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“... or Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959). It’s too intelligent for one thing: its director is, after all, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who had made not only Julius Caesar (1953) but also All About Eve (1950) and The Barefoot Contessa (1954). What he couldn’t do here was get the actors to rise to some of the wit in the lines, and so what ...”

“... out to be McCarthy’s last crusade; in a formal and spectacular sense, his career ended when Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer and counsel for the army, replied to the ascription of Communist connections to a young lawyer on his staff: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ McCarthyism had been ...”

“... including that of filming in England, with uneasy backing and a perhaps too-pat idea. Tirez sur le pianiste, his second full-length feature, had actually been enrichedby mixing slapstick, melodrama, romance and tragedy, whatever some reviewers wrote at the time. And although La Chambre Verte (1978), at last to be seen in ...”

“... she saw in Sinatra, a ‘hundred-and-nineteen-pound has-been’. Ava blandly replied: ‘Well, I’ll tell you – nineteen pounds is cock.’ Broadly speaking, Ava Gardner’s life is that of a small-town girl who became a Hollywood star, then a hard-drinking rabble-rouser, and finally a grand and rather sad old lady with a corgi and a maid living in one of ...”

“... chap is the same fluent character we see on the big screen.) When talking about the films of Joseph Mankiewicz and Preston Sturges, both of whom she admires – two more testaments to her acumen – DiBattista is obliged to concede in each case that the writer-director is the shaping spirit. But in most other cases you would swear she believed that ...”

“... In​ the early 1920s, Herman J. Mankiewicz (‘Mank’) and Ben Hecht were not very successful writers in New York. Then Mank ventured west, the first of what was to become an exodus of literary talent to the Hollywood movie studios. In 1925, Mank summoned Hecht to join him with an offer of $300 a week to write for Paramount Pictures: ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots ...”

“... not suggestions: ‘Orson only knew one way and that was “Now everybody keep quiet and I’ll tell you what to do.” That was his only way of working. He simply didn’t know any other.’ He was not much good at sharing either, as Howard Koch, Herman Mankiewicz, John Houseman and others discovered to their ...”

“... both on and within the industry (his previous books include a study of the Hollywood censor Joseph Breen). He concludes, with some generosity, that when it came to dealing with the Nazis, Hollywood was ‘no worse than the rest of American culture in its failure of nerve and imagination, and often a good deal better in the exercise of both’. Urwand ...”

“... band in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, playing, with numbing tediousness, a tango, ‘La Cumparsita’, sodden at half-tempo, followed by a sleepwalk through that ‘perennial favourite, "Stardust"’. The music was interrupted once for a bulletin, something about an atmospheric event on Mars, a series of pulses each ‘like a jet of blue flame ...”

“... Rome under Augustus leading into two chapters on Cleopatra movies from the early 20th century to Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 ‘Lizpatra’, as the Taylor/Burton epic was nicknamed. The first essay makes it clear why Chauveau’s attempt to ‘exorcise the myth’ of Cleopatra and concentrate only on the ‘facts’ was doomed to be so short. Very little ...”

“... was attuned to this is again an understatement. In 1950, a mere starlet with a walk-on part in Joseph Mankiewicz’s All about Eve, she took the autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, the original muck-raking journalist, onto the set. All about Eve is another of her films about the lengths to which an actress will go to make it. Steffens is famous for ...”