In 1971 - the year of its 30th anniversary - legendary film critic Pauline Kael wrote a mammoth two-part essay for the New Yorker in which she sought to re-evaluate and recontextualise the success of Citizen Kane — the film that many still consider the greatest ever made but which destroyed the Hollywood dreams of its director and star Orson Welles.
Kael's essay, Raising Kane, looked at the way in which the film, through its thinly fictionalised portrayal of the hubris and megalomania of real-life publishing magnate and serious power-player Randolph William Hearst, sowed the seeds of its own immediate destruction. This was thanks to fears of retribution among the studio heads and stars of Hollywood's golden age.
Welles, the New York wonder boy who had been lured to Hollywood by the RKO Studio heads with unheard-of promises of full creative control, would spend the rest of his life struggling to find funding for his films and using whatever acting jobs he was still permitted to do to bankroll his cinematic ambitions.
Kael also importantly refocused the story of Kane on the personal history and acerbic wit of its screenwriter - an inveterate gambler and hopeless alcoholic named Herman Mankiewicz, who'd once been part of the anointed social circle at Hearst's fabled California castle San Simeon.
Mankiewicz, who fellow legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht once described as "the Central Park West Voltaire", had been part of the seminal generation of writers in the early period of Hollywood who straddled the transition from silent films to talkies. He'd been one of the silver-tongued, wise-cracking writers who'd gather at New York's Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s and who'd go on to become the core group of writers employed by Harold Ross at his new magazine the New Yorker.
There, Mankiewicz took on theatre critic duties, before, like many east coast writers before and after him, making the trip west to capitalise on the large pay cheques and hunger for stories of Hollywood producers.
By the time Welles arrived in Hollywood to begin his takeover of the movie business, Mankiewicz was, at the age of 44, a has-been, a pariah — a typical Icarus casualty of the swiftly changing moods of Hollywood, whose gambling, drinking and love of a scurrilous quip had proved too much for the men who ran the dream factories.
Once the favoured court jester of Hearst, he was now banished from the castle of the publisher king and so, with only his trusty pen and sharply morbid sense of humour left in his arsenal, Mankiewicz used what he saw as his last chance to fight back against his former patron.
He wrote what he knew, creating an epic, innovative modern American fable about the personal corruption of power. Kane was not just the story of Hearst, but also the story of Mankiewicz and ultimately would become the story of Welles himself.
David Fincher's new film Mank - ostensibly about the making of Citizen Kane told through the story of its overlooked screenwriter - is Fincher's strongest work in a decade.
Played with grizzly charm and haggard world-weariness by Gary Oldman, Mankiewicz is depicted as a man who's been beaten down by the very charms and wit that offered him countless spat-upon chances within the world of which he was once a prince. The aged-by-excess screenwriter found his Holy Grail in the script for the film he originally titled, "American".
The writing process isn't made any easier by a car accident that renders him bedridden with a broken leg at a ranch miles from Los Angeles where Welles (Tom Burke), fearful of his writer's legendary self-sabotage, has imprisoned him in the care of a personable but firm secretary (Lily Collins), a severe German physiotherapist (Monika Gossmann) and nervous Welles confidant, the actor John Houseman (Sam Troughton).
Welles has also ensured that Mank's prison is dry, substituting bottles of alcohol (that he'd promised) with a sedative and cutting the delivery deadline by a month to 60 days. As Mankiewicz sits battling his demons and his deadlines, the film, in homage to Citizen Kane, begins to flash backwards in time to moments from its protagonist's memory that add up to a revealing and rambling exploration of some of the events that have led him to this point — and a famous final battle with Welles for credit for his masterpiece.
Written by Fincher's father, Jack, (who died in 2003) and shot in a technically dazzling homage to the ground-breaking deep-focus photography of Kane's cinematographer Gregg Toland, Mank has a suitably winking modern Jazz Age soundtrack by long-time Fincher music collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Mank is not only a brilliant tribute to the film that caused all the trouble in 1941, but also a universally relatable Shakespearian tragicomedy about the regrets and insights of a once wise fool in exile. It's also a sharply written and lovingly realised tribute to Mankiewicz and the other forgotten writers of the generation that helped, more than any other, to give the American talking pictures of the 1930s their own unique and distinctive voice.
Films about filmmaking often tend towards navel-gazing and self-absorption, which makes them pretty unappealing to anyone except film geeks, but Fincher has managed here to offer something deeper than a mere trip down a narrow alleyway of forgotten movie lore. That's thanks to a meeting of his singular technical brilliance with performances that create empathetic portrayals of the real people behind the glamour portraits.
There's also a slight but effective political subplot that offers some pertinent criticism of the tendency of Hollywood to be governed more by fear than fidelity to any guiding moral principles. This often makes it easy prey for those wishing to harness its powers for the purposes of dangerous propaganda creation and the dissemination of fake news.
Like the film that Mankiewicz had no small part in creating and which still towers above the history of cinema, Fincher's film shares with Kane the theme that Kael described as, "how brilliantly gifted men who seem to have everything it takes to do what they want are defeated. It's the story of how heroes become comedians and con artists."
• 'Mank' is available on Netflix
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