NEWS FLASH!!!: Alias Nick Beal (1949) is finally available on a legitimate, non-bootleg Blu-ray. It’s from Kino Lorber, which has presumably worked something out with Universal. Universal owns the pre-1950 Paramount library, but it seems that unless a Paramount picture stars either the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields, there’s scant interest at Universal in issuing a DVD. That may be changing; maybe it takes someone like the gang at Kino Lorber to offer to do all the work (and pay a sufficient fee) to get Universal to shake loose. On the other hand, I found a suggestion that story-rights issues had kept Beal (and another 1949 Paramount, The Great Gatsby with Alan Ladd) off the market, but I wasn’t able to confirm or clarify that. Whatever the backstory, the main thing is we’ve got it now, finally, in North America; you can order it here at Kino Lorber or here at Amazon. (Be warned: The Amazon page reprints KL’s description, which garbles the plot. Best not to read either one; just click “Add to Cart” and take it from there.) Anyone within reach of Cinedrome must not hesitate, but order their copy of Alias Nick Beal forthwith. If that peremptory order is not enough, I’m republishing my 2011 post on this John Farrow/Jonathan Latimer masterpiece.

When I posted on Beal ten years ago, the picture had gone from running two or three times a year on local Late Late Shows in the 1970s to virtually vanishing from the face of the earth. The last legal showing of it I was aware of was on The Movie Channel in 1990 — which I fortunately had the foresight to record on VHS and later transfer to DVD. That disc was the source of the frame-caps I included. I may replace those illustrations when I get my new disc; we’ll see. For now, read on…

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The Paramount mountain dissolves to a slate-colored sky pouring a torrential, whistling rain, riven by claws of lightning and rumbling thunder. There’s a crashing fanfare from composer Franz Waxman that sounds magisterial, commanding and insinuating all at once, then descends into a tortured, frantic violin scherzo. Next the names of the three above-the-title stars — Ray Milland, Audrey Totter, Thomas Mitchell — then the title itself. Alias Nick Beal is under way.

Alias Nick Beal is another “supernatural noir“, the subgenre I mentioned in my post on Night Has a Thousand Eyes. It may be the only other example. Of all the movies with supernatural plots, I can’t think of any but those two that dressed their stories so fully in the trappings of film noir. (If you know of any, please speak up; I’ll gladly kick myself for not having thought of them first.) 

Beal came hot on the heels of Night Has a Thousand Eyes for director John Farrow, writer Jonathan Latimer and producer Endre Bohem — so close, in fact (the pictures were released less than five months apart), that I have to believe Beal was being prepared while Night was shooting, and being shot while Night was being readied for release. Without access to Paramount’s detailed records I can’t confirm that, but the two movies are simply too close a match, variations on a theme of frail little humans trapped in a web of which they can see only the dark and shadowy outline. The difference between them — the variation — is this: Night Has a Thousand Eyes speaks of sinister and mysterious forces beyond our understanding; in Alias Nick Beal the sinister mystery is entirely comprehensible, and it has a name — most of us were raised on childhood tales of it — but as adults, our belief in our own sophistication blinds us, makes us willfully refuse to see it until it’s too late.

The screenplay for Alias Nick Beal was by Jonathan Latimer, from an original story by Mindret Lord. Lord’s name isn’t a familiar one even to movie-trivia buffs; he is sometimes misidentified as “Mildred”. In fact, he was born Mindred Loeb in Chicago in 1903. His early years haven’t left much trace in the permanent record, but by the late 1920s he was an aspiring writer and had embarked on a long affair with the opera singer Marguerite Namara, 15 years his senior.

 

In 1934 Lord met an old flame of Namara’s, tenor Hardesty Johnson, and his wife Isabel, daughter of Hamlin Garland, a popular early-20th century writer whose fame would pretty much die with him in 1940. Isabel had ambitions to be a writer like her father, so she and Lord had something in common; by this time he had begun selling stories to the pulps, detective fiction to magazines like Black Mask and tales of horror and the supernatural to Weird Tales and the like (“pot boiling” he called it), and he mentored Isabel on her own writing. They began an affair that eventually finished off his liaison with Marguerite and her marriage to Hardesty. Lord and Isabel were married on December 21, 1936.

