Artistry, power and madness collide in ‘Mank’
Often regarded as the greatest film of all-time, Orson Welles 1941 masterpiece of epic cinema, Citizen Kane, is a film that still inspires to this day and any noted fan of the cinema knows of its power and grandiosity.
Now noted director David Fincher takes audiences behind the scheming and power struggles that led to this grand picture in Mank, his feature length-biography of Citizen Kane’s screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, here to be played by Academy Award winner Gary Oldman, in a thunderous piece of cinema.
An all-new trailer has been released and it teases the scope and scale of Mank. Check it out below;
Watch my full reaction video for Mank below:
Here’s the official synopsis:
The story centres around the life of Herman J. Mankiewicz as he wrote Citizen Kane, and the problems that arose with Orson Welles during production and leading up to the film’s release.
Shot in glorious black and white, Mank is a uniquely personal film for Fincher, who adapts the feature-length screenplay written by his own father Jack Fincher, who sadly passed away in 2003. Fincher has been wanting to bring the story of Mank to the big screen for over a decade now, and the result is film is a piece of cinema that honours both Hollywood’s past along with it’s future due to the film’s release through Netflix.
To bring this historical piece of cinema to life, Fincher has assembled a stellar cast to join Oldman who include Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies, Lily Collins as Rita Alexander, Arliss Howard as Louis B. Mayer, Tom Pelphrey as Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Sam Troughton as John Houseman, Ferdinand Kingsley as Irving Thalberg, Tuppence Middleton as Sara Mankiewicz with Tom Burke as Orson Welles and Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst.
The new trailer paints an amazing picture of the creation behind Citizen Kane, from the friendship that endured between Mank and Marino Davies, mistress to William Randolph Hearst, the battles waged between Mank and Welles over the content of Kane, and the animosity that existed between Mank and Hearst.
Alongside the characters introduced in the trailer for Mank, audiences also get a look into the lavish lifestyle lived by Hearst at his San Simeon mansion, along with a taste of new score from Fincher’s frequent collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross who have developed a score that is in keeping solely with the film’s time period.
Mank is a film to be especially excited about and it will arrive on Netflix on December 4.
Image: Netflix
