Mank is a remake of Cyrano de Bergerac without the thrilling swordplay and with the romance dialed down to Platonic friendship. Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) was a great wit who, like Cyrano, sought battle with people more powerful than himself and seldom received proper credit for his work.
In Mank’s case this was mostly because of the Hollywood studio system’s assembly-line approach to filmmaking. But Mank’s fearlessness cost him, too. A 1933 play he wrote condemning the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews prompted Joseph Goebbels to insist that Mank’s name be removed from any films he wrote at MGM—this at a time when Louis B. Mayer routinely accommodated such prohibitions because the German market was too important to ignore. Closer to home, after Harry Cohn, the famously crude president of Columbia Pictures, said he judged movies by whether they made his fanny squirm, Mankiewicz famously cracked, “Imagine! The whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass!” This was not advisable in a tight-knit company town like Hollywood.
In Mank, Roxanne is played by Marian Davies (Amanda Seyfried), mistress to William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance). Davies shares Mank’s nose for phonies but lacks his self-destructive compulsion to call them out. Unlike Roxanne, whom Cyrano idolizes for her imagined virtue, Davies is admired by Mank because she’s a gold-digger who came up from the gutter and never pretended otherwise. The role of Comte De Guiche, Cyrano’s romantic rival and unworthy foe, is assumed by Hearst, who keeps Mank around for entertainment (in the film he likens him to an organ-grinder’s monkey), bides his time, and eventually crushes him after Mank writes an a clef Hearst biopic, Citizen Kane.
The absence of swordplay is felt keenly. Mank’s sword is his pen, and watching a writer put words on the page is never going to be exciting, even when we know the end product will be a masterpiece. This problem is compounded by Mank’s being bedridden because he’s broken his leg. Mank crossed swords with his tongue even more than he did with his pen, and Mank should have had an easier time dramatizing that. But the quips Mank utters in the film fall flat, perhaps because they haven’t aged well (the Harry Cohn crack quoted above, but not in the film, is more thrillingly rude than funny) or perhaps because the script mines the wrong witticisms and/or fails to furnish new ones that sparkle and shine. The audience has to take Mank’s brilliance on faith, because the bons mots Mank dispenses throughout the film feel pedantic and tired. Perhaps that’s meant to be deliberate; he was, after all, just a decade away from drinking himself to death. But Mank’s not any wittier in the flashbacks. We admire Mank’s nerve, but without wit this Cyrano lacks panache, and a Cyrano without panache isn’t much good to anyone.
(I should mention here that I had a friendly acquaintanceship with Herman’s son Frank, who had a distinguished Washington career as a regional director in the Peace Corps, a press secretary to Robert Kennedy, campaign manager to George McGovern, and president of National Public Radio. Frank inherited his father’s wit, coining, for instance, the invaluable word, “retronym.”)
In Cyrano, the gallant hero admits authorship of his greatest masterpiece—love letters to Roxanne signed by the handsome and brainless Christian de Neuvillette—only in his last dying moments, reluctantly betraying a promise he made to the long-dead Christian. In Mank, the Cyrano character rightly refuses to honor a similar contract with his Christian, Orson Welles (Tom Burke), upholding a more contemporary moral code that says you’re a coward if you don’t stick up for yourself. An interesting counterpoint and throwback to the older code is the great screenwriter Robert Towne’s own Cyrano, Edward Taylor. According to Sam Wassen’s book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, Taylor, who was Towne’s roommate at Pomona College, served as unacknowledged co-author on many of Towne’s greatest scripts, including Chinatown. Apparently Taylor was a genius who judged the collaboration an act of friendship and was content to be kept by Towne in the shadows and on a modest retainer. It will be interesting to see how a forthcoming film dramatization directed by Ben Affleck will account for such weird behavior.
Mank, taking its cue from Pauline Kael’s 1971 essay “Raising Kane,” portrays Welles as a spoiled wunderkind brat who deserves no credit for coauthoring Citizen Kane. Kael did Mank a good turn by resurrecting his reputation, and her essay is a wonderful appreciation of what’s great about the film. But it’s well-documented that she overstated her case in claiming Mankiewicz as sole author of Citizen Kane, and even Kael recognized that Welles was a genius. (The most cinematic thing Welles ever did in real life was throw a can of flaming Sterno at Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, but unfortunately his target was his producing partner John Houseman, not Mankiewicz, and it happened after Citizen Kane, leaving no historically accurate way to work it into Mank.)
Kane is at least as much Welles’s film as it is Mank’s, much as Chinatown is, Wassen argues, a genuine collaboration between Towne, Taylor, and the director Roman Polanski, who did an uncredited rewrite that apparently imposed much-needed narrative coherence. Cyrano-like writers were not hard to find in midcentury Hollywood, and indeed they became a social type—literary men pickled in gin who loathed the power structure, mostly cranked out hackwork, and for their troubles were dismissed by Jack Warner as “schmucks with Underwoods.” They were very well paid, so don’t weep too hard for them. But like Cyrano, a great many of them died young, and the final injustice is that their creative martyrdom doesn’t make for especially compelling drama.
(The illustration above is of my all-time favorite Cyrano, Derek Jacobi, who I saw in a touring Royal Shakespeare Theater production in 1985. I dearly wish it were available on DVD.)