Mindret and Isabel collaborated (as “Garland Lord”) on several mystery novels while he continued to boil pots for the pulps; he never really broke into the “slicks”, as they were called, though he did eventually get four short-short stories (fictional anecdotes, really) into The New Yorker in 1942 and ’43. By then he had contributed some sketches to New Faces of 1936 on Broadway, done some script doctoring for a wealthy Park Avenue wannabe-playwright, and picked up work writing for sundry radio series.

 

This got him a foothold in Hollywood (sort of), writing for independent producer W. Lee Wilder (Billy’s older, far less talented brother), who released his movies through Poverty Row’s Republic Pictures. Lord began drinking heavily, his marriage fell apart, he had an affair — though in what order, and which caused what, is anybody’s guess. In 1948 and ’49 he sold two stories to Paramount which became The Sainted Sisters (adapted by Lord from a play by Elisa Bialk and Alden Nash) and Nick Beal respectively. He wrote for a few second-string syndicated series in the early years of television, one last C-picture for Wilder, and finally, the script for The Virgin Queen (1955) with Bette Davis as Elizabeth I and Richard Todd as Sir Walter Raleigh. Near the end of that year, Lord committed suicide at 52. It’s not hard to imagine why — his writing career had never really gone anywhere, and he died one day after what would have been his wedding anniversary — but if anybody knows the real reason, or even how he did it, they didn’t leave the information lying around where I could find it.

 

Jonathan Latimer, who turned Lord’s story for Beal into a screenplay, was also born in Chicago and wrote for the detective pulps in the ’30s, but he was another case entirely — a more successful career, a longer life, and death from natural causes at 76 in 1983. Latimer started out as a crime reporter for the Chicago Herald Examiner — and later for the Tribune — where he became personally acquainted with Al Capone, Bugs Moran, and other Chicago underworld celebrities. In the mid-’30s he turned to fiction with a series of hardboiled, semi-comic mysteries featuring private eye Bill Crane.

 

Latimer branched out into non-crime fiction and non-series mysteries. One of the latter, Solomon’s Vineyard (1941) was so violent and sexy it came out only in England; it wasn’t published in the U.S. until 1950 (as The Fifth Grave), and then it was heavily expurgated (Latimer’s original text finally appeared in the States in 1982). It’s a good solid mystery that doesn’t waste a word, but it is violent, with at least a dozen killings (only about half of them offstage), and a surprising amount of hot and kinky sex, especially for 1941. It also has one of the greatest I-dare-you-to-stop-reading opening lines in the history of pulp fiction: “From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she’d be good in bed.”

 

At a time when The Thin Man had spearheaded a vogue for comedy/mysteries, Universal bought three of Latimer’s Bill Crane books for a short-lived series starring Preston Foster: The Westland Case (from Headed for a Hearse) in 1937 and two more the following year, The Lady in the Morgue and The Last Warning (from The Dead Don’t Care). Those scripts were written by others, but in 1940 Latimer tried his own hand at screenwriting, first contributing the story for Phantom Raiders (with Walter Pidgeon as detective Nick Carter), then in 1941 co-writing the script for Topper Returns.

 

Like many newspapermen accustomed to deadlines, Latimer worked well in Hollywood, and he got some assignments that have aged gracefully among movie lovers: the 1942 remake of The Glass Key with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake; They Won’t Believe Me (’47) with Susan Hayward, Robert Young and Jane Greer; and The Big Clock (’48) with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton. The Big Clock was directed by John Farrow, and Latimer reunited with him for Night Has a Thousand Eyes — then, in ’49, with both Farrow and Milland for Alias Nick Beal. In fact, Latimer worked with Farrow more than with any other director (and Farrow more with him than with any other writer), ten pictures in nine years, and the titles would be among the best on both men’s résumés — there were also Plunder of the Sun, Botany Bay and Back from Eternity.

Like Lord, Latimer also got into television, but at the other end of the food chain, writing for important network shows: Hong Kong, Checkmate, Markham (Ray Milland’s one-season half-hour crime series), and a whopping 31 episodes for the original Perry Mason — that last gig was as high as a writer could go in early-’60s TV. Latimer’s last credit was another top-of-the-heap assignment: a 1972 episode of Columbo guest-starring his old friend Milland.

