The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (266 page)

Silvana Mangano
(1930–89), b. Rome
The gap between Italian neorealism and the striving after international markets that dominated Cinecitta in the 1950s is straddled by the magnificent thighs of the teenage Silvana Mangano in
Bitter Rice
(49, Giuseppe de Santis). The social comment of that film was swamped by its popular elements, chief of which was Mangano, her skirts tucked up, standing in the rice fields. She had been trained as a dancer and performed with a rough, erotic energy in that film. Already, she had made two films—
Il Delitto di Giovanni Episcopo
(47, Alberto Lattuada) and
L’Elisir d’Amore
(48, Mario Costa)—but
Bitter Rice
was a vast hit, and in 1949 she married its producer Dino de Laurentiis.

That was enough to assure her of a place as a leading Italian actress, but for some fifteen years she was overshadowed—by Lollobrigida and Loren, her reluctance to go to America, and the nagging thought that the boss’s wife need be no great actress. However, after 1966, she became a leading actress for Pier Paolo Pasolini and proved more beautiful in middle age than ever she was in that paddy field:
Black Magic
(49, Gregory Ratoff);
Il Brigante Musolino
(50, Mario Camerini);
Anna
(51, Lattuada);
Mambo
(54, Robert Rossen);
Gold of Naples
(54, Vittorio de Sica); as Penelope in
Ulysses
(55, Camerini);
Uomini e Lupi
(56, de Santis);
Tempest
(57, Lattuada);
The Sea Wall
(58, René Clément);
Five Branded Women
(60, Martin Ritt);
La Grande Guerra
(60, Mario Monicelli);
Crimen
(60, Camerini);
Una Vita Difficile
(61, Dino Risi);
Il Giudizio Universale
(61, de Sica);
Barabbas
(62, Richard Fleischer);
Il Processo di Verona
(62, Carlo Lizzani); in two episodes, directed by Mauro Bolognini and Luigi Comencini, from
La Mia Signora
(64);
Il Disco Volante
(65, Tinto Brass); in
Le Streghe
(66, Luchino Visconti, Bolognini, Pasolini, and de Sica);
Oedipus Rex
(67, Pasolini);
Theorem
(68, Pasolini);
Medea
(69, Pasolini);
Death in Venice
(71, Visconti);
The Decameron
(71, Pasolini);
Conversation Piece
(75, Visconti);
Dune
(84, David Lynch); and
Dark Eyes
(87, Nikita Mikhalkov).

Joseph L
. (Leo)
Mankiewicz
(1909–93), b. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
1946:
Dragonwyck
. 1947:
The Late George Apley; The Ghost and Mrs. Muir; Somewhere in the Night
. 1948:
Escape
. 1949:
A Letter to Three Wives; House of Strangers
. 1950:
No Way Out; All About Eve
. 1951:
People Will Talk
. 1952:
Five Fingers
. 1953:
Julius Caesar
. 1954:
The Barefoot Contessa
. 1955:
Guys and Dolls
. 1958:
The Quiet American
. 1959:
Suddenly Last Summer
. 1963:
Cleopatra
. 1967:
The Honey Pot
. 1970:
There Was a Crooked Man
. 1972:
Sleuth
.

Mankiewicz’s first job was for
The Chicago Tribune
in Berlin in 1928. While there, he also worked for UFA on subtitles, and in 1929 he went back to America to join his older brother Herman in Hollywood. There he worked on dialogue, titling, and story adaptation:
River of Romance
(29, Richard Wallace);
Thunderbolt
(29, Josef von Sternberg);
Fast Company
(29, Edward Sutherland); and
The Saturday Night Kid
(29, Sutherland). Within a few years, he had become a leading writer at Paramount:
Slightly Scarlet
(30, Louis Gasnier);
The Social Lion
(30, Sutherland);
Skippy
(32, Norman Taurog);
Million Dollar Legs
(32, Edward Cline);
This Reckless Age
(32, Frank Tuttle); and
Alice in Wonderland
(33, Norman Z. McLeod). He then moved to MGM and scripted three W. S. Van Dyke pictures:
Manhattan Melodrama
(34);
Forsaking All Others
(34); and
I Live My Life
(35).

