish, I will reread the book. But when Fitzgerald finally wrote a distinguished novel, the
audience was not interested. What, after all, is the moral to Gatsby? Since there seemed to be none, The
Great Gatsby failed and that was the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald, glamorous bestseller of yesteryear, bold
chronicler of girls who kissed. It was also to be the beginning of what is now a formidable legend: the
“archetypal” writer of whom Cyril Connolly keened (in The New Yorker, April 10, 1948) “the young man
slain in his glory.” Actually, the forty-four-year-old wreck at the bottom of Laurel Canyon was neither
young nor in his glory when he dropped dead. But five years later, when Wilson itemized the wreckage, he
re-created for a new generation the bright, blond youth, forever glorious, doomed.
III. [F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph L. Mankiewicz] In July of 1922, Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald were offered
the leads in a movie version of This Side of Paradise. Andrew Turnbull says that they turned down the offer.
In 1927, Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald spent two months in Hollywood where he was contracted to write an
original screenplay for Constance Talmadge. Although the screenplay was not used, Fitzgerald got his first
look at the place where he was to live and die. In 1931, he came back to Hollywood for five weeks’ work on
Red-Headed Woman at MGM. Although Fitzgerald’s script was not used, he got to know the boy genius
Irving Thalberg, whose “tasteful” films (The Barretts of Wimpole Street) were much admired in those days.
On one occasion (recorded in the story “Crazy Sunday”) Fitzgerald held riveted a party at the Thalbergs
with a drunken comedy number. Movie stars do not like to be upstaged by mere writers, especially drunk
writers. But next day, the hostess, the ever-gracious Norma Shearer, wired Fitzgerald (no doubt after an
apologetic mea culpa that has not survived), “I thought you were one of the most agreeable persons at our
tea.” In Hollywood that means you’re fired; he was fired.
All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars. On Scott Fitzgerald’s first
trip to Hollywood, he was given a screen test (where is it?). As early as 1920, Fitzgerald tells how
“summoned out to Griffith’s studio on Long Island, we trembled in the presence of the familiar faces of the
Birth of a Nation. . . . The world of the picture actors was like our own in that it was in New York, but not of
it.” Later, Zelda’s passion to become a ballerina was, at its core, nothing except a desire to be A Star. But
like so many romantics, then and now, the Fitzgeralds did not want to go through the grim boring business
of becoming movie stars. Rather they wanted to live as if they were inside a movie. Cut to Antibes.
Dissolve to the Ritz in Paris. Fade to black in Hollywood. Each lived long enough and suffered enough to
realize that movies of that sort are to be made or seen, not lived. But by then she was in a sanitarium fulltime and he was a movie hack.
In “Pasting It Together” (March, 1936) Fitzgerald, aged forty, made note of a cultural change that
no one else seemed to have noticed.
I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and
emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art
that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the
tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where
personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that
the talkies would make even the best-selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures.
Fitzgerald was right. Forty-four years later, it is the film school that attracts the bright young
people while the writers’ workshop caters to those whose futures will not be literary but academic. Today,
certainly, no new novel by anyone commands the sort of world attention that a new film automatically gets.
Yet, for reasons obscure to me, novelists still continue to echo Glenway Wescott who wrote that Fitzgerald’s
hunch was “a wrong thought indeed for a novelist.” I should have thought it was not wrong but inevitable.
A decade later, when I wrote that the film had replaced the novel as the central art form of our
civilization, I was attacked for having said that the novel was dead and I was sent reading lists of grand new
novels. Obviously, the serious novel or art-novel or whatever one wants to call the novel-as-literature will
continue to be written; after all, poetry is flourishing without the patronage of the common reader. But it is
also a fact that hardly anyone outside of an institution is ever apt to look at any of these literary artifacts.
Worse, if the scholar-squirrel prevails, writers will not be remembered for what they wrote but for the
Cautionary Tales that their lives provide. Meanwhile the sharp and the dull watch movies; discuss movies;
dream movies. Films are now shown in the classroom because it is easier to watch Pabst than to read
Dreiser. At least, it was easier. There is now some evidence that the current television-commercial
generation is no longer able to watch with any degree of concentration a two-hour film without breaks.
Thus, Pabst gives way to the thirty-second Oil of Olay spot.
In our epoch, only a few good writers have been so multitalented or so well situated in time and
place that they could use film as well as prose. Jean Cocteau, Graham Greene . . . who else? Certainly not
Faulkner, Sartre, Isherwood, Huxley. In the heyday of the Hollywood studios no serious writer ever got a
proper grip on the system. But then few wanted to. They came to town to make money in order to buy time
to write books. But Fitzgerald was more prescient than many of his contemporaries. He realized that the
novel was being superseded by the film; he also realized that the film is, in every way, inferior as an art
form to the novel—if indeed such a collective activity as a movie can be regarded as an art at all. Even so,
Fitzgerald was still enough of an artist or romantic egotist to want to create movies. How to go about it?
