Recently Watched: Inside Baseball Edition

Our traditional Friday night movie night pick this week, by my wife, was A Christmas Story, which she had not seen. Usefully, it was also the last Bob Clark film on my list to rewatch, after digging into his work earlier in the fall. Christmas Story is charming, of course, and very well-known by now, though I had only seen it once or twice in my life and never had a great affinity for it. That condition continues—it’s cute and strange and has a warm nostalgic blanket thrown over it, like Radio Days or something, without the polish.

Also recently rewatched Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a masterful horror film that fails to announce itself as horror, at first, but creates an unbearable tension by practically hypnotizing us to notice every single instance of the color red. Once we are hooked into doing so, Roeg plays us like a harp, deploying a red menace in bits and pieces in at least half of his frames, as our protagonists lose their grip on reality. One of the best evocations of memory and stream of consciousness as it relates to tragedy in cinema.

And Mank arrived on Netflix yesterday. A new David Fincher movie is always something of an occasion; for me, this was separately exciting because I am an old-Hollywood nerd and Citizen Kane is one of my favorite films. I am a great audience for a film about Herman Mankiewicz writing the first draft of Kane, peopled with legends like Mayer and Thalberg and Selznick and Davies and Hearst and Welles—though I can’t imagine much of a general audience for this film. It’s one of the most inside baseball Hollywood stories I’ve ever seen—which is great for me, but I think far too obscure for audiences made up of people who have never even seen Kane, much less appreciated it, much less ever learned anything at all about Hollywood history.

But it’s a wonderful script—a passion project of Fincher’s late father, Jack—and beautifully filmed and acted. My only complaint—I was more concerned about this possibility before seeing it, but even after—is that it may reignite long-settled arguments about Citizen Kane’s authorship in a confusing way. Pauline Kael’s famous 1971 essay, “Raising Kane,” for years dominated discussions of the creative contributions of the two credited writers on the film, Mankiewicz and Welles, but was largely bunk in the way it tried to excise Welles from the story of the script. This film does nothing to address the impression that Welles was not involved in the creation of the script; this is simply a false narrative. Robert Carringer’s intensive scholarship for his excellent book The Making of Citizen Kane (1996) makes clear that Welles fully deserved his co-writing credit; that the first draft depicted in Mank was a glorious starting point, but was heavily revised before production. It would be a shame if Mank were to mislead a new audience for Kane by omission.