Being Joe Mankiewicz: Kent Jones Offers Some Final Thoughts On NYFF14's Director Retrospective.

Kent Jones, noted film essayist, critic and documentarian, has served as director of programming of the New York Film Festival lo these pleasingly skedaddled-past two years. He graciously offered some closing comments on last month's Mankrospective.

Considering all the filmmakers in need of a career retrospective, perhaps of reappraisal, why Joseph L. Mankiewicz?

 For me, it’s not really a question of a given artist being “in need” of a retrospective or a reappraisal. Rather, it’s a matter of seeing something or someone in a new light. Let me start with the example of music. From the 60s through the 90s, Motown was ubiquitous. It was all over the radio, then movie soundtracks, then commercials. You got sick of hearing “Where Did Our Love Go?” and “Just My Imagination” and “What’s Goin’ On” again and again and again. I suppose a lot of people did what I did and stopped paying attention to Motown. And then, suddenly, you hear it afresh, for one reason or another – it plays by chance in a restaurant or on the radio or it’s placed in a movie in a new way, and it’s new again. When Fincher opened Zodiac with “Easy To Be Hard” – not Motown, but music for a summer night in the late 60s, for barbecues and fireworks and lawn furniture and Pixie Sticks – the record was placed back within its original world and made new again; he did the same thing by putting “Inner City Blues” (Motown) alongside the time-lapse construction of the Trans-America Tower. Only someone who’s thinking musically would do that – because it’s a film about time passing, the sadness of it, and he’s connecting with the mournful, incantatory, deep melancholy of that song.

 We can all do this on an individual level, at home, film by film, book by book, song by song. But doing it in a public forum is a different act, and every festival provides a different setting. So why Mankiewicz? Because it’s common to find people who think they know him already and that there’s nothing more to say about him. I don’t mean that pejoratively – it’s a question of accretion. So many listings of All About Eve and A Letter to Three Wives on the TCM schedule, so many inclusions of “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night” in AFI and Oscar montages, and a notion takes shape like a snowdrift – seen it, seen it, seen it again, let’s move onto something new. The same is true of what some people might call “high Hollywood” in general. I would say that so much of the work that falls under that heading seems fresher and more vital as the years go by, while a lot of the new stuff in the theaters feels instantly dated and antique. And, last year I did Godard, and Mankiewicz seemed like a good contrast in one way and complimentary in another way – for instance, take a look at The Barefoot Contessa and Contempt side by side. And, Mankiewicz’s films were his own, through and through. And, finally, the complexity of the work – the shift from acerbity to fear to acceptance in the character of Margo in All About Eve, for instance – is breathtaking.

 So, that’s why.

  Was he a figure instrumental to the burgeoning cinephilia of your youth? Was he amongst the first of names whose work you started to follow and study?

 No. But the thing about cinephilia – you might say the problem with cinephilia – is that it has acquired a mystique of its own, wholly distinct from that of the cinema itself, and as a consequence many actions and judgments and formulations from years ago have hardened and solidified. When Andrew Sarris wrote The American Cinema, all the directors who wound up in the “Less Than Meets the Eye” category were the reigning kings of the Oscars, the culture stars. He was taking them down from the top shelf so that we could get a better view of Hitchcock and Ford and Hawks. In so doing, he was rendering judgments that I don’t think he believed – in the case of Billy Wilder, for instance, he later said so, openly and unashamedly. So you were looking at this grand gesture of reclamation, the reclamation of all these guys who had milled in the cultural shadows (from the standpoint of official recognition) while the Wylers and the Mankiewiczs and the Hustons had gathered up statues and tributes like garlands of flowers. And within this framework of auteurism, already established when I encountered it as a kid in the early 70s, Wyler and Mankiewicz and Huston were people whose films were supposedly faulty. You would begin by looking at them as flawed artists.

 But, before all of that, I had been drawn to individual films – to The Best Years of Our Lives and A Letter to Three Wives and The Maltese Falcon. And I kept going back to them, amidst all the films of Ford and Nick Ray and Hawks that I found through auteurism. I still do go back to these movies. In the case of A Letter to Three Wives, no matter what age I was, no matter what lens I was looking through, I felt an attachment that had nothing to do with shoulds and shouldn’ts and categories and hierarchies. I think I’ve always felt similarly about The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

The artists we choose to champion often speak volumes about ourselves. What of Mank's life, career and/or output do you find personal connection with? What autobiography do you draw from observing his biography & resume?

