In 1946, Joseph L. Mankiewicz—a prodigy who went to Hollywood in 1929, at age nineteen (after his graduation from Columbia) and, in 1936, became a major producer (of such films as “The Philadelphia Story,” “Woman of the Year,” and Fritz Lang’s “Fury”)—was offered a chance to direct, and planned to turn it down, due to his lack of enthusiasm for the project, an adaptation of the novel “Dragonwyck,” by Anya Seton. But the offer had come from the person who would be his producer, Ernst Lubitsch, who was also one of the greatest of directors. As Mankiewicz recalled decades later,
Mankiewicz learned quickly and well. His direction of the film, which I discuss in the clip above, wasn’t showy—at its best, it never was—but was always spot-on, the result of a kind of perfect narrative pitch that, for all Mankiewicz’s effervescent, incisive dialogue, always kept attention fixed on what was happening, not merely on what was being said. The clip below culminates in a visual marvel, anchored in the psychological insights of expert storytelling, that marks him as one of the greatest of directors. Let’s look at what the late Eric Rohmer wrote, in 1958, about Mankiewicz’s style, or “mise-en-scène” (with specific reference to his adaptation of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”):
Lubitsch to Mankiewicz to Rohmer: it should be apparent how much the French artist learned from Mankiewicz’s exquisitely verbal way of approaching visual style.