In those days, the producer was all-powerful and everyone else was simply a technician to be used
by the producer. Naturally, there were “stars” in each technical category. A super-hack writer like Ben
Hecht could influence the making of a film in a way that, often, the director-technician could not or, as
Fitzgerald put it in a letter to Matthew Josephson (March 11, 1938),
In the old days, when movies were a stringing together of the high points in the imagination of half a dozen
drunken ex-newspapermen, it was true that the whole thing was the director. He coordinated and gave life to
the material—he carried the story in his head. There is a great deal of carry-over from those days, but the
situation of Three Comrades, where Frank Borzage had little more to do than be a sort of glorified cameraman, is
more typical of today. A Bob Sherwood picture, for instance, or a Johnny Mahin script, could be shot by an
assistant director or a script girl, and where in the old days an author would have jumped at the chance of
becoming a director, there are now many, like Ben Hecht and the aforesaid Mahin, who hate the eternal waiting
and monotony of the modern job.
Although Fitzgerald underplays the power of the producer (in the case of Three Comrades the
witty and prodigious writer-director Joe Mankiewicz), he is right about the low opinion everyone had
of the director and the importance, relatively speaking, of the super-hack writers who pre-directed, as it
were, each film by incorporating in their scripts the exact way that the film was to be shot. This was still
pretty much the case when I was a writer under contract to MGM a dozen years after Fitzgerald’s death.
Scott was still remembered, more or less fondly.
“But,” as the Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table said, “there wouldn’t ‘ve been all this revival stuff, if
he’d looked like Wallace Beery.” The Wise Hack [this is Gore Vidal’s device or conceit that he has used in many of
his essays about studio Hollywood] had only contempt for Edmund Wilson’s labors to restore Fitzgerald’s
reputation. “The Emperor’s tailor,” he snapped. At the Writers’ Table we all snapped or riposted or even,
sometimes, like Fitzgerald, shrilled.
When I said that I’d never much liked Fitzgerald’s face in the early photographs but found the later
ones touching because he always looked as if he was trying very hard not to scream, the Wise Hack said,
“No. Not scream, whimper. There was never such a whiner. God knows why. He had a good time around
here. Joe admired him. Got him a credit. Got his contract renewed. Whole thing started with Eddie Knopf
who was queer for writers. It was him who talked the studio into taking Fitzgerald, the trick of the week
after all that shit he shoveled in Esquire about what a drunk he was. Then Joe puts him on Three Comrades
because he thought he could get some good period stuff out of him. Then when that didn’t work, Joe got
old Ted Paramore to help out on the script. But that didn’t work either. First day on the set, Maggie
Sullavan says, ‘I can’t say these lines,’ and so Joe has to rewrite the whole damned thing. So why should
Scott be pissed off? He knew enough to know that in this business the writer is the woman.”
But Scott was pissed off at what Mankiewicz had done to the script of the only film on which
Fitzgerald’s name was ever to appear and for him to get what is known in the trade as a credit (debit is
usually the better word) was a giant step toward big money, autonomy, freedom or, as Fitzgerald wrote
Zelda (Fall 1937), “If I can finish one excellent picture to top Three Comrades I think I can bargain for better
terms—more rest and more money.” To Beatrice Dance he wrote (November 27, 1937), “I’ve been working
on a script of Three Comrades, a book that falls just short of the 1st rate (by Remarque)—it leans a little on
Hemingway and others but tells a lovely tragic story.” To the same woman, a sadder if no wiser Fitzgerald
wrote four months later, “Three Comrades, the picture I have just finished, is in production and though it
bears my name, my producer could not resist the fascination of a pencil and managed to obliterate most
signs of my personality.” To his mother-in-law, Fitzgerald wrote in the next month (April 23, 1938): “Three
Comrades should be released within ten days, and a good third of that is absolutely mine.” But a few weeks
later he wrote his sister-in-law: “Three Comrades is awful. It was entirely rewritten by the producer. I’d
rather Zelda didn’t see it.”
But Zelda saw it and thought that a lot of it was very good even though
there isn’t any dramatic continuity—which robs the whole of suspense. I know it’s hard to get across a
philosophic treatise on the screen, but it would have been better had there been the sense of some inevitable
thesis making itself known in spite of the characters—or had there been the sense of characters dominated by
some irresistible dynamic purpose. It drifts; and the dynamics are scattered and sporadic rather than
cumulative or sustained.
Even in the loony bin, Zelda was a better critic than the ineffable Frank Nugent of The New York
Times (who loved the picture) or Fitzgerald who had written a so-so first draft of a film that was to be
altered not only during a collaboration with one Ted (The Bitter Tea of General Yen) Paramore but, finally
redone by the producer Joe Mankiewicz.