Alias Nick Beal is arguably the best thing Jonathan Latimer ever wrote, and it’s certainly the absolute pinnacle of Mindret Lord’s rather lackluster career. It takes place in an unnamed big city, one that closely resembles Lord and Latimer’s native Chicago: corrupt, crime-ridden, and ruled by oily political boss Frankie Faulkner (Fred Clark), so secure and arrogant that he doesn’t even bother to conceal his scheming or veil his threats.

However, Faulkner may have met his match in district attorney Joseph Foster (Thomas Mitchell), a paragon of legal rectitude and civic virtue — in his spare time he helps his friend Rev. Garfield (George Macready) manage an after-school recreation program for boys at risk of delinquency. Foster is prosecuting Faulkner’s underling Hanson on corruption and racketeering charges, hoping to bring down Faulkner’s organization brick by brick. But Faulkner isn’t that easily dismantled; through crocodile tears he informs the prosecutor that Hanson’s books, which Foster had subpoenaed only that morning, were destroyed in a fire the night before. Foster is stymied, checkmated; he had been careful to make it appear that he wouldn’t seek the books, then had sprung his subpoena at the last moment, just to forestall something like this. But Faulkner was a step ahead of him. Foster’s got to nail Hanson if he wants to clean up the city, and there’s nothing he won’t do to get him.

 

That’s when Foster receives a cryptic summons to a dingy dive down by the waterfront: “If you want to nail Hanson, drop around the China Coast at eight tonight.” The man he meets that night (Ray Milland) is clean-shaven and dapper, impeccably groomed and dressed, cutting a figure entirely at odds with the squalid little tavern where Foster finds him. His card reads simply: “Nicholas Beal, Agent”. “Agent for what?” asks Foster. Beal grins slightly. “That depends. Possibly for you.”

 

Beal takes Foster to a nearby building, a rundown, darkened cannery where he presents Foster with the evidence he had sought that very morning — Hanson’s books, saved from the flames after all. Foster hesitates. He can’t take them, he says; he has no warrant. I thought you wanted Hanson, Beal says; here’s your chance. Foster continues to peruse the books. He doesn’t speak but we can imagine his thoughts: Here they are, can I take the chance on losing them again? I can always get a warrant tomorrow. When he looks up, Beal is gone.

Foster decides. He tucks the books under his arm, puts out the light, and makes his way out of the cannery by the beam of a flashlight Beal left behind. In the pitch dark of the outer room, his light startles a rat on a shelf. The rat squeaks plaintively and stares at Foster, eye to eye. We can almost read the rat’s mind, as clearly as if he were speaking: Welcome to my world.

 

Foster gets his conviction and becomes a hero in the press. He’s still vaguely troubled about his hocus-pocus with the warrant, but shrugs it off. Still, Beal isn’t finished with him. No sooner do representatives of the state’s Independent Party arrive, asking if Foster will allow his name to be placed in nomination for governor, than Beal shows up in his study to collect for services already rendered. But what seems like a sly piece of blackmail takes an odd turn when Beal offers to contribute to his political campaign; he already knows about the overtures from the Independent Party (“I hear things.”).

That night, on the foggy boardwalk outside the China Coast, Beal takes the next step in whatever scheme he has afoot. A down-and-out slattern (Audrey Totter) gives him a come-on, but is taken aback when he knows her name, Donna Allen. He knows her history, too: a couple of years of college, ambitions to be an actress, then seduced and abandoned by an actor she called “Boysey” — who turned out to be married. They fought, he fell down a flight of stairs. “An accident, they said.” How do you know about Boysey, she asks; you a friend of his? “I met him once.”

 

 

Beal leads her to an expensive penthouse apartment, smart and stylish but somehow foreboding and unsettling, with Daliesque frescoes painted on the walls. It’s hers, he says, along with a wardrobe of silks and sables, diamonds and sapphires. She tries to bolt, but the delivery boy is at the door, and everything is just too tempting — and it all has her name on it. “What do I gotta do, murder?” “Just the opposite,” says Beal, “reform work. In a boys’ club.”

 

In the next scene Donna has made herself indispensable, organizing the boys’ club office and writing large checks for donations — and coyly flirting with Foster. It’s a scene she’s played often since her days with Boysey, but usually only for cheap drinks, and never with such lavish sets and costumes. Men are all alike, right? Boysey was married and here’s another one; this time she’s wised up, and if Beal wants her to tickle his vanity she’ll play along. Why should she care? 

