Joseph L. Mankiewicz makes talk worth watching because his characters are so eager to impress, flatter and outwit one another. We rate him highly, especially when the sharp writing leaves room for hurt.
Fi1m perspective
In All About Eve (1950), Eve Harrington approaches Margo Channing as an admirer, and Mankiewicz finds plenty to question in that apparently harmless arrangement. How well can anyone judge someone who seems to admire them? Writing and directing, he makes the wish to belong to New York theatre’s clever company understandable, even when its members are behaving badly. We were moved by Bette Davis’s Margo because her vanity never quite hides the strain of having to remain impressive. Mankiewicz lets her be difficult without accepting that this explains every difficulty she faces.
His first film as director was Dragonwyck (1946), and he wrote and directed A Letter to Three Wives (1949) before All About Eve. Multiple narrators and complicated structures became recurring ways of examining performance and ambition. His later work took in Cleopatra (1963) and the independent two-hander Sleuth (1972). Two people talking gives him plenty to work with, especially when the actors can make the most of each sentence.
The writing gives those actors something precise to do. In All About Eve, Anne Baxter makes Eve’s attentiveness so insistent that admiration itself becomes worth watching, though her wide-eyed manner can look laboured beside Davis. Mankiewicz also gives us reasons to question the people judging Margo. The screenplay notices how readily professional confidence in a working actress becomes a fault when it inconveniences someone else. The jokes are sharper because the wish to be admired still seems reasonable.
The reservation is that his liking for talk can make the telling stiff. Some critics have found the films stagebound and the visual style anonymous; our objection in All About Eve is more specific, to a flashback structure that can feel over-arranged. It is a limitation worth admitting, but it scarcely cancels the care given to Margo’s working life or the pleasure of this disagreeable company. Start with All About Eve, particularly if an evening of people behaving badly in complete sentences sounds promising.
Biography
Joseph L. Mankiewicz was an American screenwriter, director and producer. Born on 11 February 1909 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Columbia University in 1928. He began his career in Hollywood as a dialogue writer at Paramount Pictures before becoming a screenwriter and later a producer at MGM.
He moved to Twentieth Century-Fox in 1944, where he made his directorial debut with Dragonwyck (1946). Mankiewicz wrote the screenplay for and directed All About Eve (1950). His other credits include directing and writing A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Julius Caesar (1953), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and Cleopatra (1963), as well as directing Sleuth (1972).
Mankiewicz died on 5 February 1993 in Mount Kisco, New York.