Fitzgerald’s first-draft screenplay was completed September 1, 1937. Edited by the ubiquitous
Professor Bruccoli, Fitzgerald’s screenplay was published in 1978, along with the various letters that
Fitzgerald wrote but did not always send to Mankiewicz and the heads of the studio as well as the position
paper that he did give to his collaborator Paramore. In an afterword, Professor Bruccoli gives a short history
of the film’s production; he also compares the penultimate screenplay with Fitzgerald’s first draft.
Now I have always been suspicious of the traditional Cautionary Tale of Fitzgerald’s fragile genius,
broken on the rack of commerce by “an ignorant and vulgar gent” (Fitzgerald in a letter to Beatrice Dance,
four months after the picture’s release). Inspired and excited by Professor Bruccoli’s researches, I have now
turned scholar-squirrel myself. I have penetrated the so-called “vault” at MGM where I was allowed to read
not only a copy of the actual shooting script of Three Comrades (dated February 2, 1938) but also the revisions
that Mankiewicz made during the course of the filming. I also know the answer to the question that has so
puzzled my fellow squirrels: did Mankiewicz ever receive Fitzgerald’s letter of protest, dated January 20,
1938? He . . . . But let us not get ahead of our story.
On November 5, 1937, the first Fitzgerald-Paramore script was handed in. There was a story
conference: one can imagine what it was like. Mankiewicz talking rapidly, eyes opening wide for emphasis
while the faded Fitzgerald thought about the last drink—and the next drink; and Paramore did whatever it
is that Paramores did or do. Subsequently, two more revised scripts were handed in by FitzgeraldParamore. Then between their last script, dated December 21, and the script of January 21, something
happened.
On January 20, the day before the penultimate script was mimeographed, Fitzgerald wrote
Mankiewicz a furious letter in which he attacked the radical changes that Mankiewicz had made in the
script. Although Mankiewicz is on record as saying that “Scott Fitzgerald really wrote very bad spoken
dialogue,” I don’t think this is true. But we shall never know for certain because little of his dialogue ever
made it to the screen. In the case of Three Comrades, Fitzgerald thought that “37 pages mine about 1/3.” I’d
say it was rather less.
In Fitzgerald’s original script the boy-girl dialogues are charming and, curiously enough, far less
wordy than the final version’s. Fitzgerald’s lack of humor might not have been so noticeable in an anti-Nazi
tear-jerker were it not for the fact that Mankiewicz is one of the few genuine wits ever to come out of
Hollywood. Where Fitzgerald’s dialogue tended to be too sweet, Mankiewicz’s dialogue was often pretty
sour; the combination was not entirely happy. In any case, Fitzgerald never did get the point to
Mankiewicz’s jokes.
Fitzgerald’s original script was overlong and somewhat confusing. In an excess of conscientiousness, he
had studied so many old movies that there was hardly a cliché that he overlooked. When the hero
telephones the heroine’s sanitarium “CUT TO: QUICK TRAVELING SHOT OF A LINE OF TELEPHONE
POLES IN WINTER—The line goes up a snowy mountain. CUT TO:” . . . Mel Brooks cutting the line.
[Erich Maria] Remarque’s story of three German World War I buddies who go into the car-repair
business during the rise of the Nazis was plainly not congenial to Fitzgerald’s talents but since he needed
the money, he did what all good writers who write for hire instinctively do: he pulled the narrative in his
own direction. He made the German girl Pat (a rich girl now poor) into a Fitzgerald heroine and he made
the boy Bobby (Erich in the final script) into a Fitzgerald hero. Once again, Scott and Zelda light up if not
the sky the first-draft screenplay. Erich now has an unacknowledged drinking problem—hardly a page
goes by that he doesn’t think of bottles of rum or ask for a double whisky (not the usual tipple of your
average Weimar Republic worker-lad). Erich’s two comrades and the cleaning woman also, as they say in
the script, “prosit” quite a lot.
When Pat is dying of tuberculosis in a sanitarium, Fitzgerald has a field day and much of the
dialogue is charming. But even in Culver City, Fitzgerald could not escape the shadow of his monstrous
friend Hemingway. “Pat (as if to herself): It’s raining. It’s been raining too long. At night sometimes when I
wake, I imagine we’re quite buried under all the rain.” Fans of A Farewell to Arms will recall the soon-to-bedying Catherine’s speech as “All right. I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.” Told
that this is all nonsense, Catherine agrees: “‘It’s all nonsense. It’s only nonsense. I’m not afraid of the rain.
I’m not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn’t.’ She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped
crying. But outside it kept on raining.” There was a lot of rain in those days. Luckily most of it was
outside.
