DRAGONWYCK: THE GENESIS OF RODERICK USHER

Vincent Price is remembered as more of an icon of the Horror genre than ever in his lifetime. One of the reasons for this rests firmly with the seven films he created with director Roger Corman. When Tim Burton put together his very first film project it was of course called VINCENT, where he furthered the Price mythology by making Price and Edgar Allan Poe the same voice for a generation raised on these films.

All of this began long before Vincent Price ever met Roger Corman or Richard Matheson in 1960. It began while the actor was under contract to 20th Century Fox where he learned that Ernest Lubtisch was to direct a film from the novel DRAGONWYCK.

This film, and Price’s performance, would solidify the persona that Price would take to his grave. The following is an essay from the forthcoming book Prof Samuel Umland and I are working on for Tomahawk Press entitled BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: The Poe films of Roger Corman.

In 1946 20th Century Fox would produce a film that would resonate well into the next two decades due entirely to the presence of an actor who had never held a film together before this one. The film in question is DRAGONWYCK, and the actor was Vincent Price. At the time I am quite sure that studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck assumed the film was a Gene Tierney vehicle since the actress was a top Fox star at the time, not to mention stunning to look at and compelling when given the right material. What Zanuck was oblivious to was the degree that Vincent Price would dominate the film and how much the character of Nicolas Van Ryn would ultimately affect all the genre roles that would follow, making Vincent Price the heir apparent to Boris Karloff by 1960.

DRAGONWYCK was supposed to be directed by the stylish Ernst Lubitsch, who had Gregory Peck in mind for the role of Nicolas Van Ryn. Ironically both Price and Peck had already worked together at Fox in THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM two years before, and were quite different in their approach to acting. Lubitsch fell ill during preproduction and the film was given to a producer and screenwriter who had yet to direct a film – Joseph L Mankiewicz.

Vincent Price and Gene Tierney had already made three films together when they were cast in DRAGONWCYK and adored each other as actors. Price recalled “Gene was so stunning to behold in the flesh, with those gorgeous blue eyes of hers, I used to kid her that if all the men in America could see her as I did they would fall hopelessly in love with her. While we were filming DRAGONWYCK her marriage to Oleg Cassini was beginning to come apart. We had a visitor onset who caught Gene’s eye almost at once, a handsome young politician named John F. Kennedy, and this chemistry soon made it apparent to me that a romance was about to begin, which it did.”

The replacement of directors while filming was a situation particularly familiar to both of them. It had already happened while they were filming LAURA. In that film they had shot half of the picture with Rouben Mamoulian directing when Zanuck pulled the film away from Mamoulian for creating a gay subtext out of the relationship between Dana Andrews and Clifton Webb. Otto Preminger took over, reshooting some of the offending material, yet nothing Otto could do really hid the fact that Waldo Leydecker was a homosexual, infatuated with the glamour of LAURA rather than the romance between a man and a woman in the conventional sense.

Zanuck was a well known homophobe in Hollywood and made it known that he did not want homosexuals like Clifton Webb and Laird Cregar working on the Fox lot. He was, however, made to see the light: while he may not have liked it, these actors and quite a few more gay men in every dept at Fox made money for the studio and were far too talented to let sexual preference stand in the way. Nevertheless, Mamoulian was replaced by Preminger, who really understood the perversity of these self-serving characters and wound up making a classic in the process.

We will never know what kind of a film Lubitsch would have made out of DRAGONWYCK’s Gothic romance. What we now had with Mankiewicz in the director’s chair was a brilliant screenwriter who knew next to nothing about directing films but was blessed with a first rate cameraman in Arthur C. Miller. Price would work with Miller a total of four times in his career, the first time in SONG OF BERNADETTE, followed by KEYS TO THE KINGDOM produced by Mankiewicz, then A ROYAL SCANDAL starring Price’s friend Tallulah Bankhead with the original director of DRAGONWYCK, Ernst Lubitsch. This production would be taken over as well by Otto Preminger as Lubitsch’s health began to fail.

I asked Price about working with a first time director in an interview done in the actor’s home in 1985. “Joe was a superb writer as well as being a top producer in Hollywood. I remember how much I wanted to play this character Van Ryn and I must tell you I had my work cut out for me convincing Joe. He had me typed as the somewhat portly priest character I played in KEYS TO THE KINGDOM, so I went on a crash diet, slimming down considerably so that, by the time I auditioned for Joe, I was Nicolas Van Ryn at least in appearance. I knew I could play this part because it was very similar to the character Jack Manningham that I had played on Broadway in ANGEL STREET. That role was really the genesis of what I like to call my Aristotelian villains, and from that day forward I used it whenever I was called upon to play a villain like Nicolas Van Ryn, or Roderick Usher for that matter.”