 

As time goes on Donna will slowly realize that neither Foster nor Beal is the kind of man she thought he was. Neither she nor Foster can see what we see: that Beal is slowly, carefully drawing his net around them both. Every step, beginning with Foster’s compromise on the warrant and Donna’s following Beal from the waterfront to that apartment, calls for just a slight stretch of the conscience, a tiny little disregard of misgivings, moving them off true center by degrees they simply don’t notice.

 

We see other things the characters don’t. Beal’s plans involve conspiracy, duplicity, bribery, double-dealing, seduction and murder. Things come to a head as Beal prepares to spring his trap. He shows up at Donna’s apartment, telling her that Foster is on his way after a fight with his wife. Beal tells her how the conversation will go — what she’s to say, what Foster will answer, what she’s to say to that. She sneers at the melodrama; who would ever spout those cornball lines? Never mind, he says, just remember your part.

 

When Foster arrives their talk runs more or less as Beal said it would. Then, hearing her cue and hardly knowing what to expect, Donna segues into the words Beal gave her — and so does Foster. With growing horror, she tries to stop things, and her words take on a different, more frightened meaning — but they’re still Beal’s words! Try as she might, she can’t not say what Beal told her to. It’s a brilliantly written scene, and brilliantly played by Audrey Totter, the finest five minutes in her career.

 

Donna Allen becomes the first to sense the truth: Nicholas Beal isn’t just some slimy, amoral political operative. He is, in literal fact, the Devil Himself.

 

I’m not spoiling anything here; this isn’t a please-don’t-reveal-the-ending mystery. We’ve tipped to this long before Foster or Donna or Rev. Garfield. Beal knows things before they happen. He can’t stand to be touched. He refuses to read from the Bible, or even touch it. He cold-shoulders Rev. Garfield, who can’t quite place where he’s seen Beal’s face before. (“Did anyone ever paint your portrait?” “Yes, Rembrandt in 1655.”) The beauty of Alias Nick Beal isn’t that Beal’s character is revealed to us in a sudden, shocking whoa-didn’t-see-that-coming revelation. It’s that we can easily believe that the other characters can’t see him for what he is. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, they see but they do not observe. We’re sitting watching a movie, but they’re living their lives; after all, this is the 20th century, and things like that just don’t happen, do they? But as Rev. Garfield finally says, “Maybe the Devil knows it’s the 20th century too, Joseph.”

 

Foster passes control of his soul to Beal by increments, one step at a time. The first step is both the smallest and the biggest, because once he’s started it gets harder to turn back, easier to go on, until finally he stands bewildered, unable to recognize himself. How did I get here?, he wonders. In a moment of self-knowledge, he realizes: “It’s not Beal, it’s me.”

 

Naturally, the mainspring of Alias Nick Beal must be Ray Milland’s performance, and he’s nothing short of superb. His Beal is smooth, quiet, confident, glib. Nothing ruffles him. But don’t try to touch him. “I don’t like to be touched.” He says it simply, almost apologetic, but his meaning is clear: you won’t like what happens when you do something Nick Beal doesn’t like. When Beal once flares in anger, it’s over in an instant and his calm demeanor returns, but the moment is unnerving; though his eyes are angry slits in that moment, we can almost see the fires of Hell banked behind them.

 

Milland won a well-deserved Oscar for his tour de force in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, but he’s even better here — more subdued, certainly, his face often registering only the slightest movement of an eyebrow, a cheek muscle, the corner of his mouth. He’s the master puppeteer with no wasted motion, supremely in control, confident that his puppets will never feel the strings. Milland worked four times with director Farrow (not incidentally, all but one of them written by Jonathan Latimer), and they were an excellent match, never more so than here.

Alias Nick Beal is superbly directed, too, by the underrated Farrow, whose name is familiar now thanks more to his daughter Mia and grandson Ronan’s careers than to his own. He was Australian-born in 1904, naturalized American in 1947, twice Oscar-nominated (1942 for directing Wake Island; 1956 for co-writing Around the World in 80 Days, which he won). He was also something of a polymath — author of plays, novels, short stories, a Tahitian-English dictionary and biographies of Thomas More and Father Damien. Besides the Oscar, he was also awarded an honorary Commander of the British Empire (by Queen Elizabeth II) and a Knighthood of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre (by Pope Pius XI). In Nick Beal his hand is firm but not heavy, and he doesn’t overplay it. Scenes move sinuously from one to the next (the black fog of the waterfront becomes the back of Foster’s suit as he steps away from the camera in his study), and the story moves with the slithery grace of a serpent.

