Ben Mankiewicz

“Season seven of TCM’s podcast The Plot Thickens is all about Stanley Kubrick. More than that, the podcast is being made in conjunction with Criterion. They’re our partners on it. So I’m going to start with the Kubrick movie that I first fell in love with. This is The Killing, from 1956. It’s his third movie. It is the nearly perfectly planned heist. Starts it off.”

“Now, second on the list is another Kubrick film. This is not because I’m overdoing Kubrick. This film would be on any list that I made at any time: Paths of Glory, which I was introduced to by John McCain, who came on TCM and picked the movie during the Iraq War. It aches with humanity, which leads to outrage, which I can barely control every single time I see it. Certainly the greatest World War One movie ever made. I think the greatest war film ever made. And that Kirk Douglas photo is… that’s really something. And Kubrick, you see all the magic of Stanley Kubrick in Paths of Glory.”

“So Humphrey Bogart’s best film, obviously Casablanca, because it’s the greatest studio film ever made, but it’s not really his best performance, even though it’s amazing. So that’s In a Lonely Place. He’s a down-and-out screenwriter. Things aren’t working out. Falls in love with his neighbor in this apartment complex they live in Hollywood. He’s broken and he is dangerous and he’s violent. And yet the magic of Humphrey Bogart keeps us on his side. I can’t get enough of this performance from Bogart. And if you want to know why Nick Ray’s a great director, you watch In a Lonely Place and you understand it.”

“The next film I’m going to choose is Louis Malle’s first movie, Elevator to the Gallows. Again, we’re rooting for criminals here. Bad criminals. The movie opens, they’re plotting a murder. But this is, like, a movie that reminds me what I think everybody should pay more attention to: how much luck there is in life, or bad luck there is in life. Man, it is random. Things happen, and then it’s how you adapt to these unforeseen circumstances that you could never imagine. But this is as good a crime movie and as good a bad-luck movie as there is.”

“So, my grandfather was a screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz. He wrote a film called Citizen Kane. It’s not a big deal. And I wasn’t going to include Citizen Kane because I talk about it a lot. And then I imagined the conversation after I did the Criterion Closet if my dad was still alive, Herman’s son, and if he said to me, “What’d you pick?” And I’d name the movies and then he’d go, “Did they not have Citizen Kane?” And I was, like, oh, man, I wouldn’t know what to say. So for my dad and for my cousin John Mankiewicz, my cousin Nick Davis, filmmakers, my brother, I’m picking Citizen Kane. But it is a reminder that we give Orson Welles all the credit for Citizen Kane, and he deserves it, it is his film, but this is a collaborative art. He had help from my grandfather. He had help from Robert Wise. He had help from Gregg Toland, shooting the film. He surrounded himself with experts. And that enabled Welles to be his best self and make this amazing, unforgettable film.”

“Nobody lightens things up better than Preston Sturges, who wrote and directed Sullivan’s Travels. It has maybe the line in movies that I use most in life: “I’m not a scientist. All I know is I’m hungry.” And when people question you about things that they have no business questioning you, answer them with, “I’m not a scientist. I just want to lie down on the couch.” Whatever it is, you’re okay, man, and you don’t have to defend your actions. And Veronica Lake, we’re still hungry.”

“I did plan to end this with four movies from the greatest ten-year period in the history of American films, 1967 to 1976. I want to start with the Martin Scorsese film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, with Ellen Burstyn. She was coming off The Exorcist, had tremendous power in Hollywood. She got to pick her director. She called Francis Ford Coppola, asking for a… “Who’s a hot young filmmaker who could understand this?” And he mentioned this guy Martin Scorsese. And it has a great soundtrack, because it’s a Martin Scorsese film, and it opens with “All the Way from Memphis,” Mott the Hoople.”

“Okay. So, continuing from that era, my favorite actor might be Gene Hackman. So I went with Night Moves, Arthur Penn’s film. Plays a former football player who’s a private eye, and he is reflective of the times. He has grown incredibly cynical about the world, about institutions. This is a very post-Vietnam and certainly post-Watergate film. And it has as good an ending as you can have in a movie.”

“Continuing with crime, apparently. I really– that was not my intent, but it seems pretty clear that’s where we are. Friends of Eddie Coyle, man. I discovered this movie while at TCM. This isn’t a big-crime film. This is a little-crime film. These are… These are Boston low-level gangsters. There’s a scene in this film with… with Mitchum and… and the woman who plays his wife, an actress named Helena Carroll, and it’s a beautiful moment that gives you a look at a marriage that you don’t really see in the movies that often. It makes me emotional just thinking about it. I love, love, love Friends of Eddie Coyle.”

“You know, I spend a lot of time trying not to be hyperbolic. And I get in this Closet and I get enormously hyperbolic. But this is the best documentary, certainly I’ve ever seen: Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA. This plays like a political thriller, an action movie, a tense drama. It has high-profile murder. It has danger. It has menace. And then it has just the… the drudgery and the commitment and the compassion that these miners and their families have for each other. It’s a great, great, great American film.”

“So that’s ten movies. But I am going to add one more. This Is Spinal Tap. Now, so smart, but mostly what it is uproariously funny. But I wanted to include Spinal Tap because this, this bag goes to 11.”