Word: mankiewicz
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...original movie, directed by Hollywood veteran Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Andrew was played by Laurence Olivier, widely considered the century's greatest actor; and Michael Caine, who came to movie fame as the charming cad Alfie, was Milo. In a promising symmetry, this Sleuth has Caine playing the older man and Jude Law, who starred in a 2004 sequel to Alfie, as his young rival...
...some blunt objects on display, and a gun does go off, but the play is basically two men talking, firing elaborate insults at each other, scheming to find the perfect humiliation for slights received, the most elegant revenge. All this was catnip for the original film's director. Mankiewicz (whose older brother Herman wrote Citizen Kane) had been in movies since the early days of talking pictures, and "talkies" is a good description of his very voluble films. His Oscar-winning scripts for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve were filled, stocked, clogged with clever badinage. Nearly...
...Mankiewicz and the urban sophisticates he wrote about, words were swords in the duel of wits. He thought of himself as a screen playwright, and Hollywood as Broadway West: films were theater in closeup. (Academy voters apparently agreed with Mankiewicz: they named him best director as well as best writer for Three Wives and Eve.) No question, he loved the sound of his own authorial voice; it had an overripe eloquence that could beguile any viewer-listener. And when he turned plays into films - producing Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story or directing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar - he could fall...
...view of American politics that applies today as much as it did then. Like Silvio Berlusconi and Michael Bloomberg, Kane (Welles) is a media magnate who runs for office. Like Mark Foley, he is caught in a sexual scandal just before the election. The brilliant script by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles is about a powerful man's need to be loved by the millions of people whose lives he dominates. And when they jilt him, he rationalizes the rejection by spinning tales of conspiracy. His newspaper runs the headline FRAUD AT POLLS...
...that night. His audience was unaware of King's assassination. He had no police or Secret Service protection. His aides were worried that the crowd would explode as soon as it learned the news; there were already reports of riots in other cities. His speechwriters Adam Walinsky and Frank Mankiewicz had drafted remarks for the occasion, but Kennedy rejected them. He had scribbled a few notes of his own. "Ladies and gentlemen," he began, rather formally, respectfully. "I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening because I have some very sad news...