Word: mankiewicz
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Last week, Producers Sam Spiegel (On the Waterfront) and Joseph Mankiewicz (The Barefoot Contessa) were jockeying with each other and with Italian Director Alberto Lattuada (Mill on the Po) to get a head start in shooting the life of Goya in its original Spanish setting. All three want Marlon Brando in the title role. But so does Director Stanley Kramer, whose new film, The Pride and the Passion, will be entirely photographed in Spain...
TRIAL, by Don Mankiewicz (306 pp.; Harper; $3.50), is the $10,000 winner of the Harper Prize Novel Contest, but the ribbon it really earns is a piece of black crape. The book is a flaccid throwback to the I-never-had-a-chance school of social protest popular in the '30s. Author Mankiewicz, 32, nephew of movie Writer-Director-Producer Joe (The Barefoot Contessa) Mankiewicz, chooses as his hero-victim an 18-year-old boy of Mexican descent who lives in a Southern California town that draws its color line tight as a noose. Straying from "Mex Town...
...First, Mankiewicz tries to recapture the salty flavor of epigramatic dialogue that marked All About Eve. Sometimes he partially succeeds. For example, a fading ingenue hurls "What have you got that I haven't?" at Ava Gardner, and is told by a mutual friend, "What she's got you can't spell, and what you have you used to have." But more often, the lines strain hard to evoke gasps of admiration; they produce only grunts of mystification. To prove that disaster has struck, a publicity agent says of a movie mogul, "I could tell something was wrong because...
...When Mankiewicz finally does concentrate on the alleged problems of a tempestuous Spanish beauty, he shows the same lack of decision. He just can't decide what the poor girl's trouble is. First, she is a hot-blooded little wanton who, while proud of the fact that "no man has ever bought men," has no real objection to the barter system. But she isn't satisfied with her earthy life. It's never exactly clear why, except that she yearns to be "a really good actress," so she goes to Hollywood. Then everyone decides that Maria is really...
...press agent, and is skillful enough to play a man, undergoing startling moral growth in about forty-five minutes of film time with precision instead of only vigor. Goring is a lecherous South American millionaire in a very small part--which shows how far from the mark Mankiewicz was in planning the film, since Goring's services should always be made the most of. Performance, though--even beauty--can't keep the film from alternating between boredom and silliness...