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  • On Dunn’s The Worlds of Wolf MankowitzBetween Elite and Popular Cultures in Post-War Britain
  • Searle Kochberg
The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz: Between Elite and Popular Cultures in Post-War Britain. By Anthony J. Dunn. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2013. 266 pp., ISBN 978-0-85303-865-8 (hc). US $75.95.

In a recent edition of the New Yorker (December 17, 2012), John Lahr writes a review of the recent revival of Clifford Odets’s 1937 play Golden Boy, on the New York stage. The review can be read as Lahr’s call for the reappraisal of Odets’s position in the canon of twentieth-century American playwrights. Now, in the UK, we have Anthony Dunn’s The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz, which attempts much the same thing for its subject in relation to postwar London writing. Wolf Mankowitz, like Odets, was Jewish, affiliated with the Left, and took a foray—in his case more than a foray—into the world of popular entertainment. From the mid-1950s to early 1960s—the peak of his career—Mankowitz steered a remarkably successful course between art and showbiz. As he put it, he looked “both up and down Piccadilly . . . stopping for material at the slightly heart-warm townships between O’Henry and Damon Runyan in the Far West and Sholem Aleichem in the Far East” (197).

So who was Wolf Mankowitz? For many of his generation, this boy wonder from the “wrong side of the tracks” (namely, the environs of Fashion Street, Commercial Street, and Brick Lane) came to epitomize the London Jewish writer-impresario. In his heyday Mankowitz enjoyed enormous success with his [End Page 223] novellas, plays, films, and TV dramas. Most famous perhaps was Mankowitz’s evocation of a modern-day London shtetl, encompassing both the Jewish East End (The Bespoke Overcoat) and the Jewish West End (Expresso Bongo). All of the regulars were there: the nebbish, the mensch, the shmendrick, the shmuck, the fershtinkener, the gonif, the zaydeh, the shneider, the shiksa. Here was a world of tailors, wrestlers, crooked antique dealers, promoters, strippers—all with heaps of salt beef and pickle. He also wrote the initial draft of the first Bond film, Dr. No (1962), and contributed to the spoof version of Casino Royale (1967).

It is interesting to contrast the writing of Mankowitz with that of another London Jewish writer, one also associated with the Royal Court at the time, Arnold Wesker. Like the prewar Odets, Wesker depicts a Jewish London defined by social realism. Mankowitz belongs to an altogether different tradition—that of the Jewish spieler. This is the narrative world of the parable, the myth, the UK equivalent of the “Borscht Belt” comic writers working on the other side of the Atlantic at the same time. Many of them went on to Hollywood careers, and so did Mankowitz, if not too successfully. Typical of his cross-Atlantic hits was a lifeless adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s The Millionairess (Anthony Asquith, 1960) with Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers.

His lack of success in Hollywood, however, should not detract from his UK success, which was considerable: TV and stage productions with Orson Welles (including a West End production of Moby Dick—Rehearsed), co-productions at the Royal Court (including Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera), a hit screen adaptation of his book, A Kid for Two Farthings (Carol Reed, 1955), an Oscar-winning short film adaptation of his play, The Bespoke Overcoat (Jack Clayton, 1956), and a hit screen adaptation of his musical, Expresso Bongo (Val Guest, 1959).

We are lucky that the key works of this period were all filmed—an indication of the standing of Mankowitz at the time. All epitomize the Mankowitz style: an acerbic yet warm ethnic voice that was easily assimilable in the uncertain, postcolonial days of Britain after the war. In the film version of A Kid for Two Farthings, the pugilistic world of the East End has none of the existential angst found in the boxing milieu of Odets’s prewar Golden Boy. Here the East End becomes a Technicolor wonderland, and the wrestler’s crisis consists of nothing more than winning his fight against the...

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