Fitzgerald was not entirely at ease with the talk of young men in the car-repair business. He was
also hampered by Hollywood’s insistence that an English-speaking film about Germans in Germany should
be loaded with achs and auf Wiedersehens and Herrs. Mankiewicz also maintains the silliness: the one auf
Wiedersehen in the script is his. Since profanity was not allowed in those chaste days, Fitzgerald has the
lower orders accuse one another of being “twerps,” “squirts,” “greasepots,” when today he would doubtless
have used the more succinct if somewhat bleak epithet for all seasons and occasions “ass-hole.” Fitzgerald
also loaded the script with such epithets as “Holy Cats!” and “Great Snakes!” Wisely, Mankiewicz replaced
Scott’s cats and snakes with emotion-charged ellipses.
Now for Fitzgerald’s January 20 letter. According to Professor Bruccoli, “Mankiewicz has stated
that he never received this letter, which survives in a carbon copy in Fitzgerald’s papers. Since there is no
closing on the letter, it is possible that Fitzgerald did not send it.” But Fitzgerald sent the letter; and
Mankiewicz read the letter. Proof?
In Fitzgerald’s script the boy and the dying girl are on a balcony, gazing out over what is supposed
to be Thomas Mann’s magic mountain but is actually Sonja Henie’s winter wonderland. “Pat: Is that the
road home? Erich: Yes. Pat: How far is it? Erich: About five hundred miles. In May you’ll be starting back
along that road. Pat: In May. My God, in May!” Fitzgerald left it at that—and why not? The dialogue
comes straight from Remarque’s novel.
Mankiewicz kept the dialogue. But then he moved the couple off the balcony and into Pat’s
bedroom at the sanitarium. Daringly, they sit on the bed for a really serious chat. After Pat’s
“(unbelievingly): In May. My God, in May!” Mankiewicz adds: “(a pause then she turns to him): But we’re
not saying what we should be saying this first time together. (he looks at her puzzled) All these months I’d
figured out what you would say and I would say—word for word. Do you want to hear? (he nods, smiling)
We’d be sitting here on the foot of this bed like this, hand in hand, and you’d ask, what time is it and I’d say
that doesn’t matter now. We love each other beyond time and place now. And you’d say, that’s right.
God’s in this room with us, lightning’s in this room, and the sea and the sky and the mountains are in this
room with us. And you’d kiss me on the forehead and I’d say, how cool your lips are, don’t move away—
(he kisses her on the forehead). And you’d say, ought I to be in this room now? Aren’t we breaking the rules?
And I’d say must I start now—not breaking them—(he looks into her eyes, unsmiling) because I can’t let you go
and then you’d say hello, Pat, and I’d say, Erich, hello, and suddenly it would all be so real it would stab my
heart and—Erich: But—darling—” They embrace “fiercely” and the camera sails out the window en route
to the magic mountain and Settembrini and Naphta in the distance.
After Fitzgerald read this scene, he wrote Mankiewicz that Pat’s big speech is “utter drool out of
True Romances . . . God and ‘cool lips,’ whatever they are, and lightning and elephantine play on words. The
audience’s feeling will be ‘Oh, go on and die.”’
Now if there is ever any way of making nervous the sardonic Mankiewicz it is to call him corny.
Like Billy Wilder, he does not go in for scenes out of True Romances. Between January 20 and February 2
Mankiewicz rewrote the scene. He cut out “God” and “cool lips” and “lightning.” Here is Pat’s aria
revised: “We’d be sitting here on the foot of this bed like this, and I’d ask, is that the road home. And you’d
say, Yes. It’s four hundred miles. And I’d say, that doesn’t matter now. We love each other beyond time
and place now. And you’d say, that’s right. And you’d kiss me—” And five months later there was not, as
they used to say, a dry seat in any cinema of the republic when Margaret Sullavan husked those words to
Robert Taylor.
What Fitzgerald had not realized was that dialogue must be precisely cut in quality to the player’s
talents and in length to the player’s salary. Margaret Sullavan was a star whose deathbed scenes were one
of the great joys of the Golden Age of the movies. Sullavan never simply kicked the bucket. She made
speeches, as she lay dying; and she was so incredibly noble that she made you feel like an absolute twerp for
continuing to live out your petty life after she’d ridden on ahead, to the accompaniment of the third
movement of Brahms’s First Symphony.
