Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews (review)

This volume from the University Press of Mississippi series Conversations with Filmmakers provides valuable insights into the classical Hollywood cinema of the 1940s and 1950s through the eyes of writer, producer, and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Although often overlooked by contemporary film scholars and critics, Mankiewicz won consecutive Academy Awards in 1949 and 1950 for Best Screenplay and Best Direction for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve.

Mankiewicz was somewhat of an iconoclast who lamented the Hollywood film industry's abandonment of sophisticated drama and dialogue in favor of the special effects and action pictures of the 1970s. Brian Dauth, a Brooklyn-based writer whose work is published in Senses of the Cinema, provides readers with ten rare interviews from the reclusive filmmaker; most of them from the early 1970s as the pipe-smoking Mankiewicz reflected upon Hollywood and his career from the sanctuary of his rural Westchester County, New York home.

Growing up in an academic Jewish New City family, Mankiewicz initially considered a career in science following his graduation from Columbia University in 1928. Instead, he went to Germany where he worked as a journalist before finding employment in the German film industry. In 1929, he left Germany for Hollywood at the insistence of his brother, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, whose later writing credits included Citizen Kane (1941). Through the intervention of his brother, Mankiewicz secured a position as a writer for Paramount, earning an Academy Award nomination for his 1931 screenplay adaptation, Skippy. Two years later, Mankiewicz joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer where he produced such classic films as The Philadelphia Story (1941).

Wanting to make his mark as a director, Mankiewicz moved to Twentieth Century-Fox in 1943. His distinguished directing career includes A Letter to Three Wives (1949), No Way Out (1950), All About Eve (1950), Julius Caesar (1955), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955), The Quiet American (1958), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), and Cleopatra (1963). In 1972, Mankiewicz received a Best Director Oscar nomination for his final film, Sleuth, featuring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine.

As a filmmaker, Mankiewicz often directed his own screenplays, perceiving that the direction of the screenplay was simply completing the writer's work. Mankiewicz proclaimed, "The inescapable fact is that a properly written screenplay has in effect already been directed—in his script, by the trained screenwriter who has translated the visual and verbal concept of his film to descriptive movement, sound and spoken word" (89). The respect accorded characterization and language by Mankiewicz is apparent in his carefully crafted screenplays and film direction.

In fact, Mankiewicz often expressed contempt for the Hollywood scene and considered departing the film capitol for the Broadway stage. While Mankiewicz never made this transition, his respect for the stage was most evident in his detailed 1972 interview with Gary Carey focusing upon All About Eve. Bemoaning that Hollywood never achieved Mankiewicz's vision that American film could become an adjunct to the theater, the filmmaker complained that Hollywood reduced drama to the simplicity of "black hats and white hats." Mankiewicz perceived himself as stage critic Addison Dewitt who provides both a witty and trenchant commentary on the characters and human condition revealed through All About Eve. Similar to Addison, Mankiewicz found women more interesting than men. For example, Mankiewicz was fascinated with the character of Margo Channing (Bette Davis) as the leading lady of the stage struggled with approaching age forty.

On the other hand, Mankiewicz perceived Karen Richards (Celeste Holm), who is betrayed by her playwright husband, as his most original charactering, observing, "I endowed Karen with intelligence and taste because to the extent that they possess those virtues, the disquietudes and frustrations of women become even more complex—and fascinating. And because the well-bred and well spoken have become a dwindling minority in a society in which, too often, witless rudeness passes as a badge of merit" (73).

Mankiewicz laments that such sophisticated characters were increasingly sacrificed to Hollywood's fixation upon technological wizardry and the lowest common denominator...