Vincent could not have realized at the time of filming DRAGONWYCK how much of his later career would depend on the works of Poe, yet he understood the connection between Nicolas Van Ryn and Poe almost at once by reading the preface to Anya Seaton’s book which contained Poe’s poem ‘Alone’. This unlocked the secret to Van Ryn’s philosophy and especially his sense of “that demon in my view” that Poe refers to about his own inner turmoil as a writer. “When I began to create the character of Jack Manningham, who was a psychotic personality if ever there was one, I read Kraft Ebbing’s PSCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS, which was of great help for me as an actor in attempting to understand this kind of behavior. I read Seaton’s book cover to cover to try and discover what made Van Ryn such an egotist and found the basis for my characterization in Poe’s magnificent poem which I believe to be one of his best. In the book, Nicolas takes Miranda to New York where they actually meet Edgar Allan Poe. It is a shame that in adapting a novel like DRAGONWCYK to film, so much must be sacrificed. We also lost my real death scene as well. In the book I drown saving Miranda from doing the same during a boat race on the Hudson river, which redeems Nicolas as a man whose principals were always above the pack, yet the evil that resided in him was also measured in the good that was beneath the surface.”

It is interesting now to compare just how similar the great house in DRAGONWYCK is to the HOUSE OF USHER, both being haunted by ancestral misdeeds. One might even consider DRAGONWYCK to be the unofficial prequel to USHER. There is a moment in Corman’s film where Roderick Usher surveys the landscape around the house of Usher from his terrace, lamenting the decay and especially the family heritage which will die out with him. Seeing Price slimmed down once again to play Usher, he resembles what Nicolas Van Ryn might have become if he had remained locked in his tower chamber at Dragonwyck, watching the outside world drift away as the house around him decayed into the void.

Anya Seaton’s novel of DRAGONWYCK, like most of her work, is well researched and vivid in its depiction of the Dutch influence that dominated New York in the 1840’s, where a family like the Van Ryn’s could live like feudal lords of the 19th century, creating the role of “patroon” to allow men to farm land they could never own. In the film, Mankiewicz makes a point of depicting the ludicrous attempt by Van Ryn and his followers to recreate the culture of the European court life on the Hudson River, as if America was somewhere else out of reach.

The influences that hover over Seaton’s novel don’t end with Poe; the character of Nicolas Van Ryn owes something to the legend of Bluebeard, with its forbidden tower room and dead wives. Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is almost a role model for Gene Tierney’s character of Miranda, although Max De Winter Van Ryn is decidedly not. I remarked to Price that this must have been the beginning of what I referred to as Vincent’s “late wife films.” This made him laugh. ” Absolutely, it was when I realize that my wife in the film is a bit too fond of food and drink as a result of my lack of interest in her altogether, I decide to help matters along by poisoning her with Oleander leaves ground into her desserts. After that, if my wife wasn’t dead by reel two, then she certainly was by the end of the film.”

DRAGONWYCK is by turns a bit of Poe and Tocqueville with a soupsan of Perrault’s COUTES added to the mix. The film as seen today is a tour de force for Vincent Price, which was not the intention of the studio or the director. I asked Price about this situation during one of our interviews in 1985. “Gene and I used to speculate what DRAGONWYCK might have been like if Otto had been the director when we worked on LAURA which, as you know, started out with Mamoulain, who did not really understand the kind of people these perverse New York socialites were or the world they lived in. I mean, there was not one redeemable character in LAURA, and when Otto came on the film he got it at once. He knew these people from his own experience. I believe Otto would have brought out more of the perversity of the faux nobility that Nicolas felt was his right as a patron. Also he would have paced the film with more clarity than Joe was capable of at the time. I think looking back that Joe did the best he could in trying to cope with a production like DRAGONWYCK. The set alone was intimidating; I mean you could actually live in it. Lyle Wheeler was a genius as he unitized an entire soundstage at Fox to create the great house of Dragonwyck. It is ironic to realize that even a major studio like Fox still tore down the whole thing in the same manner we did years later with the Poe films that I did with Roger {Corman}, THE RAVEN, which was a huge set, was taken down in three days, but not until Roger shot an entire other feature at the same time. As you pointed out, DRAGONWYCK may well have been my “first Poe film,” even though it would take my career another fourteen years to bring Edgar Allan Poe full circle with HOUSE OF USHER.”