Fitzgerald’s death scene went like this: Pat is all in a heap beside her bed, as Erich enters. “Erich:
Pat—oh, Pat. (He raises her, supports her. Pat’s head wobbles on her shoulders.) Help—somebody! Pat: (very
low) It’s all right—it’s hard to die—but I’m quite full of love—like a bee is full of honey when it comes back
to the hive in the evening.” On this grammatical error, “her eyes close in death.” Joe will fix that line, I
thought, as I put to one side Scott’s version and picked up the shooting script. But, no, Mankiewicz’s final
words for Pat are: “It’s all right for me to die, darling—and it’s not hard—when I’m so full of love.” Joe, I
say to myself, tensing, make her say “as.” But, alas, Miss Sullavan dies “like a bee is full of honey when it
comes home in the evening.” At least Mankiewicz got rid of Fitzgerald’s hive.
In the novel, Remarque killed Pat more realistically—she doesn’t talk all that much. But then she
had already made her great speech a few pages earlier on why it’s OK to be dying because she has Erich’s
love: “Now it’s hard; but to make up, I’m quite full of love, as a bee is full of honey when it comes back to
the hive in the evening.” (Emphasis added by me.) Curiously enough, there is no rain in the book. But then
the Föhn is blowing.
Mankiewicz’s main contribution to this tear-jerker was an anti-Nazi subplot which the Breen office
objected to. They wanted the German thugs to be communists. When Mankiewicz threatened to quit, the
Breen office backed down; and the film was politically daring for its time. Mankiewicz also added a certain
wit to the girl’s part, annoying Fitzgerald. He thought that Mankiewicz had made Pat “a sentimental girl
from Brooklyn”—a mildly anti-Semitic swipe which was off the mark: Mankiewicz’s jokes were usually
rather good and as much in character as anything else in the film. Incidentally, for those who subscribe to
the auteur theory, Frank Borzage was in no way involved with the actual creation of the film that he humbly
directed.
Professor Bruccoli tells us that “after MGM dropped his option in 1939, Fitzgerald freelanced at
other studios before starting The Last Tycoon—which, in its unfinished state, is the best Hollywood novel
ever written. In 1977 Hollywood turned The Last Tycoon into the worst movie ever made.” Well, I am sure
that Professor Bruccoli does not regard himself as a literary or film critic. He is a scholar-squirrel and the
nuts that he gathers from past Mays are great fun to crack. To say that The Last Tycoon is the best
Hollywood novel is like saying Edwin Drood is the best mystery novel ever written. Since The Last Tycoon is
a fragment and nothing more, it’s not the best anything. The Day of the Locust, The Slide Area, the crudely
written but well-observed What Makes Sammy Run? are far more interesting “Hollywood novels” than the
fragment Fitzgerald left behind, while to say that The Last Tycoon is the worst film Hollywood ever made is
silly squirrel-talk. At the risk of betraying an interest, I would propose not the worst film ever made (critics
are not allowed to use the sort of hyperbole that scholar-squirrels may indulge in) but a film that was
certainly much worse than The Last Tycoon (and based on, dare I say? a rather better work), Myra
Breckinridge [Vidal’s own novel].
Recently, I ran into the Wise Hack. He was buying the trade papers at the newsstand in the
Beverly Hills Hotel. He is very old but still well turned out (blue cashmere blazer, highly polished ox-blood
loafers with tassels); he owns a shopping center in downtown Encino; he has emphysema. Although he still
keeps up with the latest movie deals, he seldom goes to the movies. “Too many cars,” he says vaguely.
When I mentioned Fitzgerald, he sighed. “At least Ketti made some money out of him.” It took me
a moment to realize that he was referring to Ketti Frings who had written, in 1958, a successful stage version
of Look Homeward, Angel.
“Did you hear the latest Polish joke?” The Wise Hack’s little eyes gleamed behind thick glasses.
“This Polish star, she comes to Hollywood to make a picture and she,” the Wise Hack wheezed with delight,
“she fucks the writer!”
Poor Scott: “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close
that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in
that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” Habent
sua fata libelli. Writers have their scholar-squirrels.
[Gore Vidal, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Case,”
The New York Review of Books, 1 May 1980]
Reading #4. “ALL ABOUT CICERO” by Donald Lyons
FIVE FINGERS (1952) belongs to one of my favorite subsets of WW2 espionage films: Germans-almostuncover-D-Day-secrets. Eye of the Needle and 36 Hours are very elaborate and gripping examples. Subsubsets include Germans-fooled-about-Sicily-invasion (The Man Who Never Was), Germans-almost-captureChurchill (The Eagle Has Landed), and Germans-almost-perfect-secret-weapon (Heroes of Telemark; the
excellent Operation Crossbow). But Five Fingers's membership in this to-me-irresistible genre coexists with its
premier place in the work of Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Mankiewicz is often regarded, and not seldom damned, as a talkative analyst of artistic
temperaments and a curmudgeonly critic of American philistinism and conformity. But his essence lies
elsewhere: he is the poet of ambition. His best movies––A Letter to Three Wives, All About Eve, Julius Caesar,
Fire Fingers––take a social-climbing character stung by snobbery, by premature closure, who vows to rewrite
life's typecasting. Other Mankiewicz movies have merits, from the powerful House of Strangers to the
underrated People Will Talk, but 1949 to 1953 were his anni mirabiles. By 1954's The Barefoot Contessa he has
lost sight of his real theme and mistakes his career for his topic, deliberately echoing Eve's mots. The rest is
a long goodbye.