 

Notice too the performances of minor characters — Donna’s maid (Theresa Harris), a railroad depot bartender (Sid Tomack), the grizzled denizens of the China Coast. Farrow is a director who tends to the details. After all, isn’t that where the Devil is?

 

The phrase “banality of evil” was years in the future when Alias Nick Beal came out, but the theme is on display here. The banality of evil, but also its seductiveness, and the good intentions that pave the road to Hell. Above all, the tenacity of evil. You may vanquish the Devil, but he won’t give up; he’ll be back, and he’s patient. Beal tells us as much when he and Foster overhear a sidewalk Salvation Army convert’s testimony: “Glory be! I’ve wrestled the Devil and thrown him. I’ve pinned his shoulders to the mat…” Beal turns ironically to Foster. “I wonder if he knows it’s two falls out of three.”

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When I wrote about Alias Nick Beal in 2011, it was buried deep in the Universal vault, available only in a gray-market transfer from Loving the Classics.com (whose customer service, I regret to say, is not what it used to be). In the intervening years it’s been poking up from time to time, like a hibernating bear checking out the spring weather — showings on Turner Classic Movies, DVD releases in Europe and Australia. But now our Mr. Beal has come home where he belongs, so hurry over to Kino Lorber or Amazon and grab your copy; as I said about Henry Hathaway’s Down to the Sea in Ships, this is one of the best movies you never heard of.

Now — if only somebody would bring out a Region 1 disc of Night Has a Thousand Eyes. That one’s available in Europe too. Why not here? How about it, Kino Lorber?

As a rule, Cinedrome doesn’t concern itself with the contemporary movie scene, or with any movie made after, say, 1964 or so (that being the year to which I more or less arbitrarily date the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age). But rules are for breaking, after all, and I last broke that one in February 2019, when I wrote that Mary Poppins Returns was manifestly the best and most enduring movie of 2018 (when I bought the Blu-ray in early ’19, I told the twenty-something Target clerk who rang it up, “It’s the only movie from last year that your great-grandchildren will know.”) I used that observation to segue into a discussion of the long shadow of Walt Disney. My original plan was to follow up with a second post about the contentious relationship between author P.L. Travers and Disney’s Bill Walsh, Don Da Gradi and the Sherman Brothers in crafting the script, with possibly a sidebar discussion of 2013’s bucket of enjoyable hogwash Saving Mr. Banks, which purported to tell the same story. But in reading up on it, I found the querulous, intransigent Ms. Travers such churlish and unpleasant company that I dropped the idea early on, and that follow-up post (“Mary Poppins: Enter the Dragon”) never materialized. 

Well, that was then, this is now, and I’m breaking that rule again to discuss another contemporary movie and another long shadow. The movie is Mank, directed by David Fincher from a script by his father Jack, and the shadow belongs to Citizen Kane (1941). The younger Fincher appears to have undertaken Mank as a tribute to his father, who died in 2003 (the movie is dedicated to his memory). Besides that, it fits into the intermittent vogue for making movies about the making of movies — that is, about the making of specific movies. It’s a sub-genre that dates back at least as far as 1980’s TV movie The Scarlett O’Hara War, in which 55-year-old Tony Curtis played the 35-year-old David O. Selznick beating the bushes to find a leading lady for Gone With the Wind. The vogue has cropped up from time to time ever since; examples include the aforementioned Saving Mr. Banks and 2012’s Hitchcock, about the making of Psycho. Even Citizen Kane‘s production has been done before, in RKO 281 (1999), with Liev Schreiber as Orson Welles and James Cromwell as William Randolph Hearst.

Mank covers ground similar to RKO 281, but concentrating not on Welles (played by Tom Burke as a drive-by cameo) but on co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman). In the spring of 1940, after hashing out with Welles a rough outline of what would become Citizen Kane, Mankiewicz was dispatched to a distraction-free exile in Victorville, in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert, to crank out a first draft. He was encased in a half-body cast after thrice-breaking his leg in September ’39 in an auto accident en route to New York. He had just been fired from MGM and was headed east to beg work from friends, having burned too many bridges in Hollywood; his convalescence put the kibosh on that, but it led to the job with Welles.

