Word: mankowitz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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They had spent the evening among sharpies and shills and slick-talking swindlers dedicated to the ancient shopkeeper's art of conning the customer. But London's theater critics were delighted. When it opened in the West End last week, Wolf Mankowitz' brash, breezy new comedy, Make Me An Offer, rang up just the sort of sale the playwright was bargaining for. "When the British musical finally finds its feet," said the staid Financial Times, "we may well remember Make Me An Offer as a landmark...
...Soldiers Never Die, by Wolf Mankowitz. A richly comic novel about a Cockney indestructible and his mute pal, who trip up Britain's Welfare State (TIME, Sept...
Thus with proud self-derision the Old Contemptibles* of 1914 sang as they marched to battle. British Author Wolf Mankowitz has written a superb novel about an Old Contemptible who has lived beyond his era, beyond World War II (when everything was "more efficient"), and on into the Welfare State. The old fellow recalls the recruiting poster of World War I, "Kitchener Wants You," and adds his sardonic comment: "He's about the only bastard what does...
...Author Mankowitz might well be Britain's answer to the Schweppes Man, proving that the language of England is not a clipped and snooty modification of the inarticulate. Born in London's East End, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper, Mankowitz took himself on a scholarship to Cambridge, ran a shop, became an authority on Wedgwood china, worked as a film scenarist. He writes best about what he knows best: the cockney. His unforgettable cockney Quixote belongs not (as Novelist Elizabeth Bowen suggests on the book jacket) with James Joyce but with Joyce Gary's articulate...
...trade winds, and love is as free as coconuts. This is for Rantz. Joyously he explains his bag of tricks-which may or may not symbolize civilization. The natives realize that instead of being dread magic and tools of humiliation, the Rantz line is really for laughs. Versatile Novelist Mankowitz, a scriptwriter, playwright and dealer in Wedgwood, is too soft a man for tough satire, and lets his shrewd observations on the human condition melt into sugary fantasy. In the end Laugh Till You Cry falls flat somewhere between Walter Mitty and Dean Swift, but it is good...