By 1936 he was promoted to producer and made an auspicious if uncharacteristic debut with
Fury
(36, Fritz Lang). After that, his credits included:
Three Godfathers
(36, Richard Boleslavsky);
The Bride Wore Red
(37, Dorothy Arzner);
Mannequin
(38, Frank Borzage);
The Shopworn Angel
(38, H. C. Potter);
Three Comrades
(38, Borzage), the film on which he rejected Scott Fitzgerald’s subtleties and provoked the cry “Can’t a producer be wrong?”;
The Shining Hour
(38, Borzage);
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(39, Richard Thorpe);
Strange Cargo
(40, Borzage);
The Philadelphia Story
(40, George Cukor); and
Woman of the Year
(42, George Stevens). In 1943 he moved to Fox to write and produce
The Keys of the Kingdom
(44, John M. Stahl) and, after the war, he remained at that studio to become a director.

Although still only thirty-five, it was remarkable how long Mankiewicz had chosen, or been made, to wait before directing. He is the classic instance of the efficient writer-producer who directs almost because there is no one else around to do it; in fact, his debut, the silly but florid
Dragonwyck
, arose with the last illness of Ernst Lubitsch. It took him his first five films to discard the worst defects of a training in dialogue and construction.
George Apley
, for instance, is an absurdly prolix, mannerly picture. But Mankiewicz’s virtues were always literary: he could handle complicated stories involving flashbacks, interior monologues, half a dozen characters, and intricate plots
—A Letter to Three Wives; All About Eve; Five Fingers; The Barefoot Contessa;
he wrote intelligent, sarcastic dialogue, usually based on an ironic central figure, able to comment on the life he was observing: George Sanders in
Eve
, James Mason in
Five Fingers
, and Bogart in
The Barefoot Contessa
.

Above all, he created the atmosphere of a proscenium arch, a little Shavian in the way he arranged action for an audience. It was often enough that pungent situations, witty dialogue, and smart playing concealed his indifference to what a film looked like or his inability to reveal the emotional depths beneath dialogue. Tidiness, his great asset in the eyes of Hollywood, was his gravest handicap artistically. It limits
Eve
and
Five Fingers
to smart entertainments and leaves him helpless with the greater demands of
The Quiet American
and
Suddenly Last Summer
. There is something sad but final about the way so seasoned a professional was called in to salvage
Cleopatra
, and by emphasizing the talk just made the visual opulence seem more pointless. One has only to think of what Mamoulian
—Cleopatra
’s original director—might have made with so much money, to realize Mankiewicz’s deficiencies.
Guys and Dolls
is a pleasant film with songs, but defiantly without mood;
The Barefoot Contessa
is somewhat overrated;
People Will Talk
, a superb vehicle for Cary Grant, shows all Mankiewicz’s skill and moderation. But
Sleuth
is a grotesque throwback to theatricality, indicative of Mankiewicz’s readiness to be fooled by cleverness.

That said, for the early 1950s, Mankiewicz was the epitome of smart entertainment. He got the best director and best screenplay Oscars two years in a row, with
A Letter to Three Wives
and
All About Eve
, and the latter won best picture. In addition, Mankiewicz was a droll talker, full of great anecdotes and magnificent indiscretion, not always reliable but usually biting. He could explain everything except the lack of a pressing theme in his own work.

Anthony Mann
(Emil Anton Bundsmann) (1906–67), b. San Diego, California
1942:
Dr. Broadway; Moonlight in Havana
. 1943:
Nobody’s Darling
. 1944:
My Best Gal; Strangers in the Night
. 1945:
The Great Flamarion; Two O’Clock Courage; Sing Your Way Home
. 1946:
Strange Impersonation; The Bamboo Blonde
. 1947:
Desperate; Railroaded; T-Men
. 1948:
Raw Deal
. 1949:
Reign of Terror; Border Incident; Side Street
. 1950:
Devil’s Doorway; Winchester 73; The Furies
. 1951:
The Tall Target
. 1952:
Bend of the River/Where the River Bends
. 1953:
The Naked Spur; Thunder Bay
. 1954:
The Glenn Miller Story; The Far Country
. 1955:
Strategic Air Command; The Man from Laramie
. 1956:
The Last Frontier; Serenade
. 1957:
Men in War; The Tin Star
. 1958:
God’s Little Acre; Man of the West
. 1960:
Cimarron
. 1961:
El Cid
. 1964:
The Fall of the Roman Empire
. 1965:
The Heroes of Telemark
. 1968:
A Dandy in Aspic
(completed by Laurence Harvey after the death of Mann).

