Directed by David Fincher
Based on a screenplay by Jack Fincher (the director’s father)
Music by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
2020
Netflix
CAST
Gary Oldman – Herman J. Mankiewicz
Amanda Seyfried – Marion Davies
Lily Collins – Rita Alexander, assistant to Mankiewicz
Tom Pelphrey- Joseph Mankiewicz, Herman’s film director brother
Arliss Howard – Louis B. Mayer
Tuppence Middleton – Sara Mankiewicz
Monika Grossman – Fraulein Freda, housekeeper / nurse
Joseph Cross- Charles Lederer
Sam Troughton – John Houseman
Toby Leonard Moore- David O. Selznik
Tom Burke- Orson Weles
Charles Dance- William Randolph Hearst
Ferdinand Kingsley – Irving Thalberg
Jack Romano Sid (S.J.) Perelman
Adam Shapiro- George S. Kaufman
Jeff Harms- Ben Hecht
John Churchill- Charles MacArthur
Derek Petropolis – Eddie Cantor
Jessie Cohen – Norma Shearer Thalberg
Bill Nye- Upton Sinclair
Flashback: Citizen Kane
We read the reviews and took this seriously as a background story to the writing of Citizen Kane. I discovered my copy of Citizen Kane was on VHS, so ordered a DVD and watched it the night before Mank.
I resort to Wiki on Citizen Kane – it’s a long, detailed article and there’s little to add.
- “the most influential film of all time” Richard Corliss
- “the greatest film ever made” Sight and Sound 1962 also Roger Ebert
- “But people don’t always ask about the greatest film. They ask, ‘What’s your favorite movie?’ Again, I always answer with Citizen Kane.” Robert Ebert
- #1 film, American Film Insitute poll of filmakers
- #1 film, Cahiers du cinema
- #1 film, Time Out 100 Best films
- #2 Motion Picture Editors best-edited film of all time
- 100 / 100 points – Metacritic
I won’t go on. There are too many more. I used to give a lecture on Citizen Kane in my brief part-time Film Studies era. I hadn’t seen it since VHS days. So … deep breath … it really is not as good as the list above. The greatest thing about it was Gregg Toland’s cinematography. It made flashback sequences a major part of the film-makers’ palette (but was not the first). The set design was extraordinary, Orson Welles insisting on sets with ceilings and then filming up at them (film sets rarely if ever had ceilings). Its use of deep focus was hugely influential almost at once. The plot moved all over the chronology.
Looking back, after perhaps thirty years since I last saw it. Well, the dialogue isn’t great. Welles’ bald wig as Hearst is ludicrous. He was never a subtle actor. It reeks of “film school.” Let me explain. On one video shoot we had a director who had awards for innovation. We spent hours on icy days getting a reflection of an actor in a shop window. The camera team had to run over a ploughed field all day with a heavy camera to get it jolting in a chase scene … I could go on. As the scriptwriter, I spent my days with the sound man checking dialogue on headphones next to the camera. As the second hour of getting a fiddly shot wore on, the tech crew would shake their heads and mutter, “Film school.” Or to be precise, “Fucking film school crap.” Watching it, that kept ringing in my head. Directorial showing off. Too much devotion to the look, and too little to propelling the narrative … it is NOT a fascinating story. Casablanca (for instance) is. The dialogue creaks. The best bit is the Italian opera singer giving the singing lesson. The “opera” was created for the film by Bernard Hermann, and deliberately written above Dorothy Comingore’s vocal range. That was extremely well-executed. The cast was from Welles’ Mercury Theatre of the Air radio show, and Joseph Cotten was the only one who became a subsequent star. It also was a box office flop at the time.
My main reaction was in 2020, ‘This is not an emperor with no clothes, but he hasn’t got as many garments on as he thinks he has.’
Mank
Mank is the story of the screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman). Mankiewicz was involved in writing around forty screenplays between 1926 and 1952, including Girl Crazy, Man of The World and the Kansas sequences of The Wizard of Oz. Orson Welles (We had a film director in one of our ELT books we called Orson Carter) claimed to have written far more than he actually did for the co-credit for Citizen Kane which won them a joint Academy Award for best screenplay back in 1941. This is emphasized at the very end, where Mankiewicz’s character is shown with the award, and says that as during the writing of the script, Welles was also absent for receiving the award. The film publicity had made much of Welles as “Director, writer and star” of the film. Mankiewicz was asked by Welles to allow him sole credit (in return for $10,000) and it went to the Screen Writers Guild who adjudicated a joint credit with Mankiewicz first. That was not a triumph because standard practice is alphabetical order unless one has a greater contribution. So there was no flag waving that Mankiewicz was the main author. I’ve been there myself … I am alphabetically-challenged in the opposite way.
