Wank with Mank

I read and enjoyed Walter Wanger’s My Life with Cleopatra, having previously enjoyed The Cleopatra Papers. That movie is so much more fun to read about than to watch. I watched it once and have forgotten almost everything.

The Wanger book — sloppily put together (he keeps changing from present to past tense) but fun, if you enjoy dismay as much as I do — led me to finally pick up my long-ago-purchased copy of Pictures Will Talk, Kenneth L. Geist’s Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, which I knew was going to be enjoyable from its Acknowledgements page. Geist writes there, “My qualified gratitude to Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who granted me eleven interviews […] My unqualified gratitude to Christopher Mankiewicz, who, unlike his father, has made the many hours in his company constantly pleasurable.”

Geist’s irritation at his subject, no doubt partially justified, is amusing, because we can’t really sympathise — Geist is the one thrusting himself into JLM’s company, not the other way around.

Joe and Mank

As a sample of how much value the book has for the lover of gossip and smut and trash, here’s a story told by JLM about his brother, Herman J., which unaccountably didn’t make it into Fincher’s MANK. It’s more disturbing than funny, possibly.

Herman was a heavy gambler — several entries in his filmography were written purely to pay off his gambling debts to the studio bosses. One home he played at belonged to such a mogul, and came with the disadvantage of the titan of industry’s small son, who would wander into the room where poker was being played, picking up chips, asking questions, generally being a distracting nuisance.

Nobody felt they could tell off the boss’s kid.

Fed up with this, Herman took the kid by the arm and led him away. Came back alone. The other players asked him how he’s managed it — violence, hypnotism, bribery?

“Easy,” said Herman. “I just found a private spot on a back stairway and taught the kid to masturbate. He took to it like a duck to water.”

That Chandu That You Do So Well

THE RETURN OF CHANDU. Episode 5.

A small fire has evidently broken out in the Principle Pictures Corporation titling department but I’m sure everything’s under control…

Now read on…

Yes, but WHY is Frank Chandler known in the orient as Chandu? I get why they call him the magician. But if they can pronounce that, then “Chandler” shouldn’t be too much of a mouthful, surely?

The episode begins, thrillingly, with a stock footage long shot of some exotic clime, perhaps gathered by Tay Garnett on his round-the-world cruise, who knows? Then we get a long exposition/romance scene on garden furniture, in which the sibillance of the soundtrack combines with the Hungarian and Spanish accents of stars Bela Lugosi and Maria Alba to render comprehension null. But we can still appreciate the charm of Lugosi playing a nice guy, getting some romantic interest for once. I mean, he’s sympathetic in the same year’s THE BLACK CAT if you can overlook him flaying a man alive, and he has a wife he loves in that one, but she’s plastinated and suspended from the ceiling, so there’s a limited amount of true warmth in their scenes together.

Anyway. Frank Bela Chandler Lugosi Chandu the Magician goes into a trance while staring at, oddly enough, a photograph of Princess Nadji’s forehead (it’s supposed to be her actual head but for some reason a still image has been substituted). This allows him to get a mental image of the evil cultists and learn some semi-audible stuff about the lost continent of Lemuria.

Lemuria doesn’t get enough love, I feel. They’re just as submerged as Atlantic, but far less acclaimed.

Chandu’s astral vision has a certain grandeur, consisting as it does of a glass painting, a stock shot (double-exposed with the forehead photo — a temple atop a temple, as it were), the gate from KING KONG, a sleeping beauty and a stone cat presiding over a cult meeting. This collage of imagery serves as a siren call, luring Maria Montez to Hollywood.

This fresh, if somewhat muffled, information sends Chandu sailing away to settle the hash of these cultists and their jowly leader once and for all, a plan which allows Bela to don a fetching sailor suit. He seems to have more costume changes in this thing than Liz Taylor in CLEOPATRA. But wouldn’t you know it, as soon as he’s gone, a whammy of some form is put upon his love, compelling her to lead her friends into a DEADLY TRAP.

Getting psychic wind of this, Bela promptly turns his yacht around and rushes to the rescue.

The Princess’s whammy causes her to speak in a zombified monotone, but her friends don’t seem to notice, which does not reflect well on the rest of the leading lady’s line readings.

