CTVA 319 Readings: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Dr. John Schultheiss
Department of Cinema and Television Arts
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, September-October 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 Century-Fox 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 re-imagined 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, self-reliant, 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 inmedias 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 sister-in-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 Oscar-winning 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.