Exactly. I wanted McCarey on the other side. Sorry for the posting error.
> Which brings up another point. McCarey never did a decent movie unless he had a decent screenwriter to tell him what he needed to do.
He was interesting twice for me: "Make Way For Tomorrow" and "Once Upon a Honeymoon" (strictly for perverse reasons). But McCarey does have support among some cinephiles, so he is not written off by all. But I have never been able to work up much enthusiasm for his work.
> When he was assigned to or chose a decent screenplay he could churn out a good movie. Other wise he churned out some of the most torturous insufferable movies that only an auteurist could find something good in.
Such are the wages of being an auteurist. I take a great deal of heat for my passion and support for Joseph L. Mankiewicz. He is a bete noir for many auteurists, and I only aggravate them further by claiming that Mankiewicz is not only a great screenwriter and director of actors, but a compelling visual stylist as well. And thank you Andie for mentioning my book. It will be out in January. It is a collection of interviews given by Mankiewicz over the years (all the major ones are included). There is already a bio of Mankiewicz out by Kenneth Geist which will most likely remain the standard. Only a handful of the directors of the classical period get more than one biography. What Mankiewicz is in greater need of is critical writing (Patricia White's "The Uninvited" has a wonderful chapter on "All About Eve," but her incisive critique is the exception rather than the rule).
> But of course the brothers Mankiewicz knew how to use their pens to construct a story and brother Joseph knew how to tell that story with a camera.
You are the rare person to see that. My own argument runs that Mankiewicz understood space and environmernt so well that his characters' dialogue seems to be inspired by the very spaces in which they find themselves. Eric Sherman (son of director Vincent Sherman) has a nice article on Maniewicz and his use of space in Jean-Pierre Coursodon's "American Directors."
You can see Mankiewicz's influence on both Rohmer and Rivette (though Rivette would later defame JLM) and also (in a different way) in Fassbinder.
Brian