Accompanying Mankiewicz to Victorville was a German nurse (named “Fräulein Frieda” in Mank and played by Monika Grossman); an English secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), whose last name would be used for Charles Foster Kane’s second wife; and Welles’s former producer John Houseman (Sam Troughton), who had had a violent falling-out with the Boy Genius but was coaxed back for this assignment at Mankiewicz’s request. Mank covers the twelve weeks the group spent writing, editing, and (in Mankiewicz’s case) recuperating in Victorville, with flashbacks to Herman’s feckless, self-destructive career in Hollywood to that time. 

As luck would have it, the theatrical-and-streaming release of Mank followed close on the heels of my reading Sydney Ladensohn Stern’s definitive dual biography The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics. Ms. Stern’s subject, of course, is not only Herman J. Mankiewicz but his kid brother Joseph L., their literary ambitions and cinematic achievements. Both spent their lives hungry for the approval of their college professor father, who always seemed to feel his sons were wasting their abilities by working in movies. She makes a convincing case that Herman’s accomplishments arguably surpassed those of “Pop”, and that Joe’s undeniably surpassed them both, yet neither quite managed (if only in their own eyes) to live up to Pop’s expectations.

The Brothers Mankiewicz was published just over a year ago, much too late for Ms. Stern’s research and insights to have benefited Fincher père when he wrote Mank, or Fincher fils when he filmed it, but in plenty of time to pique our interest in their movie — at least it piqued mine — and to let us compare it with the historical record.

The impetus for this post was an email from my friend Jean in Spokane, Washington, who asked me what I thought of it. She said she had a “fairly middle of the road reaction to it overall”; she “did find it a bit long” but was fascinated by “the way it presents the characters — the Mankiewiczes, Mayer, Thalberg, Hearst et al.” and was particularly impressed by Amanda Seyfried’s performance as Marion Davies. She also spoke well of Tom Burke as Welles. I told her that no, I hadn’t seen Mank yet, but I was looking forward to it, especially now that I’d read Sydney Stern’s book — twice: once to myself, then again to my uncle.

Speaking of people playing Orson Welles in movies [I wrote her], have you by any chance seen Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008)? I urge you to give it a look; it’s a modest masterpiece. It’s based on a 2003 novel by Robert Kaplow; Zac Efron plays this high school kid in 1937 who stumbles into a sort of internship with the Mercury Theatre and works on Orson Welles’s modern-dress Fascist-themed production of Julius Caesar. Welles is played by one Christian McKay, and he’s absolutely uncanny. Should have won an Academy Award, but like most people who deserve Oscars, he wasn’t even nominated; besides, it was 2008, and that was the year they decided to give it to Heath Ledger for being dead. The movie is a brilliant portrait of Welles at a time when his career was still rocketing upward, with the sky seemingly the limit, and Welles himself was like an unstoppable force of nature, by turns inspiring and insufferable, but always Herculean and awe-inspiring. Also, it’s probably as close as we’ll ever get to feeling the impact of that Caesar (scenes from which were, I understand, painstakingly researched and recreated). It’s also brilliantly cast; McKay is actually just first among equals. This is all the more impressive in that there are only three major characters who are fictitious, played by Efron, Claire Danes and Zoe Kazan. Just about everybody else in the cast is not only historical, but familiar from countless movies – Joseph Cotten, Martin Gabel, John Houseman, John Hoyt, Norman Lloyd, George Coulouris, Les Tremayne. All of them perfect, especially a fellow named James Tupper as Joseph Cotten – I mean, how would you go about even looking for the ideal Joseph Cotten? So kudos to Lucy Bevan, the casting director (casting directors are often unsung heroes of movies, and never more so than here). (And by the way, in case you didn’t notice, dear old Norman Lloyd is still with us, bless his heart, having turned 106 exactly one month ago; continued long life to him, say I.) (UPDATE 6/20/21: Norman Lloyd passed away on May 11, 2021 at age 106.)

And so it was, with the memory of Me and Orson Welles fairly fresh in my mind, that I sat down a couple of nights later to watch Mank on Netflix. What follows it what I wrote to Jean a few days after that.