In DRAGONWYCK, Vincent Price discovered his talent for the macabre, which began on the stage playing the murderer Jack Manningham in ANGEL STREET. From that moment until he was cast as Nicolas Van Ryn, the elements were already taking shape. Vincent clearly witnessed the same “demon in my view” that Poe had seen in his writing. Watching Price as he “hears” the ghostly music of the harpsichord played by a dead ancestor, or watching his descent down the stairs of the Tower room as he explains to his current wife that he is “what is vulgarly referred to as a drug addict, is to see the genesis of his future interpretations of Poe’s characters under the direction of Roger Corman.

An odd Halloween, this year. Few biggies, but a number of little goodies. Enough to fill the treat bag of any horror lover. Below are a few of these recent releases.

FOX HORROR CLASSICS
Two horror rarities, and one almost-horror flick, from the vaults.

CHANDU THE MAGICIAN – 1932. 71 mins.
Directed by William Cameron Menzies and Marcel Varnel. From the radio serial by Harry A. Earnshaw, R.R. Morgan and Vera M. Oldham. Screenplay by Barry Conners and Philip Klein. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Art Direction by Max Parker. Props by Kenneth Strickfadden.
With: Edmund Lowe, Irene Ware, Bela Lugosi, Henry B. Walthall.

DRAGONWYCK – 1946. 103 mins.
Written & Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz. Produced by Ernest Lubitsch, Darryl Zanuck. Cinematography by Arthur Miller. Original Music by Alfred Newman. Art direction by J. Russell Spencer, Lyle Wheeler. Edited by Dorothy Spencer.
With: Gene Tierney, Wvincent Price, Walter Huston, Glann Langan, Anne Revere, Spring Byington.

DR. RENAULT’S SECRET – 1942. 58 mins.
Directed by Harry Lachman. Screenplay by William Bruckner, Robert F. Metzler, from the novel ‘Balaoo’ by Gaston Leroux. Cinematography by Virgil Miller. Music by David Raksin.
With: J. Carrol Naish, Shepperd Strudwick, Lynn Roberts, George Zucco.

A nice collection, each of them in gorgeous condition, which accents the fine detail of DRAGONWYCK, and shows off Howe’s and Menzies work in CHANDU.

Of the three, CHANDU is the most impressive, suffering from a case of dueling departments. Edmund Lowe and Irene Ware are awful, flattening out our willing suspension of disbelief, as does the terrible script. Pumping the film back up are Menzies sets, Howe’s cinematography, Strickfaden’s props, and ‘s special effects. All these great talents are unable to put Chandu back together again, but as a consolation prize, we get Lugosi in prime shape, and he has some wonderful scenes (for #2500!). Fox puts a disclaimer up front about the film’s quality, but outside of an errant spice, and some minor lines, it looks gorgeous. What were they concerned about?

CHANDU, spun off of a super-successful radio show, is an early attempt at a compressed serial, a la RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, intended (as I learned from Greg Mank’s commentary) for children, with the forlorn hope that maybe adults would enjoy it as something akin to camp. There are cute animal cameos – camels, bovines, tiny frogs, etc. And there’s Ernest Munden, a dreadful comic relief character, but he’s given excellent special effects support.

Man’s colorful commentary places facts at stragegic places. He also thinks Tom Weaver for filling in some of the gaps.

Lugosi’s final ‘God’ speech really sounds like Hitler in TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, replete with gutteral voice, vocal rhythms, etc. Could the Fuhrer have seen the film and imcorporated Lugosi into his shtick? 1932 is about right. He stole Chaplin’s moustache; why not Lugosi’s ham?

DR. RENAULT’S SECRET is a poor man’s ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, with only one lost soul on display. But in its framing and veneer it looks like a Universal programmer from the 40s, which is high praise. J. Carrol Naish, as the morose ‘secret’ of the title, acquits himself well, gathering pathos, much as he did in HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. It’s a minor piece, and left to its own devices, it wouldn’t be worth having, but in the company of the other two, it is a lot of fun.

DRAGONWYCK was Mankiewicz’s first directorial foray, and while it has elements of horror in it, one could not honestly call it a horror film. Nonetheless it features genre stalwart Vincent Price…before he was adopted by the genre, and dark moody sets oozing horror ambience. Mankiewicz was to use Ms. Tierney to better effect in THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR a few years later. For a full review, check out the FIR article by David Del Valle.

PIECES (1982) aka One Thousand Cries Has the Night 
Directed by Juan Piquer Simon. Screenplay by Dick Randall and Joe D’Amato
Starring Christopher George, Lynda Day George, Frank Brand, Edmund Purdom, Ian Sera, Paul L. Smith, Isabelle Luque.

