Word: mankiewicz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week Director Joe Mankiewicz (All About Eve, A Letter to Three Wives) finished shooting a $2,000,000 picture that takes a calculated risk of being a box-office flop. Julius Caesar is the first effort by M-G-M to film Shakespeare since Romeo and Juliet lost more than a quarter of a million dollars in 1936. Shakespeare is supposed to be box-office poison, but Mankiewicz and Producer John Houseman think they have a sure-fire script. Says Mankiewicz: "It's a good, rip-snorting piece of blood & thunder coupled with eternally new and true...
...geometry class of the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles was agreed. Not one of them could make head or tail of the problem: "The common external tangent of two tangent circles of radii 8 inches and 2 inches is - ." Fortunately, the class secretary, 15-year-old Johanna Mankiewicz, had an inspiration. All the class had to do, she decided, was to write a letter to the Most Famous Physicist in the World...
Much of the credit, however, goes to Screenwriter Herman T. Mankiewicz, whose snappy dialogue and mastery of the Ozark idiom puts over the story. The plot it self is not spectacular. It follows Dean's career with St. Louis, reaching a climax in his disastrous arm injury, and leveling off with his transfer to the Chicago Cubs and final post as a baseball announcer. Though The Pride of St. Louis is basically another Stratton Story, Mankiewicz and Dailey have turned the Dean legend into a good movie in its own right...
...presumably true) story of a valet who succeeded in photographing numerous top-secret Allied documents (including plans for the Normandy invasion) at the British Embassy in Ankara during the summer of 1944 and then selling them at extravagant prices to the Germans. Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and based on a book by L. C. Mayzisch called Operation Cicerco, the picture is frequently amusing and always exciting...
...actual facts of the case. Operation Cicerco is a script-writer's dream, loaded with enough surprises and ironic twists (including the fact that the Germans refused to believe that the documents were genuine) to fill half-a-dozen run-of-the-mill espionage thrillers. In addition, Mankiewicz's screenplay contains some effective frills of its own: a love affair between the valet and a former employer, a beautiful Polish countess, some bright epigrammatic dialogue, and an array of skillfully drawn diplomatic officials. Particularly clever use is made of the contrasting personalities of the pompous, victimized, British Ambassador (superbly played...