Herman Mankiewicz: I’m particularly furious at the incredibly insolent description of how Orson wrote his masterpiece. The fact is that there isn’t one single line in the picture that wasn’t in writing—writing from and by me—before ever a camera turned
Richard Merryman, Mank 1978
I knew the story. I should do, I did a research MA on writers in Hollywood. As an author, I am naturally on Mankiewicz’s side.
I guess most reading this will have seen Citizen Kane. How well do you remember it? Really?
David Fincher has had a great run as a director … The Social Network, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, Curious Case of Benjamin Button. He is American, but in Mank he has cast major British actors in the leading roles. Gary Oldman as Mankiwicz sounds more English than American. Odd, as Oldman has played Americans several times … Mankiewicz was New York born. In my writing on British and American English, I’ve been noting uses of haven’t got v don’t have in films, and Citizen Kane is solidly in the haven’t got camp, which is allegedly (but erroneously) supposed to be a British preference and Mankiewicz wrote it. Did the real Mankiwicz adopt an English accent? Then we have Tom Burke as Orson Welles, and Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst. Add Ferdinand Kingsley as Irving Thalberg, Sam Troughton as producer John Housman (who was indeed known for his definite and studied English accent) and Tuppence Middleton as Sara Mankiewicz. Lily Collins (daughter of Phil) plays Rita Alexander who has to take shorthand and type the script. English born, half-English. Overall, I thought we saw far too little of either Welles or Hearst in the story, as they’re both played by powerful screen presences.
It’s filmed in Black & White and Fincer fortunately does not go that “film school” clever-clever route, but the cinematography is superb. On the other hand, full widescreen in crystal sharp black and white looks somehow odd. However, the marvellous scenes of the Hollywood lots join others like The Last Tycoon and Day of The Locust.
You know the outline. The story of Citizen Kane is based on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies, who he tried to promote as an opera singer and film star. Welles used to claim there were other influences, but Mank comes down on just Davies and Hearst. Mankiewicz is trying to dictate the story in 1940 while laid up with a broken leg after a car accident. The flashbacks go back to 1930, 1934 and 1936, when Mankiewicz conversed with Marion Davies at various points.
I won’t spoil the plot. A major point is the 1934 election for Governor of California. Upton Sinclair was the Bernie Sanders of his day competing with Republican Robert Merriam. Sinclair was the campaigning author of The Jungle (1906), an avowed socialist, leading light for authors’ rights (good for him), and standing as a Democrat.
The film industry cooked up a fake newsreel, getting down-and-outs and supposed “communists” to espouse the Sinclair cause. One of the most interesting scenes is as the results come in … it has strong 2020 resonances as the count goes up and down.
There is a major scene at San Simeon (aka Hearst Castle) where Mankiewicz turns up drunk and vomits. Charles Dance is a more urbane and distinguished William Randolph Hearst than Orson Welles was (and is a better actor!).
There was a point where I started fuming. Early on, they’re all sitting around the writer’s room at MGM … Herman Mankiewicz, S.J. Perelman, George S. Kaufman, Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht discussing Upton Sinclair. I have serious doubts about how well-known these people and what things they wrote are to the general public. ‘Film school!’ I exploded. Maybe I over-reacted, but it is a tad esoteric, or preaching to a dedicated film buff choir. You probably know Louis B. Mayer, and Irving Thalberg was the inspiration for Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Scott gets mentioned too, though he was an inept screenwriter compared to these guys, Perelman, Hecht, Kauffman, MacArthur and Mankiewicz, by his own admission (see The Last Tycoon, The Pat Hobby Stories.)
Overall:
I’ll avoid words rhyming with ‘Mank’ though two occurred to me. It is after all an exercise in self-satisfaction with film directing and screenwriting.
Great quote:
Louis B. Mayer: This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory. What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. That’s the real magic of the movies. And don’t let anybody tell you different.
I thought it over-rated, but to my shock and horror on re-watching, I found Citizen Kane over-rated too. However, there’s nothing in Mank as poignant as the Marion Davies figure doing jigsaw puzzles in the vast halls of San Simeon, nor as funny as the singing lesson.
You see, great film is stuff that had queues of people around the block on a Saturday night in cold drizzle, not something projected in an arts cinema to people studying the medium. I once saw Casablanca in its restored version on a plane in the days when there was just the one screen at the end of the cabin. I was still transfixed by Michael Curtizs work. Another great candidate from the era is The Maltese Falcon, though it is acknowledged that John Huston adopted many techniques from Citizen Kane.
I was pleased to see that Fincher respected the films-about-writers tradition of including a shot of thrown away scrunched-up sheets of paper, even though they were at the foot of the bed rather than on the floor.
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