I love October! It is the only month where I feel like everybody shares my obsession with horror movies. Blockbuster’s scary movie section is all checked out, and people pack into theaters to watch midnight showings of their favorite fright flicks from the past. If only it would stay like this all year round…

Sometimes I’m in the mood for a film that can get under my skin, and make me think long after the credits have rolled…that film is THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Other times I want to see a topless woman running through a locker room screaming her head off, while a mysterious figure chases her with a buzzing chainsaw, only to cut her up into small pieces, confiscating parts he needs for his human jigsaw puzzle…this film is PIECES.

PIECES is, as its tagline proudly advertises, “Exactly what you think it is”. The film opens in 1942, where a young boy is putting together a puzzle of a naked woman. He is caught by his mother and she goes crazy, throwing things around the house and attempting to burn all his belongings. Sound a little over-the-top? The child deals with this the only way he sees fit…he cuts her into pieces with an ax. CUT TO: 40 years later. A serial killer stalks women in a Boston college campus, severing their bodies and stealing limbs. I know the plot doesn’t sound very impressive, and that’s because it ain’t, but I guarantee nobody likes this movie for the ingenious plot.

To read the rest of Guglielmo Anthony’s review.

THE SKULL
DVD review by Richard A. Ekstedt
 

Legend Films. Amicus Films, released by Paramount Pictures in 1965. Technicolour/Techniscope. 83 minutes.Widescreen 2:35.1 (16×9). Original Trailer (1:85). No subtitle option but close-captioned.

Producer…Milton Subotsky & Max J. Rosenberg. Director…Freddie Francis. Music…Elisabeth Lutyens. Cinematography…John Wilcox
Film Editing…Oswald Hafenrichte. Art Direction…Bil Constable
With: Dr. Christopher Maitland…Peter Cushing. Anthony Marco…Patrick Wymark
Jane Maitland…Jill Bennet. Inspector Wilson…Richard Green. Police Surgeon…Patrick Magee. Auctioneer…Michael Gough. Dr. Londe…George Colouris. And, as
Sir Matthew Philips…Christopher Lee.
 
This is a title many lovers of the fantastique have been waiting for: a beautiful 2:35.1 WIDESCREEN (that’s right folks!) release of the Amicus Film THE SKULL!  Throw those ep p/s vhs copies away and finally see the film as it was meant to be seen.

Legend Films, a leading company in digital restoration (and the colorization of older PD titles), has obtained the rights to several Paramount Pictures titles, and has begun issuing them as authorized DVD releases that are a joy to behold. THE SKULL is just an example of their emphasis on quality.

This film, based upon the classic short story “The Skull Of The Marquis de Sade” by Robert Bloch, is a tale of obsession — the mania to collect and own something at all costs, manifested by the film’s main characters, and the horrifying outcome of one such quest.

Peter Cushing (who I had the chance to meet and talk to in the 1970′s – a very warm and gentle man) plays Christopher Maitland, a writer and collector of the occult, who is offered the skull of the legendary Count Donatien Alphonse Francois – The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), by a shady dealer named Marco (played with great relish by Patrick Wymark, best known to some viewers as ‘The Judge’ in the exceptional THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW). Intrigued by the possibility, Maitland turns to his long time friend Sir Mathew Phillips, a fellow collector who turns out to be the skull’s former owner. Warned by his friend that the skull is infested by the forces of evil and better left alone, Maitland,  now obsessed by the graveyard relic, decides to ignore his friend’s advice and seeks out the nefarious Marco. When he arrives at dealer’s flat he finds him dead – his throat ripped out. Ignoring the premonitions of his wife, Maitland, now having the skull in his study, is engulfed into a whirlwind of black horror from which there is no escape.

THE SKULL is a cinematic ballet of sorts for cinematographer/director Freddie Francis, who won Academy Awards for the films SONS AND LOVERS and GLORY, as well as his work in such genre films as DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (uncredited direction), THE INNOCENTS, EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE – to name a few. With his camera compositions in Cushing’s study as the lens lingers over the curios. to the most important shots, missing from the cropped p/s tapes but now restored in widescreen on this disc, are the POV shots that take the viewer INSIDE the skull and has us looking out from both eye sockets at the actors – done by having a large mockup of the skull positioned over the camera. The final part, done almost as a silent movie, is a visual feast as we watch Peter Cushing spiral downward in panic, set to the sparse, nervous score of Elisabeth Lutyens (who also scored DOCTOR TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS). Christopher Lee’s role very sincere performance is really an extended cameo (he is billed S ‘Guest Star’) as are Patrick Wymark, Jill Bennet (as Mrs. Maitland), Nigel Green, Michael Gough, Peter Woodthorpe (best remembered as Professor Zoltan in EVIL OF FRANKENSTEI) and George Coulouris. But the star here is Peter Cushing, who carries the movie on his shoulders in such a way that it never downgrades the talents of the other performers.