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Hi Jean —

I watched Mank the other night, and I’ve spent the last couple of days mulling over what to tell you about it, and I finally decided what the hell, I might as well cut to the chase.

I detested it. I found it to be a pompous, overstuffed, bloviating gasbag of a movie, a comically dumb-ass parade of falsehoods great and small. I’ll start with the great ones – which, paradoxically, are the least important. By “great” I mean the movie as a chronicle of the writing of Citizen Kane. Bullcrap from first frame to last. I hardly know where to begin with its tin-eared idiocies, but a few more-or-less random thoughts:

Marion Davies went to her grave insisting that she never saw Citizen Kane, and while I’m not sure I believe that, it was her story and she stuck to it to the end. In any case, the idea that she would have driven out to Victorville to sit on the porch critiquing the fine points of Mankiewicz’s script before shooting even started is just plain stupid.

Also, somewhere along the line the movie goes off onto a completely irrelevant tangent about Upton Sinclair’s 1934 campaign for governor of California, and the fake newsreels MGM made to undermine him. (This may be why you found it “a bit long”; cutting this wild goose chase could have saved half an hour to 45 minutes.) Herman Mankiewicz had nothing to do with any of that, and none of that had anything to do with writing Citizen Kane. I don’t know why it was even there (honestly, by that time my attention had already begun to wander), but it appeared to me that the movie was suggesting that Mankiewicz somehow undertook Kane as revenge against Hearst for spearheading the torpedoing of Sinclair’s campaign, and for helping drive Mankiewicz’s pal Shelly Metcalf to suicide out of shame over his part in it. Bollocks, bollocks, and bollocks. To begin with, “Shelly Metcalf” never existed, and nobody in Hollywood cared that Upton Sinclair lost the election or that MGM’s “newsreels” had anything to do with it. Certainly nobody killed themselves out of guilt over it — that’s a daydream of 21st century leftists.

At one point Mankiewicz tells Marion Davies, in one of their soulful moonlight chats on the grounds at San Simeon (itself a silly invention), that L.B. Mayer loathes Sinclair because Sinclair wrote that he “took a bribe to look the other way so a rival could buy MGM.” Another crock. The movie doesn’t say who this “rival” was, but it may be a reference to William Fox, who in the late 1920s did indeed embark on a project to buy every studio in Hollywood, intending to monopolize the business. (Adolph Zukor at Paramount had tried something similar in the late 1910s, and Thomas Edison before him. Monopoly-building has always been a tempting pastime in the movie business, and such efforts continue to this day.) Fox started by aiming big and, yes, he did try to buy MGM. He came pretty close, too — but far from looking the other way, Mayer (and Thalberg) fought doggedly against the deal. Almost to no avail; Fox came very near to pulling it off. Then, in the summer of 1929, Fox was in a horrible automobile accident that damn near killed him. He was months recuperating, and just as he was getting up and around again, the stock market crashed, taking all his credit with it. Fox was overextended, creditors pounced, and when the dust cleared he was ruined. By late 1930 he was out of the movie business forever (he lived on until 1952). He didn’t buy MGM – or rather, he did, in a way, but when the chips were down he didn’t have the cash to close the deal, and Mayer’s job at the studio was saved. I don’t know what Upton Sinclair may have written (he did write a book, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, published in 1933), and Mayer, a conservative Republican, may well have loathed Sinclair. But Sinclair wrote nothing about any bribe because there wasn’t one.

There’s hardly a detail too minor for the movie to go out of its way to get wrong. Herman Mankiewicz had a mustache in 1940. Marion Davies was sweet and well-loved, but she drank too much and, having retired from the screen in 1937, she was puffy and tending to overweight by 1939; also, she stuttered. As for Rita Alexander, no Englishwoman then, or Englishman either, would have used the word “shitty” in mixed company, even if they did think aircraft carriers were “a shitty idea” (which nobody did). That word was a pure Americanism – and for that matter, even in America few women would have said it in those days. The road accident that broke Mankiewicz’s leg happened not because a letter fluttered out of his convertible with the top down, but because Tommy Phipps, who was driving, lost control of the car in the rain on Route 66. The Mankiewicz brothers never called each other “Hermie” and “Joey”, and nobody on Planet Earth was dumb enough to call William Randolph Hearst “Willie”, even behind his back in a soundproof room.