In Mann’s great days as a director—in the forties and fifties—he had few intelligent admirers in America. Nowadays, he is taken for granted as someone from “that golden age.” But, in truth, Mann’s value arose in that age of transition after the gold: his heroes face more testing problems than gold allowed. So acceptance doesn’t necessarily entail understanding, or the ability to look at what’s happening on the screen—much less how it’s happening. That’s how Mann was neglected in his heyday, and that’s why many people still regard movies as versions of theatre or literature. (It was good form to think well of Mankiewicz, Wyler, Zinnemann, and Kramer in the fifties.) Anthony Mann is one of those directors who has to be witnessed—on a big screen—before understanding can begin.

Even so, he owed a good deal to collaborators—to John C. Higgins, who wrote
Railroaded, T-Men, Raw Deal
, and
Border Incident;
to photographer John Alton, who shot
T-Men, Raw Deal, Reign of Terror, Border Incident
, and
Devil’s Doorway;
to James Stewart, of course; to Borden Chase, who wrote
Winchester 73, Bend of the River
, and
The
Far Country;
and to Philip Yordan, who wrote
Reign of Terror, The Man from Laramie, The Last Frontier, Men in War, God’s Little Acre, El Cid
, and
The Fall of the Roman Empire
.

It’s worth stressing those collaborators because—despite my admiration—I’m not sure that Mann was always master of his films. There’s no doubting the savage economy of the B pictures from the forties, their dash of cruelty, and the panache of the lighting. But Mann was not, I think, by nature claustrophobic or quite as neurotic as those noirs suggest. It’s no disparagement if he simply directed the earlier films, seeing what they were good for and getting the most out of them. It may be wishful thinking to reckon that anyone in Hollywood could have dreamed of imposing himself on a series of B pictures.

But in the fifties, with better budgets and more liberty, there’s no question about emergent personality. Mann’s Westerns are psychological, and his best heroes are beset by self-doubt. But it’s too big a stretch to call those films neurotic when they revel in the beauty of daylight, space, and distance. Rather, I would suggest that Mann discovered his own Western sensibility, which was to see human stories as small, and even aberrant, in the vastness of terrain. Thus,
Winchester 73
is a round, a circle, that needs huge horizons; while in
El Cid
, the real beach at Valencia reaches into legend. No one has ever matched that feeling for heroic openness.

Whenever he went too far away from the Western, Mann looked a very conventional director, which is to say that
Men in War
and
El Cid
are disguised Westerns, working toward an ordeal by combat that defines honor. But
Serenade
is intolerable, or so Mann makes it seem despite the presence of his wife, Sarita Montiel;
Strategic Air Command
is boringly filled with giant aircraft;
The Glenn Miller Story
is overwhelming nostalgia, but too obedient to fond memories of the bandleader to give the screen characters an existence of their own;
Thunder Bay
—even with James Stewart—is indifferent;
The Fall of the Roman Empire
and
The Heroes of Telemark
are without urgency; and
God’s Little Acre
is a restrained attempt at the cheerful bawdiness of Erskine Caldwell.

The most intriguing failure is
The Tin Star
, a Western in which bounty hunter Henry Fonda educates raw sheriff Anthony Perkins and is himself domesticated. The set pieces in that film are VistaVision crisp, and the camera movements like proofs of theorems, for no other director could so elucidate violence. But most of the film is set in a town and its message is simplistically in favor of civic order and domestic calm—ideas that are remote from Mann’s best work, apart from the matriarchal
Cimarron. The Tin Star
illustrates Mann’s tendency to be clinical or academic, and both Fonda and Perkins look like business executives dressed up in cowboy togs.