Discover Top Posts Tagged with #herman mankiewicz

Remembering Herman J. Mankiewicz on the anniversary of his death (March 5, 1953), Oscar-winning screenwriter and playwright.

#herman mankiewicz #classic hollywood #screenwriting

Mank (2020)

RKO 281 (1999) dir. Benjamin Ross

Liev Schreiber as Orson Welles James Cromwell as William Randolph Hearst John Malkovich as Herman Mankiewicz Roy Scheider as George Schaefer Melanie Griffith as Marion Davies

I know Welles identified with Mercury, but in retrospect it's hard not to see him as an Icarus figure, flying too high on his early talent and never quite recovering from a case of singed wings. When I was a kid, he was a messy old man, a figure of fun shambling drunkenly through commercials and talk shows that paid the bills while his independent projects languished in limbo. But, raised as I was on old movies, I always felt for the ambitious and disappointed young man on the inside.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the possible new cut of his Don Quixote. I've seen just enough of the Jess Franco cut to be disappointed in it, but Jess Franco is… Jess Franco, and in my mind that's kind of a synonym for uneven. I've loved some of his movies and found others unwatchable.

I guess we'll wait and see!

May 1941. Eight decades on, the deification of CITIZEN KANE as "the greatest movie of all time" is doing it no great favors, at least in terms of persuading people to actually watch it. The title suggests a ponderous art film that will feel like homework, which some of its fans try to counter by claiming that its moody deep-focus cinematography and Bernard Hermann score make it some kind of early film noir. Neither of those things is true: CITIZEN KANE is essentially an impish pastiche of the rise-and-fall-of-the-great-man variety of Hollywood biopics, dressed up with (and held together by) a series of shameless narrative contrivances, some memorably witty dialogue, and as many inventive cinematic gimmicks as Welles could squeeze into the two-hour running time. It is, like the radio shows Welles and his Mercury Theatre company had been doing for about two and a half years beforehand, aggressively middlebrow: As Welles himself later admitted, the story really isn't that deep, but it gives the impression of depth, just as some of the clever framing devices create the illusion of a bigger cast and larger budget.

If you take it seriously, KANE, like a lot of later Welles films, is fun for a while and becomes rather dour toward the end, but taking it seriously is a mistake, and the dourness is itself a contrivance. This is a story about an old man's tragic regrets … as imagined by a 25-year-old in a bald cap and padded suit who'd made his name on the legitimate stage, where no death scene is too final to prevent a star from taking his bows after the curtain falls. It's a game, like a cat losing its mind chasing down and vanquishing a new catnip mouse, and the finale, where the plot's central contrivance comes full circle, has that same tail-in-the-air sense of triumph.