His theme receives early articulation in A Letter to Three Wives (written by Mankiewicz) in Linda
Darnell's half-golddigging, half-worthy attempts to use goofy tycoon Paul Douglas to yank herself out of the
working class. In All About Eve (written bv Mankiewicz) it is Gertrude/Eve (Anne Baxter) who reinvents
herself at the expense of the theatrical aristocrats who had patronized the mousy little brewery-escapee in a
trenchcoat at the stage door. But Eve, while beguiling most of her victims (never Thelma Ritter's Birdie!),
falls prey to the icily omnipotent intellect of Addison deWitt (George Sanders), critic and ironist. DeWitt
uses his comprehensive understanding of her stratagems, of her desperate need to remake a herself into a
stage aristocrat, in order to dominate Eve sexually, turning her struggle for autonomy into ashes. For
deWitt, as for Eve, sex is a function of power. They crave above all control. I'm not sure the movie is finally
up to realizing their bleak final alliance (Addison is weakly expository while the movie shows too little),
but, for all the brilliant Margo Channing-Bette Davis bravura, the heart of Eve is here.
As for Julius Caesar, it might be inadequate to call Antony (played by Marlon Brando) simply a
Roman Eve. But he does move from an early mentor, Caesar, through a brief period of deliberately false
discipleship to Brutus and Cassius, into what he does not realize will be dominance by the icy Octavian.
Antony is obsessed with the word "ambition" and is tracked sympathetically by Mankiewicz's camera as he
seizes what he perceives to be opportunities to behave like a Roman aristocrat.
Five Fingers was written by Michael Wilson, who had scripted A Place in the Sun, a tragedy of social
ambition, the year before. It is based in broad outline on the factual memoirs––called Five Fingers: Operation
Cicero––of one of the participants (Moyzisch), and opens with a shocked 1950 House of Commons
demanding to know if those memoirs are true. We then flash back, in wonted Mankiewicz way, to Ankara,
the capital of neutral Turkey in May 1944.
Diello (James Mason) is the Albanian valet of the British Ambassador; he has spent a lifetime
catering to aristocrats and has now glimpsed a way to become one. With blithe cool he takes to
photographing secret documents from the ambassador's safe and selling the film to the German Embassy
nearby for large sums. The British Ambassador (Walter Hampden, the old actor who hands Eve her award)
and the German Ambassador are a matched pair of aristocratic men of the world, more interested in the
diplomatic party circuit than in ideology, and disdainful of the humorless lowborn bureaucrats around
them. The office of the German Ambassador (John Wengraf) reeks of the old Germany, sporting a painting
of Frederick the Great and a bust of the Kaiser; a huge portrait of Queen Mary dominates the office of his
English counterpart. By contrast, a portrait and a stern bust of Hitler loom over the workspace of Moyzisch
(Oscar Karlweis), the oafish attaché who serves as go-between for Diello and the Embassy. Diello, infinitely
wise in the ways of national types, is able, just by smilingly gazing at this bust, to guess the combination to
the room's safe.
When things heat up, the ambassadors yield to matching teams of self-righteous fanatics (Gestapo
and Counter Intelligence) in the search for the elusive "Cicero," as he has been dubbed by the Germans.
When Ambassador von Papen hears that Ribbentrop, the vulgar Nazi Foreign Minister, has chosen "Cicero"
as a codename, he archly remarks his surprise that "Herr Ribbentrop has even heard of Cicero.” Diello, on
the other hand, is delighted and proud to bear the name of "a man of nobility, eloquence, and
dissatisfaction." (Mankiewicz himself must have relished invocation of the verbosely incensed Roman
orator. I note in passing that the real Cicero was put to death by Octavian and Antony.)
Diello is, up to a point, both the Addison and the Eve of Five Fingers. He is given a Gatsbyesque
aria descanting upon the day he, a wretched cabin boy, saw a gentleman in a white dinner jacket upon the
balcony of a villa in Rio: "I swore someday I'd be that man." But he adds to the ambition of Eve the
disillusioned, cynically articulate valuelessness of Addison. Quizzed by the mulishly suspicious Nazis, he
declares his only motive to be "money"; he is neither disgusted with England nor a believer in Germany: "I
am disgusted only with poverty and have faith only in the future of money." (Poor Diello, whom money
itself will twice play false.) Handing the Germans accurate information on the coming D-Day, he exculpates
himself airily: "By informing a man about to be hanged of the size, location, and strength of the rope, you
do not lessen the certainty of his being hanged." Diello is an ideologue only of the senses: he takes to
smoking Havanas, "the finest money can buy,” and later in Rio he is "known for his exquisite taste in wine."
