Joseph L. Mankiewicz – Search & Destroy

I find the camp lines and performances grueling instead of fun. Apparently Katherine Hepburn slapped Mankiewicz on the last day of production.

This is why created this thread, isn't it?

I think the movie's very fashionable. Absolutely love the shot of Liz's spike heels walking the platform above the snake pit.

I'm just amused. As a fan of Ten Commandments-style indulgence, I suppose I should rescreen Cleopatra.

TS: Snakepit scene in S,LS vs. the one in Shock Corridor

I read somewhere that Spencer Tracy and Mankiewicz had to explain Sebastian's character to Kate H, cuz she just didn't get it.

My memory of Cleopatra from "The 4:30 Movie" is that the Rex Harrison half ain't bad.

A Letter to Three Wives is good. (David Bordwell introduced--I'm going to try to get down tomorrow, too, when he's there for Mildred Pierce.) The Jeanne Crain segment is ordinary, but happily it's the shortest. Ann Sothern's dinner party is masterful (except for Douglas's self-righteous speech), and the Linda Darnell/Paul Douglas segment felt very contemporary. (Agree with Kael that he's great--they both are.) And Thelma Ritter's as good here as in Rear Window. Don't know how they ever got Kirk Douglas's penetration joke past the censors.

When I was still in school, we had Mankiewicz in as a guest speaker. He would have been 72 or 73 at the time. It felt like a big deal, but you don't properly appreciate something like that when you're 20.

judging from the clips, I need to see The Honey Pot.

NYFF retro this fall

http://www.filmlinc.com/daily/entry/new-york-film-festival-mankiewicz-retrospective-film-society-2014

Robert Koehler surveys the career -- "Joseph L. Mankiewicz favored sophisticated storytelling over dynamic visuals—so what?":

The characters talk on and on in Cleopatra, although the film has its defenders and is worth debate. Its elephantine physical production mirrors how the characters in the foreground think about their ambitions. Yet they might be discussing Hollywood as much as ancient Rome, and the impossible demands made by that entity—specifically the nightmarish production of this movie, as a sensitive, intelligent man (Mankiewicz’s on-screen proxy being Richard Burton’s Antony) is crushed by forces beyond his control.

Mankiewicz may or may not have intended the parallel in that case, but one explicit autobiographical gesture is Cary Grant’s physician-professor Noah Praetorius in People Will Talk (51), perhaps the oddest movie in the filmmaker’s career. Based on a German play and produced just after the Directors Guild mess, much of the film concerns the witch hunt against the doctor by small-minded colleagues. It’s also full of philosophical asides from Grant’s character on everything from medical practice to modern methods of producing butter. Mankiewicz seems to speak through Dr. Praetorius, perhaps even in his shrugging off a mood as “just my usual twilight melancholy,” a line that typifies Mankiewicz’s propensity to overwrite. And yet one wishes he’d had more shots at that sort of directness. At the end of his life Mankiewicz sounded irritated by his Hollywood career, which clearly did not allow him full expression of his ambitions—or an escape from the prison of wit.

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-typewriter-and-the-camera

has anyone seen his Serling-scripted, nuke-themed Scrooge TV movie?

Sterling Hayden is the Scrooge figure, a wealthy businessman who has become a pitiless warmonger after his son’s death in WWII. He is visited, like Scrooge, by the Ghosts of Christmas Past (Steve Lawrence, who gave Mankiewicz’s favorite performance in the film), Present (Pat Hingle), and Future (Robert Shaw), the last of whom conducts Hayden through a post-nuclear world, inhabited by a band of survivors led by Peter Sellers.

http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2014/films/a-carol-for-another-christmas

People Will Talk (51), perhaps the oddest movie in the filmmaker’s career

This film is quite an odd duck. I'd say more, but that would require spoilers.

"a band of survivors led by Peter Sellers"!!!

Lis "is terribly touching" in SLS? Oh vey

Sellers' character in that Xmas show is called "Imperial Me" and he wears a Pilgrim hat

http://www.petersellersappreciationsociety.com/Pictures/PhotoGallery/CarolForAnotherChristmas/CarolForAnotherChristmas06.jpg

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article.html?id=518186%7C535539

The Serling teleplay is fascinating -- preachy but not awful -- worth seeing once.

Last night I saw The Honey Pot, a fairly typical Old Master inflated mess of the period (like Wilder's Sherlock Holmes, or what Huston did for some of the '60s) with diverting pieces. Not only based on Volpone, the characters reference it constantly... Rex Harrison, unusually animated for his post-Oscar era, is a millionaire with a Venetian palazzo who invites 3 old flames to visit so he can play a prank re inheriting his fortune (or so it seems). Cliff Robertson is game tho miscast, but fortunately young Maggie Smith turns out to be the female lead, as Susan Hayward's nurse.

Rex is basically a heterosexualized Addison DeWitt, and he's in a bedroom clinch with Edie Adams (as a dumb Hollywood star) when he growls, "You're so... basic."

It's on Hulu.

i feel like mankiewicz's late career is riddled with such borderline grotesqueries

boy "mankiewicz" is hard to spell

Dragonwicz

a lot of the films the "old masters" made with the new freedoms of the late 60s and beyond have an element of the grotesque or simply the gauche. e.g. wyler's liberation of l.b. jones.

or, y'know, SKIDOO

they only showed There Was a Crooked Man once, couldn't get to it

Harrison character's one regret in Honey Pot is he never became a ballet dancer, there's a scene of a double whirling around his boudoir to "Dance of the Hours."

Rex is basically a heterosexualized Addison DeWitt, and he's in a bedroom clinch with Edie Adams (as a dumb Hollywood star) when he growls, "You're so... basic."

So, another gay catchphrase coined by Mank. Good job, straight dude!

Is it possible, even conceivable

new book on the brothers Mank:

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6783-january-books

Dragonwyck is quite an auspicious debut, and only 4 years before All About Eve. Gene Tierney at her best, Vincent Price and Walter Huston as well (tho the latter comes and goes).

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that both Tierney and Teresa Wright performed truncated radio performances of the piece around the same time--I can't help thinking of Wright whenever I see Tierney. They look so similar... Wright was a better actress, but Tierney had the glow of a star. Such a shame their work is so limited (Tierney had her issues and Wright did her best work in the theater).