The Mankiewicz Dispatches: NYFF52. THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN and THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR.

THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN

Synopsis: A bandit is captured and sentenced to 10 years in the hoosegow shortly after stealing and stashing half a mil. After one dishonest prison warden is killed trying to beat the cash's whereabouts from him, a new, seemingly incorruptible warden takes over, though by now every inmate is hell-bent on breaking the bandit out to collect the dough.

This hybrid western/prison flick, unsuccessfully representative of either genre, was Joe Mank's penultimate feature, coming off a virtual 8-year exile in CLEOPATRA's wake. To be fair the latter film wasn't quite the debacle it would seem; it made a huge amount of money, just not enough to cover its enormous production costs. Actually, depending on which source you trust, it eventually elbowed through the muck into the black. More importantly it immediately kept parent studio 20th Century Fox, Mank's longtime residence, from utter ruin. Fact was the axe had to swing, and Burton & Taylor were never even close to the block.

CROOKED boasts a script by the then-hot screenwriting duo of Robert Benton and David Newman, fresh from their BONNIE AND CLYDE triumph. There's actually a good film to be made from this material, but I can't decide whether the script was a bad fit for the filmmaker, or whether it needed another pass or three to shore it up. I'm not sure if Mankiewicz himself took his once-formidable ballpoint to the script - if so he did nothing to boost its quality.

Kirk Douglas is correctly given the showier role, the bandit, the amoral demagogue, who fleeces loyalty as readily and easily as other people’s property. Provided reddish-blond hair and thin-rimmed specs to accompany his boasty, physical theatrics, it would seem he’s also mimicking the antics, if not exploring the skin, of good friend and frequent co-star Burt Lancaster. Innuendo unintended. Douglas’ interplay with Henry Fonda, who once more portrays justice’s slow gallop, is not only the chief selling point for the film, it exposes the film’s shortcomings unintentionally and wholly. When the two spar, which doesn’t first occur until about the hour mark, the flick hums. Otherwise it seems constantly in search of itself. Fonda especially seems robbed of what might've been a late-career grand slam, hired foil when he should’ve been equal to the joust. To be fair, as much as I can’t help think what another director would've made of the material, I also can’t help replaying the film in my head, with Lee Van Cleef in the Warden role, and Charles Bronson, James Coburn, or really L. Q. Jones, in Douglas’ scoundrel togs.

Mankiewicz’s strengths never tended to the complexity of the zoo, but rather the complicity of the beasts; how they behave amongst each other, not how they are allowed to conduct themselves. Thus the filming of inherently interesting social structure and situation - a desert-set prison in the wild west - as though they needed no further personal definition from the man in charge. The larger scheme mattered less to Mankiewicz than the microcosmic; he wanted to know how one individual might wage war upon, and ultimately, ruin another. Nations worried about other nations; Mankiewicz worried about the gossip one UN wife might spread against another. And he didn’t care about the later consequences beyond the powder room.

If the filmmaker’s personal DNA made it into the final celluloid I can only imagine it scattered. For his personal philosophy at this point, shaped by the HUAC witch hunt and the CLEO debacle, to shortlist his trauma, must’ve left him with both loyalties doubted and ideology fractured. Indeed, without giving up the ghost as it were, Kirk Douglas’ character does his damnedest to escape his sentence, but perhaps moreso to defeat Fonda’s progressive sensibilities. Once Fonda’s sense of justice is satisfied, however, he readily accepts the baser, misanthropic instincts of his former enemy. Douglas’ philosophy wins the day, regardless of whether he survives to see it.

So CROOKED MAN, which attempts so much, is ultimately under-served by its helmer. I can say this freely, I think, because I do defend and even bolster the man’s rep whenever his name arises in film conversation.

THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR

Synopisis: A widowed mother smothered by her in-laws sets out on her own, magnetically drawn to a cliffside home unrentable, largely due to its haunted-house status. Which turns out to be horribly, aggravatingly, ultimately tragically true.

I’ve seen Mank’s GHOST & MISSUS a few times in its entirety before today’s viewing. In terms of studio-era B&W ghost-longing, it always paled to me before the likes of Wyler’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Both seem to glorify death at survival’s expense.

What changed today? Not much, but that’s by no means a knock.

It remains in my estimation one of the more disturbing works of death-worship, of the romanticism of the lost love that exists beyond the grave or beckons it, from the studio era. In this case, though, the found love is already lost, Rex Harrison’s sonorous boom having departed this world ages before Gene Tierney defies it. It is also a love automatically accepted, unconsciously by its principals and very consciously by the film’s fans. I feel like this movie deserved a subtext denied it by the fleet pursuit of the end credits. Tierney seems to belong to another world at film’s commence (her sister-in-law kindly refers to her as insane), not fleeing the death of her husband so much as searching for fulfillment, corporeal or otherwise. Indeed, Robert Coote’s real-estate agent was mere pawn in the game, matching the ill- and well-fated lovers. They had to end up together. But, aside from Bernard Herrmann’s bone-invasive score, WHY exactly? The narrative seems unnecessarily cruel to Tierney’s restless soul, punishing her for seeking fulfillment in the living world, although her feminine intuition probably should've predicted that George Sanders would ultimately turn out to be George Sanders. Thus I find the resolution not romantic reward for lifelong fealty, but the horrific comeuppance for the slavishly obsessed. My nickname’s Cupid, in case you haven't guessed.

Regardless of which, I never fail to reach for a Kleenex once the final act plays itself out. Herrmann’s score is largely responsible for that, and it’s worth saying that the man who provided score to some of filmdom’s most eerie subject matter both indulges this scene’s romantic tendencies and underlines its more macabre, disturbing implications. Is this really a happy ending? Two ethereal figures wandering into an eternal fog? Do I just not get women at all?

Mank referred to this film, an acknowledged classic, if one from the shadowy depths of the contractual obligation, as a work for hire. Not to be apprised amongst his finest hours. So I push forth my notion; his so-called personal films were his least personal, his “obligations” the most revealing.

Be sure to check back later today/tomorrow for my take on 1955’s GUYS AND DOLLS. The Joseph L. Mankieiwcz series continues on until October 14th. Keep watching this space for daily updates and commentary. Cheers!

-Joe Walsh