(Mankiewicz's heroes are both opposites and analogues of Lang's: they spend their films not caught in traps
but constructing ways out, only to find a last-minute surprise sprung under their feet.)
Diello shares his Eve/Addison duality with the Countess Anna (Danielle Darrieux), a French
aristocrat broke and hungry and stranded in Ankara by history's vicissitudes. She too is given a
background: " . . . impoverished widow of a pro-German count. . . . She symbolized a world of infinite
beauty and luxury and indulgence." Diello was her husband's valet for years.
Diello and Anna have three scenes together in which a complex sex/control dynamic evolves. In
the first, he offers to set her up in grandeur; she slaps him since "in the manner of an inferior you tried to
buy something you thought you did not merit on your own"––but she accepts. In the second, his
dominance is established by a kiss and by her purring willingness to get him a drink (reversing an earlier
mistress-servant assumption). In the third, he projects their escape to Rio and she smilingly accepts a future
as a submissive Spanish wife to her former inferior. But a close-up reveals her gathering duplicity. Anna is
Addison pretending to be content in an Eve role. She will betray him, of course––for money, and to escape
the "humiliation" of her new role. Characteristic of Mankiewicz is the image of sex in a setting of
domination (albeit shifting) and potential betrayal. These Diello-Anna scenes are the ripest enactment of the
Mankiewicz ethic of class, money, sex, and power.
Paradoxically the Mankiewicz obsessions do not suffer for being filtered through a script by
another hand. True, Kenneth Geist documented in his Mankiewicz biography Pictures Will Talk, the director
made contributions to the screenplay [see appendix to this essay], especially to the Diello-Anna scenes. But
Wilson's cosmopolitan breadth and lapidary worldliness (reportedly, he later worked on the similarly
worldly Lawrence of Arabia under the anonymity of the blacklist) tangily cut the usual Mankiewicz
expansiveness.
Also liberating for the director were the spy genre and the location shooting; getting out of
Hollywood opened the windows of his art. A great deal of Five Fingers is––or smoothly simulates––location
work in Ankara and Istanbul.
The black-and-white cinematography was the work of Norbert Brodine, who began his career in
the 'Teens and became known for his mastery of the quasi-documentary look in such postwar films as The
House on 92nd Street, Kiss of Death, and Boomerang!. Just before Five Fingers, he and James Mason had
collaborated on a portrait of another ambiguous WWII figure, Rommel, in the lugubrious but handsome The
Desert Fox. In his culminating Five Fingers, Brodine uses the sun-baked streets and cafes and trains and
terminals of Turkey not just for atmosphere and pace, but also to set off by contrast the dark doings and, a
bit, to suggest a torpid Orient indifferent to these frantic Westerners. There are scenes in mosques that
drolly accent the German insensitivity to alien cultures (they do not see the use of removing their shoes).
And there is a wonderful night sequence (no doubt a mix of location and studio) where Diello strolls
through a teeming slum to look up at Anna's window. (Here and elsewhere in Five Fingers, one is reminded
that Mankiewicz scripted and longed to film The Alexandria Quartet. But that Ciceronianly prolix work
might have given rein to his vices. Ankara was his Alexandria.) But Brodine's greatest triumphs are the
many daylight interiors, where he heightens and creamily luminizes the dull, even Fox style. It is only just
that the film's hero is himself an ingenious and resourceful photographer.
Two compositional motifs in the Mankiewicz-Brodine setups recur, with supple variation,
throughout the movie. One is the trio of figures: suave authority figures like the ambassadors will be
flanked by grimly opposing viewpoints, or an ironist like Diello will be surrounded by humorless thugs.
The center is always humane and sympathetic. The other is the dialectic of sitting and standing figures.
This reflects an obsession of Diello's; he moves from his valet stance to power sitting, both with Anna and
with the Brits and Nazis, as at Hakim's cafe in Istanbul.
Bernard Herrmann's score decently crosses Fox "house" music with increasing flashes of his
signature excitement––not to mention the lovely French record played by Anna. As for the performers, the
range of embassy types is caught perfectly in Michael Rennie's hardeyed Counter Intelligence agent, in
Wengrafs and Hampden's twin ambassadors, Oscar Karlweis's timid functionary, and Herbert Berghof’s
Gestapo counterpart to Rennie. James Mason's ironically self-undermining poise may never have been
better displayed (certainly A Star Is Born is less economical); Danielle Darrieux's amused, sadly knowing
eroticism gets its finest anglophone showcase here, too. (Both Mason and Darrieux were veteran [Max]
Ophüls players and knew a thing or two about the ambiguities and treacheries of sophistication: he had
done the sublime Caught and the sublimer Reckless Moment; she had done La Ronde and La Plaisir and was
about to embark on the sublimest Madame de . . . . )
The movie ends with three matching gestures of nihilistic rejection. Anna has written Letters to
Two Ambassadors, denouncing Diello to the British as a German spy and to the Germans as a British spy.
