The Brothers Mankiewicz by Sydney Ladensohn Stern

Author:Sydney Ladensohn Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2019-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

After battling Cecil B. DeMille in the Screen Directors Guild, Joe enjoyed seeing Cary Grant play Dr. Noah Praetorius, his alter-ego/mouthpiece in People Will Talk (1951), especially when the noble young doctor triumphs over a malevolent older rival seeking to destroy him.

Threaded through the political plot is a romance between Praetorius and Deborah Higgins (Jeanne Crain), a medical student who tries to commit suicide when she learns she is pregnant. To prevent future attempts, Noah tells Deborah that she is not really pregnant, then marries her and brings her father Arthur (Sidney Blackmer) to live with them. Joe took pride in the fact that he had managed a rare, if not unique, achievement in American 1950s film, portraying an unmarried pregnant woman who was allowed to go unpunished. Walter Slezak, who played Praetorius’s bass-fiddle-playing atomic scientist friend, so enjoyed the break from playing villains that he used his $10,000 salary to add a “Praetorius Pasture” to his Bucks County, Pennsylvania, farm, which he planned to populate with a Mankiewicz Herd of cows.

Joe’s last film under his Fox contract was based on Operation Cicero, the true story of a World War II spy in Turkey, written by the spy’s German contact, L. C. Moyzisch. Codenamed “Cicero” by the Nazis, the spy was the Albanian valet to the British ambassador to Turkey. Cicero provided documents of such value (including minutes of the Moscow, Cairo, Tehran, and Casablanca conferences and D-Day invasion plans) that the Germans decided he must be a British plant and refused to act on what they assumed was false information. Doubling the irony, Cicero insisted the Germans pay him for selling out the British in British pounds. Tripling the irony, after their initial payment of £20,000, the Nazis paid him another £300,000 in custom-made counterfeits, courtesy of master German forgers.

Zanuck had assigned Michael Wilson to write the script and Henry Hathaway to direct, but when Joe saw Wilson’s script, he asked to take over, provided he be allowed to tighten the action a bit and add “humor, sex and excitement” to the dialogue. Zanuck consented if Joe would agree to forgo a writer’s credit and to accept Otto Lang, Zanuck’s former ski instructor, as his producer.

Wilson had added a fictitious love interest, Anna Staviska, an impoverished Polish countess whose late husband had employed Cicero as his valet while he served as Poland’s ambassador to Britain, and Joe used that relationship to comment on sex and class. Recycling the sexually charged power struggle from Eve, even down to the slap, he created some very un-English, Lubitschean skirmishes between Anna (Danielle Darrieux) and her former employee, Ulysses Diello/Cicero (James Mason). In a reference to class, the diplomats’ myopic assumptions about the aristocratic Anna and the servant Ulysses enabled the pair to manipulate their British and German dupes, adding to the film’s subtle humor.

When Joe went to Turkey in 1951 to scout locations, he also indulged in a bit of intrigue. He met with Elyesa Bazna, the actual Cicero, whom he described

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