But honestly, none of that is really important; in fact, it’s all beside the point. I mean, if you want to know about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, you don’t watch John Sturges’s 1957 movie, or even John Ford’s My Darling Clementine; nor do you go to The Adventures of Robin Hood for insights about Medieval England in the reign of Richard I (or for that matter, to Shakespeare about Richard III). You certainly don’t sit through Lawrence of Arabia, your butt going permanently numb, if you want to know anything about T.E. Lawrence. So the fact that Mank falsifies the writing of Citizen Kane and the career of Herman J. Mankiewicz beyond any semblance of the actual events, is not what matters. The salient fact about Mank is simply that it’s a lousy movie.

I can’t really fault the actors, except that the roles they’re shoved into are unplayable and none of them seems to have complained about it. At a minimum, they do struggle bravely with dialogue that positively bristles with name-dropping howlers:

“Mark my words, The Wizard of Oz will sink that studio.”

 

“Well, you know most everyone here. Mr. Kaufman…” “‘George’ is fine, kid.” “…Mr. Perelman…” “Do you prefer Sidney or S.J.?”

 

“Aimee Semple McPherson says you’re a godless commie, Upton!”

 

“We all want to welcome the Thalbergs back from Irving’s long convalescence in Europe…”

 

“L.B., this is my brother Joe.” “Nice to meet you, Joseph, I’m Louis Mayer.” (As if Mayer would find it necessary to introduce himself to someone in his own office!)

 

“You all know Jo von Sternberg…”

 

“I love Lowell Thomas’s voice. I sat across from him at the Brown Derby once.”

 

“How is Marie Antoinette coming along?” “Norma is a nervous wreck.”

 

“That’s Herman Mankiewicz. He wrote one of our Lon Chaneys.”

 

“I know you, we met at John Gilbert’s birthday party; you’re Herman Mankiewicz…You fractured Wally Beery’s wrist Indian wrestling.”

There’s hardly a minute without such low-camp groaners. I’d love to go on, but you get the idea; the script is a chortler’s paradise.

The look of the movie is flat and murky. Not “evocative” or “atmospheric”, just dark and indistinct. It was shot in something called “Hi-Dynamic Range”, whatever the hell that is. Faces, even architectural details, are lost in shadows or merge into background darkness. The cinematography, credited to someone named Erik Messerschmidt, is perfectly atrocious. It’s obvious Messerschmidt didn’t light the film for black and white, he lit it for color and shot it that way, then just leached the color out, as if that’s the same thing. You light a subject differently for black and white than you do for color, a fact that they used to teach you in the first ten minutes of Photography 101. Either Mr. Messerschmidt cut class that day or he’s merely incompetent (that’s my vote). Either way, he’s in well over his head here, and I intend to remember that name.

Late in the movie, I think at the climax (such as it was), there was a long scene in the “Refectory” at San Simeon (although in Messerschmidt’s hands it just looked like a rather well-furnished cave). The scene seemed to be terribly important; anyhow, it had Gary Oldman going tooth-and-nail for his second Oscar. But by that time the movie had completely lost me and I was no longer even pretending to pay attention; I just sat there rolling my eyes and making that wrist-rotating gesture that is the universal signal for let’s-wind-this-thing-up-already. (I couldn’t help remembering something Pauline Kael wrote in one of her reviews: “Sitting in the darkened theater, I kept listening for snorts, but every time I heard one I could feel the breath on my hands.”) Somewhere in this seemingly-terribly-important scene, Mankiewicz puked and made his famous wisecrack about the white wine coming up with the fish (which actually happened at the home of Arthur Hornblow Jr.), but that’s really all I remember. I was just marking time, waiting for this ridiculous, fraudulent movie to be over. And then…finally…it was.

So for what it’s worth, that’s my reaction to Mank, a silly and terrible movie where not a scene, not a minute, not a second, not a frame has the ring of truth – plus it’s ugly to look at, and it’s more trouble trying to peer through the stygian gloom than it’s worth. It’s 131 minutes I’ll never get back, but on the whole I might well have frittered the time away on something almost as useless, so no great harm done. Still, having gotten it out of the way, I now dismiss it from my mind forever, and I intend never to give it another moment’s thought.

On the other hand, I can’t wait to watch Me and Orson Welles again. Now that’s how it’s done.

All for now; write when you can.

Jim