DieIlo, having stolen the British one, reads it on a train to Istanbul and shreds it out the window. So much
for love. In Istanbul the Nazis, convinced by Anna's letter that Diello was a British plant all along, toss his
perfectly correct info about the imminent D-Day from the Consulate window (pan to the waterfront where
the British dash after Diello, who has escaped in a rowboat). So much for espionage. Then, in Rio, a whitejacketed Diello, told all his money is counterfeit, flings it from his beautiful terrace, and flings it laughing;
for he has been told, too, that Anna in Switzerland has been similarly duped. So much for money.
These contemptuous tossings echo Eve's snarling dismissal of her Sarah Siddons Award, symbol of
all her strivings; they have something, too, of the despair, if not the beauty, of Alida Valli's final walk in The
Third Man, a movie of the same cultural moment. Interesting to contrast these two films with two 1946
movies about some South American neighbors of Diello, Gilda and Notorious. In both of the earlier works,
redemptive love managed to win by a nose over the circumambient hatreds. But 1946 was close to the war
and to its intense need for meaning. Later films could use the war as backdrop, as source of bitter wit. And
from the perspective of 1990, we can see how valid it was to insist not that the war lacked moral content, but
that national characteristics and the ineradicable hungers of human nature endure.
Oh yes: The safe's combination, like that of half the safes in German offices, was 1-30-33, the day
Hitler came to power. And Diello adds that Hitler's birthday would open the other half.
[Donald Lyons, “All About Cicero,” Film Comment, September-October 1990]
APPENDIX
Screenwriter Michael Wilson vehemently contended, in a 1972 letter, that no more than twenty-five to
thirty lines in Five Fingers were written by Mankiewicz. The charred copy of Wilson's mimeographed
script in Mankiewicz's files, which shows Joe's penciled revisions, proves precisely the opposite of
this contention. Almost none of Wilson's dialogue was used, though the scene-by-scene continuity of
his screenplay was largely retained. The following example illustrates the difference in style between
Wilson's original and Mankiewicz's complete rewrite:
Wilson Version
CICERO: Which reminds me. I am forced to increase the price of future documents.
VON RICHTER: Your price is already outrageous.
CICERO: Let me explain. If the truth be known, I am not a very brave man. The idea of facing a
firing squad does not appeal to me. The more frustrated I become, the more money I want.
It's the only motive force to keep me at work.
VON RICHTER: (sourly) How much more?
CICERO: (musing) Oh––25,ooo pounds per roll.
VON RICHTER: Preposterous. There's a limit to what my government will pay.
CICERO: Do you think so? When every roll of film I sell is worth more than a
division of Gestapo agents. How pennywise can they be?
VON RICHTER: But we don't have an inexhaustible supply of English currency.
Perhaps––if you would accept payment in Reichmarks . . .
CICERO: I have no confidence in the stability of German currency. No, we will stick with English
pounds till the well runs dry.
Mankiewicz Version
VON RICHTER: Then at least satisfy my personal curiosity on one point. Why are you selling us
information?
(Cicero finishes counting the money, puts it aside in a neat stack. He hands von Richter the roll of film.)
CICERO: I thought that was self-evident––for money.
VON RICHTER: But you must have some other motive. Perhaps you share our disgust with British
decadence––or our faith in the future of Germany . . .
CICERO: Colonel von Richter, if I have a disgust for anything, it is poverty. And if I have faith in the
future of anything––it is in the future of money.
VON RICHTER: Then I cannot understand why, on the one hand, you sell us information which will
help us to win the war––and on the other hand, you insist upon being paid in money with
a very dubious future––British pounds . . .
CICERO: (smiles) What makes you think I think Germany will win the war?
VON RICHTER: Apart from all other considerations, apparently you attach little importance to these
documents . . .
CICERO: In the first place, I cannot sell you the ability to make proper use of the information I get for
you. In the second place, by informing a man about to be hanged of the exact size, location,
and strength of the rope, you do not remove either the hangman or the certainty of his
being hanged. (He crosses.)
And now I am sure you will want to rejoin your friends. One week from tonight I shall
have more film for you. (He opens the door.)
Good night.
VON RICHTER: Good night. (He goes out.)
[This analysis asserting the claim for Mankiewicz's uncredited dialogue contributions is from
Kenneth L. Geist, Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Scribners, 1978).]