As reported to me, the original materials given by Paramount were in very good shape, with just a little bit of grain/scratches showing up on the visuals. The color is strong and the audio is equally good, with little distortion when played LOUD. Also included is the original theatrical trailer, framed at 1:85. There is no subtitle option but the filim is closed captioned. THE SKULL may be obtained from Legend Films (www.legendfilms.net) or various retail outlets like Best Buy.  Seek out this film and pay the price!!

When I received a call last August (2002) from a Los Angeles producer, Eric Young, asking me to provide commentary for the forthcoming Fox DVD of ALL ABOUT EVE, I leapt at the opportunity. I figured that if I didn’t take it, it would go to Sam Staggs, the author of the misnamed but recent “All About ‘All About Eve.’” “All About” obviously should have been a compendium of all the significant writing on “Eve” from 1950-2000, including Mankiewicz’ own, superior memoir, “More About ‘All About Eve’” (1972), which Staggs disdains as stylistically inferior to the gossip he re-visits. Its inclusion would have permitted readers to judge how Mankiewicz and Staggs measure up as writers.

While my critical biography of EVE’s writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz,’ “Pictures Will Talk,” dates from 1978, Staggs’ opus came out in 2000. (‘coming out’ is a tiny in-joke alluding to Staggs and his all-gay, Texan, viewing circle.) The 22-year age difference in pub dates tends to make Staggs’ work appear more contemporary and, therefore, more authoritative than my book and Joe’s (which are both out-of-print). My chapter on ALL ABOUT EVE, Mankiewicz’s finest film, is my shortest because I directed readers to the stories in Joe’s preface, which I could just as easily have rewritten and appropriated as Staggs did. (A Scribner’s editor told me that my deferential reference to a rival publication was gauche, and she, therefore, deleted it.)

I had a better right than Staggs to the tales because Joe and the other EVE subjects were then alive and had told all of their tales directly to me. Staggs appropriated all the remaining, first-hand gossip in my chapter, Biblically-titled, “And Joe Created Eve,” but failed to write a word about my original views on the rivalry between the old and the young Mankiewicz brothers as the origin of the conflict between the aging Margo and the rising Eve. As a friendly wag commented, “He [Staggs] stole the dish but left the meat!”

Little did I dream that Eric Young would give Mr. Staggs his own commentary track on the DVD to further explain why EVE is self-evidently a gay camp classic, nor that my own derogatory comment on Staggs’ book, “it’s quite awful,” would be retained, in isolation, when I had so much else to say in throwing dirt on Staggs’ casket-case of a book. Knowing my highly negative views, Mr. Young ought to have intercut me with Staggs fore scorching debate. That way I might have, authoritatively, set the record straight.

Instead, he paired me with two other voices (producer Christopher Mankiewicz, Joe’s argumentative older son, whom I recommended, and now whispery-voiced Celeste Holm, 83, the last survivor of the cast of EVE) on my track. Our commentary track has been ably edited by Mr. Young to suggest that we were all in the same studio, but ‘twas not so. On THE GHOST AND MRS MUIR DVD, also produced by Eric Young, my coeval, Jeanine Basinger keeps reintroducing me every time she finishes her long-winded spiels, “and now, critic Kenneth Geist” so you may be sure that we have never set eyes on each other.

To this date, I cannot bring myself to listen to the Verbal Version According to Staggs. It was irritating enough for me to read and to painstakingly annotate his text for review. However, every gay friend of mine who knows Staggs tells me he is a real sweetheart. I have declined two opportunities to meet him as his work continues to cause me so much superfluous grief.

Of course, my well-received biography of Mankiewicz was precisely the reason I was assigned Staggs’ book (in galleys) by a senior editor of the New York Times Book Review staff who was reciprocating a number of crucial favors I had done for him on the biography he was in the process of writing. ALL ABOUT EVE seemed like a slam dunk to a Mankiewicz scholar.

