eading this splendid compilation of interviews with the director-producer Joseph Mankiewicz, one theme continually recurs. Mankiewicz is forever convinced that “my kind of filmmaking”—literate, witty, grown-up and filled with sparkling dialogue—is in its death throes. It’s always true to a certain extent, but here is Mankiewicz saying the same thing in 1945 as he does in 1960, 1970 and 1982, and yet his style of filmmaking somehow always manages to endure, if just barely.

Mankiewicz’s career in Hollywood was a long and storied one. He arrived as a teenager in the wake of his older brother Herman, the champion drinker and gambler who somehow managed, between binges and purges, to grind out the masterly screenplay for Citizen Kane (Joseph offers his own take on “Rosebud”; it was the name of Herman’s childhood bicycle, stolen only two days after he received it: “He never got over it”). Joe worked first as a writer (his first Oscar nom came in 1931 when he was 22 years old for adapting the then-popular cartoon strip Skippy). He had ambitions to direct, but found himself trapped as a successful producer at prestige-hungry MGM for most of the 1940s. “You have to learn to crawl before you can walk,” Louis B. Mayer told him. “An inadvertently brilliant description of an MGM producer’s plight,” counters Joe. Eventually, Mankiewicz re-hyphenated himself as a semi-independent director-writer-producer in the relatively sympathetic environs of Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Fox in the late ’40s and ’50s. In 1949-50 he won unprecedented—and still unmatched—back-to-back director-writer Oscars for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. He also won the first DGA Award for Letter and served as the Guild’s president from 1950 to 1951.

The real treat here is that we get to hear Mankiewicz talk—and what a great talker he is. He was long-admired as a wit around the studio commissary writers’ tables for his erudition and combativeness (oh, the mean things he says about Mel Brooks or Hitchcock’s Notorious!). The rich mine of anecdotes from his long service in Hollywood between the end of the silent era and the death of the studio system makes this a welcome addition to the excellent University of Mississippi series of interviews with directors. One might carp at the repetitiveness of certain turns of phrase, tales and opinions honed to perfection over the years. But heavyweight interviewers like Andrew Sarris and Michel Ciment continually draw new and fascinating material from the director who, unconvincingly, once called himself “the oldest whore on the block.”

Anthony Mann
(Wesleyan, 240 pages, $27.95)
By Jeanine Basinger

Basinger breaks down Mann’s career into three distinct phases: his postwar black-and-white work with pioneering film noir cinematographer John Alton; his widescreen Technicolor Westerns with Jimmy Stewart in the 1950s, in which human psychosis plays out against spectacular western landscapes; and his late period epics, including genre highlights such as El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Basinger doesn’t discount the impact of Mann collaborators like Alton or writers Borden Chase and Philip Yordan, but her deep reading of Mann’s body of work discerns a continuity of vision and technique that pulses through his entire career. The script is simply the starting point for Mann; it is usually lighting, composition, framing and other directorial embellishments that make his movies truly distinctive. Basinger explores the constant rearrangement of figures in the frame to delineate power relations among characters; the aggressive use of chiaroscuro to conceal and reveal information and to intensify suspense; and what she calls his “arhythmic editing style.” All these are aspects of Mann’s integrated, coherent and instantly recognizable signature, which never degenerated into mere stylistics. Though his movies look and feel original and powerful, Mann’s artistic choices were always in service of the story.

Alongside the three main periods of the career, Basinger finds room for fascinating oddities like The Tall Target, Men at War and God’s Little Acre, and fascinatingly flawed transitional works like the 1950 oedipal-noir Western The Furies and the 1960 epic-Western Cimarron. She has revisited every movie directed in full or in part by Mann, and her richly detailed and persuasive formal analyses repeatedly yield new and invigorating insights. This is the way all great directors’ careers should be examined, though it’s possible that many of their oeuvres might not stand the pressure as well as Mann’s.

hen we talk about “Independent Hollywood” today, we tend to think of the Sundance generation of the mid-1990s, and forget that independent filmmaking in Hollywood—meaning movies in which creative talent has a controlling stake—enjoys a pedigree stretching back to United Artists in the 1920s. But the term also describes a seminal moment in Hollywood history—the emergence of talent-turned-producer after World War II. This was spurred by the U.S. Justice Department’s 1948 antitrust suit against the studios’ production-distribution-exhibition monopoly. That development, along with falling revenues, the rise of TV and the super-agency MCA, saw the studios divesting themselves of hundreds of formerly indentured players and in-house directors. The smart ones founded their own production companies and many—Stewart, Lancaster, Cagney, Douglas, Kazan, Wilder, Hitchcock, Huston, Preminger and Mankiewicz, among others—flourished and got rich, or richer, as independents.

Denise Mann’s meticulously researched critical history digs deeply into the long prelude to this sea change. It was generally deemed to have begun after Stewart’s company won profit-participation on Winchester ’73 in 1950. Eventually, the rise of independents transformed Hollywood, both financially and artistically, planting a long fuse that would detonate spectacularly in the Hollywood Renaissance of the early ’70s. Mann examines the list of great American movies made in spite of, rather than thanks to, the studios, and it is a long and impressive one. It includes landmark liberal movies by the greatest filmmakers of the period: Kiss Me Deadly, On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd, Touch of Evil, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Sweet Smell of Success and The Manchurian Candidate.

Mann deftly sorts out a complicated political and artistic saga, first concentrating broadly on the business side and the postwar political environment in Hollywood. She then analyzes emblematic indies to trace how the films reflect the often free-thinking and sometimes openly dissident circumstances in which they were conceived and created. While Mann’s academic style may prove a bit of a challenge at times for the general reader, she never falls into jargonese, and offers one of the best available accounts of this transformative period in modern moviemaking.