 I don’t believe that things work that neatly. In fact, I think it’s often the opposite. When I read Whitman or Dickinson, it’s the encounter with another human being, in all their fullness and strangeness and divinity, that takes me deeper and deeper. I’m seeing myself in their light. In the cinema, a lot can get in the way of that kind of encounter. Not to slight Cukor, for instance, but that’s not really a characteristic of his films – the signal strengthens and weakens, constantly. But it is present with Ford, with Hitchcock, with Godard, with Linklater, with PT Anderson. It’s an intimate communion.

 Then there’s the question of recognition. When I watch a late Ford film, I feel like I’m within the world of my great aunts and uncles – their way of being together, their countenances, the way they held themselves, their shared sense of humor. When I watch any given film by Fincher, I feel an uncanny sense of recognition of the world as I recognize it or, in the case of Zodiac and Benjamin Button, the way I recognized it. When I saw Horse Money by Pedro Costa, I felt a recognition of something I’ve experienced in the eyes of loved ones: being beaten down and lost in the emptiness of institutional spaces, paperwork, forms being filled out, information being taken, the inner experience of that.

 In the case of Mankiewicz, let’s say that I recognize a certain style of self-presentation that people aspired to when I was a kid, and a vivid rendering of the fragility around the edges. That always amazes me in Mankiewicz. For instance, the relationship between Paul Douglas and Linda Darnell in Letter.

Your take, in a few short sentences apiece, on the following titles;

PEOPLE WILL TALK – one of my favorites among his films. There’s something so direct about it. Having Cary Grant play Doctor Praetorious is, on one level, as incongruous as having Rock Hudson play a Thoreau devotee in All That Heaven Allows; on another level, the level of Grant’s otherworldly concentration, it makes sense. The HUAC parallels seem extremely crude ( I suppose that most of it comes from the original German play, by the way), but they set up the extremely moving ending, when Finlay Currie tells his story.

THE LATE GEORGE APLEY – I didn’t check in with this one this time, but I think it was the first film of his that I saw. It showed often on TV when I was a kid and I loved it.

THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR – another favorite. One of the many great period films made at Fox in the 40s. They shot on the coast of California but apart from the sunlight you could swear you were looking at Cornwall or wherever it’s set. I think that Gene Tierney is wonderful. Like every Hollywood actress of that era, she obviously had elocution and poise lessons pounded into her, and the net effect was that they kind of stilled her – she’s like a scared rabbit. I love the way she and Rex Harrison interact. The film is a rapture, really, and as my friend Geoffrey O’Brien put it (I asked him to introduce the film during the series), it’s in some way a very good film about being a writer.

NO WAY OUT – this was a movie that people dismissed, one of the many well-meaning “message” films of the era, many of them made by Fox (Gentleman’s Agreement, for instance). In fact, the last time I saw No Way Out it felt much more uncomfortable than that. Widmark’s character is genuinely scary and Poitier is so young, fresh, sharp, beautiful.

THE QUIET AMERICAN – a very good movie. I haven’t read the novel but I have no doubt that Mankiewicz is right when he says that the film is more complex. When Audie Murphy was cast, Laurence Olivier walked, but I think that Mankiewicz lucked out with Michael Redgrave. And I love the atmosphere of the film.

THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN – I remembered liking this when I saw it on TV years ago. Seeing it again, I was taken with the tone. So many directors of Mankiewicz’s era really got themselves boxed into a corner in the 70s. Preminger in particular. Huston adapted better than any of them, but Mankiewicz also worked well within what was then the “new sensibility.” I don’t disagree with the shared assessments of the film by Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda, Benton and Newman – that something in the Fonda character’s transformation doesn’t quite click – but I love the work around the edges with the character actors, the gradual unfolding, the hot Saturday afternoon quality of the whole movie.

SLEUTH – unfortunately, we had to cancel the screening: let’s say that the current owners aren’t very interested in film distribution. I love the movie.

Finally, if you have to make one solid pitch to classic film lovers, those who might've attended the series as well as those who didn't make it, how would you sell further investigation of Mank's CV?

 See above.

Current and upcoming programming at the Film Society includes Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist, Part Two, An Evening with Jimmy Wong Yu, and Nastassja Kinski: From the Heart. Plus, the popcorn's aces. Trust.

- Joe Walsh

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