Now this editor and I both knew Staggs’ book was dreary as we had both read the long excerpt, totally devoid of novelty, which appeared in Vanity Fair more than a year before the book appeared. (All books are previewed by The Times to determine whether they merit review at all, and, if they do, whether they should be covered in long or brief form.)
I solved the problem of recycling the previously recycled by dismissing the book as a repository of all-too-well-known tales, and then writing a provocative essay on ALL ABOUT EVE based on my original views of its genesis. So, in short order, I dismissed Staggs’ book as poorly and pretentiously written; filled with trite trivia and anecdotage: and grievously padded by Staggs’ monumental-only-to-him discovery of the actual stage-door intruder who insinuated herself into Elizabeth Bergner’s life, thereby inspiring Mary Orr’s short story, “The Wisdom of Eve,” which, in turn, formed the basis for ALL ABOUT EVE. This self-impressed archeology is about as significant to Mankiewicz’ film as Staggs’ detailed chapter on “Applause,” the 1970 musical based on the plot and characters of ALL ABOUT EVE, but with all of Mankiewicz’s zingers replaced by the less elegant, musical comedy wit of Comden & Green.

This was not sufficient for my editor, however. If I was going to make such disparaging remarks, I would have to detail exactly what was wrong with every chapter. My deeply offensive male Gorgon, as I thought of him, lacked the politeness of other literary editors. When, for example, the Gorg requested a plot summary of “Eve,” he didn’t call me a numbskull nor a cretin in failing to supply one, but something far more wounding. In fact, all of the Gorg’s edits, great and small, were accompanied by hugely insolent comments on my illiteracy, stupidity, and ill-usage. And I absorbed this body-blow punishment for three, castigating edits. (I am pleased to see that the Times’ top film critics have recently employed the term “nexus,” which the Gorg thought only fit for Henry Miller and yours truly.)

Actually, I was the one being ill-used, but I had such a large investment of time in the damned review, that I swallowed my Gorgon’s contumely and pointed out why Zsa Zsa was only trashing Marilyn as a bimbo, because her then husband, George Sanders, was overinterested in MM. This was why Staggs had used a slanderous passage from Zsa Zsa’s autobiography to punch up the uneventful shooting history of EVE. The only bit of scandal on AAE was that Gary Merrill and Bette Davis, playing lovers in the film, fell for each other so completely that they quickly divorced their respective spouses in order to wed each other and make their lives a continual shouting match. This, in itself, was very, very old news. Fifty years old, to be precise.

By analyzing the sins of each chapter at my editor’s behest, I transformed my initial bored dismissal into a hatchet job. In fact, I made every change required of me by the Gorg, but for two:

I could never find a more apt nor witty summation had I tried
.
This conclusion seemed perfectly just for the loopy prose stylist who had written, “The subtext [of “All About Eve”] has beguiled several generations of devotees, largely gay men, who have ‘read’ the film as though it beamed a limelight into the closet of their hearts.” Ed Wood could have written that incredible sentence himself, but the Gorg said I could not defame a writer so definitively. “Subtext” my ass to gays’ appreciating the film even more than straights. Mankiewicz’ significance is in the lines, not beneath them.

As the Gorg never told me he was not running the piece until long after the pub date, I could not place it with another important book review. I am most grateful to my friend Roy Frumkes, who commended it, published it on his filmsinreview website, and commissioned the present essay.

My unfamiliarity with DVD commentaries caused me, at first, to decline the producer’s initial offer to speak to picture all through a full-length screening of EVE. Not knowing that the soundtrack would be muted for my remarks, I feared competing with Joe’s elegant dialogue and, also, that I would not have enough to say to cover the film’s running time of 138 minutes.

Initially, I chose only to make isolated comments on various aspects of the film to the producer Young’s Nagra tape recorder, placed on my travertine dining table in New York City. This accounts, possibly, for the inapposite scenes shown while I recount Joe’s explication of the fleeting shots which revealed Eve as a Lesbian (which were hard to slip by the censors, in 1950, when there were no Lesbians in the movies). My/Joe’s observations are, curiously, not synced to the shot of Eve and her roommate, arms linked, triumphantly climbing the boarding house stairs after luring the playwright from his marriage bed to tend the supposedly sick Eve; as well as the scene at the end, where the disgruntled Eve only warms to her young fan, Phoebe (who has snuck into her apartment) after persuading her to stay the night.

The second session, to record my opinions of THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR, (with additional comments on ALL ABOUT EVE) was conducted nearly two weeks later in a sound studio in Los Angeles with one technician running a large sound-monitoring board and another slowing or speeding through MRS. MUIR. Even though early morning is not my best hour, being able to comment to the picture and having it slowed or rewound as I directed was a boon to me as commentator.

