User Reviews

It's always arguably foolish to call anything All because you are no longer limiting yourself to a given area of investigation. When the 'all' is a person you are on even more dangerous ground because you have implied full disclosure of private life and public career. In this case Michel Ciment either with or without guidance from director Luc Beraud makes no mention of such Mank films as No Way Out, The Late George Apley, Escape, The Honey Pot etc and most of those mentioned receive little more than the equivalent of station identification. For a moment I thought Ciment was even going to let Mank off the notorious rewriting Scott Fitzgerald episode on Three Comrades but even when he does bring it up he accepts at face value Mank's explanation that the novel and the screenplay require totally different disciplines followed by his assertion that Fitzgerald's screenplay was unfilmable with no evidence to back it up. This is at odds with Budd Schulberg's account - in his roman a clef The Disenchanted - of how Fitzgerald winged a very visual sequence involving a skier and an automobile at a story conference. It's true there are some tasty anecdotes - especially if you haven't heard them before - and for those who know of Mank but not too much about him it will fill in some gaps but more than that ...