Chandu leads a gang of sailors into a frenzied fistfight with the Ubasti cult’s oiled and stripped-to-the-waist acolytes, and before you can say homoeroticism, the main cultist, cunningly disguised in a pith helmet, has re-re-re-abducted the Princess via the magic circle that gives this episode its name. Is it a portal to Lemuria, or merely, as the title implies, a ring of invisibility? Tune in next time, or don’t.

Cleopatter

YES! The Cleopatra Papers is every bit as good as David Ehrenstein has suggested. Basically, two Twentieth Century Fox publicity men preserved and edited their correspondence accumulated during the production of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s epic gabfest, CLEOPATRA, and the result is a unique window into the life of that embattled studio and production. Along the way, the authors, who are profoundly sympathetic to Mank’s approach and genuinely seem to think he’s making a masterpiece (we’ll agree to differ), get in pot-shots at the (other) turkeys on the Fox roster, including obscurities I’ve written about there.

LISA aka THE INSPECTOR is dismissed as a bunch of shots of people getting on and off barges on Dutch canals, which is a brisker dismissal than the one i managed HERE and hilariously accurate. Reductive in a way, yes, but as I look back on the film I can’t seem to remember much else. “What can I say? You won’t believe me if I tell you. All right, I’ll tell you. Dolores Hart and Stephen Boyd getting on and off barges in Amsterdam canals. Philip Dunne, on whom we can always rely, has directed one of Fox’s all-time stiffs. Charlie is readying an all-out sex campaign for the picture though, and if it doesn’t save the picture at least it’ll probably get him investigated by some congressional committee.”

Leo McCarey’s SATAN NEVER SLEEPS is viewed with appropriate through-the-fingers dismay. McCarey himself hated the film, and its true that William Holden’s (uncharacteristic) refusal to die onscreen harms it, but the whole thing is a disaster, a burning hay-cart of a film trundling ever so slowly and wretchedly forwards while torching the credibility of everyone involved and the entire medium of cinema itself. “I just saw the ad in the Sunday Times on SATAN NEVER SLEEPS, and it needs no comment. A Chinese girl raped in front of a priest and Fox is trying to tell the world it’s another GOING MY WAY!” And “The reviews are enough to begin bankruptcy hearings here.”

“It never stops. Yesterday we saw CALIGARI. Not the CALIGARI but the Bob Lippert reproduction. Charlie, deadpan, told the meeting that the picture was better than PSYCHO — which Martin Moskowitz thought it only as good as — and Charlie said the picture is baffling and therefore will be all the rage, just like LA DOLCE VITA and L’AVVENTURA. SPS said, ‘You’re right, Charlie. We’re better than all those Europeans and I don’t know why people talk so much about them.'”

Other movies I haven’t seen: “Saw THE COMANCHEROS last night. We may not make it to Christmas.” “We haven’t seen TENDER IS THE NIGHT as yet […] but saw the trailer today and it’s not to be believed — this middle-aged, twitching woman (a serious Alice Pearce) rolling on floors, on beds, on beaches, in clinch after clinch with world-weary, grat, lined and creased Jason Robards jr. (JUNIOR!) It’s going to hurt this company, I tell you!” Later: “It is so awful. Can Henry King have read the book? Don’t they know this in’t Fannie Hunt, man, this is Scott Fitzgerald?”On CLEOPATRA, the writers are of interest less for their middlebrow enthusiasm than for the gossip and observations about the central players. Rex Harrison gets off lightly, apart from a nasty jab he made at Roddy McDowall (how could ANYONE be nasty to Roddy?) — RM asked him to take his picture and Sexy Rexy is reported as replying, “I’m terribly sorry and everything but I just don’t like you.” Seems typical of Rex that he would be gratuitously offensive in an apologetic, polite way.

 

Of course it’s Burton and Taylor who come in for close analysis. It’s observed that Taylor has grown up in movies and so in a way hasn’t grown up at all, has a very strange, distant, starry view of reality. We learn that, when offered a script, she only ever looks at her part, which might help explain some of her later career choices. Though nothing can really explain the Losey films. I guess she doesn’t play her character as dying in BOOM! because the scenes where her illness is established are scenes where other characters are discussing her in her absence, and so she simply never knew that was the intention.

Burton confuses them a bit because he’s clearly both smitten with her and hitching a ride cynically on her fame. For a while it’s expected he’ll go back to his wife because he always has in the past. At some point, his career move became an amour fou, and maybe it always was.

ANYWAY — highly recommended. I got it for cheap in a reprint with a blank green cover and maybe you can too?