My one grief was that I had made copious notes while screening MRS. MUIR in my hotel room, but I could not watch the monitor and look down to read my notes as, apparently, did Jeanine Basinger, my opposite number, who, I confess, puts me to sleep with her detailed, lengthy, reader’s precision. In comparison, my off-the-cuff comments are genuine while Professor Basinger seems like a pedant and supreme apple-polisher in commending every last one of Fox’s gifted technicians’ skills and vastly overpraising the limited gifts of Gene Tierney.

I knew I had done something perceptive when a noted editor in the publishing world told my partner, recently, that, “I should ease up on Gene Tierney,” I forget exactly what I said about the somnolent vacuity of this former cover girl with perfect cheekbones whom Fox made one of its wartime stars. I must try once more to endure Professor Basinger’s lecture to determine whether I only confined myself to Tierney’s monotonous line readings. Mankiewicz claimed that the Fox stars Tierney and Jeanne Crain were imposed upon him by Zanuck very much against his will.

Now, while it is perfectly true that Tierney and Crain could scarcely act a lick, neither could the Fox star Linda Darnell. One fundamental difference among these stunning women is that Darnell became a favorite Mankiewicz bedmate, and did well for her mentor-lover in A LETTER TO THREE WIVES and NO WAY OUT. Tierney was married to the zealously protective and successful designer Oleg Cassini, while Jeanne Crain was a fervent Catholic mother producing multiple bambini with a virile fellow named Paul Brinkman, as I recall.

Tierney is wiped off the screen by the flamboyant theatricality of Vincent Price in DRAGONWYCK, Mankiewicz’ first directorial effort, and Rex Harrison, polished in theater, film and life as a cad, does a neat job of scene-stealing from his titled co-star. However, Joe liked to play leading man to his leading ladies, and when they rebuffed him–he bridled. Jeanne Crain is perfectly swell in A LETTER TO THREE WIVES.

By Sam Staggs
Revised 4/04/00 / Illustrated. 369 pp.
New York: St. Martin’s Press / $24.95

Half a century after its 1950 release, All About Eve endures as “one of the most enjoyable movies ever made,” in Pauline Kael’s estimation. In part, this is because the film features a truly bravura performance by its star, Bette Davis, as a theatrical diva whose temper tantrums towards others are as much fun to watch as are her savage misgivings about herself.

But it is the remarkably literate and witty screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz which makes All About Eve a rarity among American film classics. Mankiewicz’s text is studded with bon mots a la Oscar Wilde, in addition to allusions to a host of historic theater figures. A backstage comedy of ill manners, played by a sterling cast, the film concerns the rise of a scheming actress (Anne Baxter)–the eponymous Eve–who plots to supplant a reigning Broadway star (Davis) by betraying every member of the star’s coterie after they have befriended her. All About Eve is really all about succeeding as well as succession.

Sam Staggs’ “All About ‘All About Eve’” is not nearly as comprehensive a work as its title suggests. It leaves out Mankiewicz’s own, elegant, 1972 essay on the film’s creation combined with his brilliant screenplay, titled “More About ‘All About Eve.’” Mr. Staggs denigrates Mankiewicz’s book as “turgid and meandering” while praising his own work by writing, “I had unified the contradictory narratives and random gossip into an authentic account of All About Eve and all those connected with it.”

Mr. Staggs commits such turgid sentences as, “The subtext has beguiled several generations of devotees, largely gay men, who have ‘read’ the film as though it beamed a limelight into the closet of their hearts.”

Despite his current book’s many charts and sidebars (every esoteric theater figure receives at least an introductory paragraph), this volume is composed almost entirely of stale gossip and marginal trivia in lieu of any significant analysis. (Mr. Staggs’ only previous publication is the obscure novel, “MM II: The Return of Marilyn Monroe.”)

Much space is given to such peripheral subjects as Mary Orr, the author of the 1946 Cosmopolitan short story, “The Wisdom of Eve,” on which All About Eve was based. Staggs also profiles Martina Lawrence, the real-life prototype of Orr’s Eve, who was befriended and then rejected by the actress Elisabeth Bergner. Though Staggs appreciates that Orr’s fiction is “a second-rate story in a forgotten magazine [sic]” and merely “the embryo” for Mankiewicz’s magisterial script, he gives Orr a parity with Mankiewicz which she does not deserve.

In this hodge-podge of a book, Staggs analyzes the coffee and ink stains as well as the lipstick blots in the archival copy of Bette Davis’s script at Boston University so portentously, that you can never take him seriously again.

Staggs discovers a “sacra conversazione ” in one of the film’s best-known production stills of Anne Baxter, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe and George Sanders at the “Fasten-your-seat-belts” party scene. But since the photo lacks a Virgin and Child, Staggs quickly changes his pretentious designation to one of “three types of female beauty.”

In Staggs’ most useful discovery, he cites seven lines from All About Eve which made their way into Edward Albee’s equally bitch-witted play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, (1962).

The only notable but well-worn story of the uneventful production–the scripted romance between Bette Davis and Gary Merrill becoming real–is expanded by Staggs to inordinate length. To spice up his tired gossip, the author reprints a scurrilous and highly implausible anecdote from Zsa Zsa Gabor’s autobiography depicting Marilyn Monroe as an insatiable nymphomaniac.

As if it weren’t very old news, Staggs outs Eve as a gay cult film.. This tiresome way of interpreting the picture may seem significant to Staggs, but such an appreciation is irrelevant to the film’s intrinsic merits.

By magnifying the subtly implied lesbianism of Eve and terming “bi-sexual” both Eve’s conqueror, the vicious theater critic Addison De Witt, as well as the actor who portrayed him (George Sanders), Staggs gives All About Eve far more of a gay spin than it warrants.

Though Staggs calls Mankiewicz “a heterosexual trapped in a gay sensibility,” the writer-director would have deplored any “hint of mint.” Mankiewicz was a noted womanizer who was highly contemptuous of both male and female homosexuals. When I had occasion to compare him with George Cukor as a famed director of actresses, Mankiewicz cracked that “George only befriended female stars. I fucked them!” This may be one of the reasons why Mankiewicz made the hateful Eve a lesbian.

Manifestations of Eve’s lesbianism are only twice briefly discernible. First, after a duplicitous late-night phone call to lure the married playwright to her room, Eve links arms with the caller (her rooming-house mate) and, both dressed in night wear, they joyfully climb the stairs together. Second, in the final scene, Eve’s hostility towards a young intruder melts after “Phoebe” offers to spend the night.

A more important topic in the film concerns the conflict between Broadway’s prestige and Hollywood’s lucre. It was a source of profound ambivalence to Mankiewicz and it keeps cropping up throughout All About Eve, although it is overlooked by the author of this supposedly authoritative study.

The film was actually a valentine to the theater community which Mankiewicz yearned to join, rather than the poison-pen letter many mistook it for. Although Mankiewicz moved to New York in 1952, he never realized his great ambition to become a Broadway playwright. He did complete one full-length play, Jefferson Selleck–contrary to Mr. Staggs’ claim that he never finished one–and began many others which he failed to conclude.

Staggs perceives that “in structure, Eve is the offspring of Citizen Kane,” but he refers only to such similarities as their multiple narrators and duplicated scenes shot from different perspectives, which Mankiewicz envisaged for Eve but which Darryl Zanuck (the film’s producer as well as the head of Twentieth Century Fox) deleted. A more significant correspondence between Citizen Kane and All About Eve can be found in the rivalry between the films’ respective writers. Herman Mankiewicz won a 1941 screenwriting Oscar for Citizen Kane, which his younger brother, Joe, greatly coveted. (Significantly, All About Eve is framed by a gilded awards ceremony.) Joe owed his film career to Herman’s bringing him to Los Angeles in 1929 when he was only 20. In the 1940s, as Joe ascended the ladder of success which Herman was skidding down, the highly competitive Joe was continually nettled by being known in the film colony as Herman’s “younger and less witty brother.” Though a role reversal with his brother had taken place, he could never forget this sobriquet as Herman’s junior and lesser.

All About Eve may be based, in part, on Orr’s short story, but the ongoing competition between the younger and older Mankiewicz brothers provides its unconscious vitality. The picture’s combat between an aging star, Margo Channing (Bette Davis), and a gifted, ambitious, and strikingly younger upstart, Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), is remarkably similar to the rivalry between Herman and Joe.

While Mr. Staggs puts Citizen Kane in his “pantheon of classic screenplays,” he fails to note how remarkable it is that the disparate but similar Mankiewicz brothers wrote two of the greatest American screenplays within a single decade.

Staggs claims that the film’s final image of Eve’s successor bowing to countless self-images, is a “mirror sequence” wholly “borrowed” from Orson Welles’ shattered mirror shoot-out at the end of The Lady from Shanghai. While Welles’ sequence is characteristically dynamic, Mankiewicz’s is static–albeit reverberant as a metaphor of youth’s inevitable succession. As usual, Staggs gets it wrong, and proves that he is to film journalism what Ed Wood was to filmmaking.