Delbert Mann, film producer and B24 pilot

[Adrian Roberts]

I must admit I had never heard of this Hollywood film producer, but it seems he was a B24 pilot in the war.

Delbert Mann, who has died aged 87, began his career in television, but it was his adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky's play Marty as a film that made his reputation in Hollywood, winning him an Oscar for best director in 1955.

Starring Ernest Borgnine as an awkward Italian-American Bronx butcher, and Betsy Blair as the equally awkward teacher with whom he gets involved, the film broke new ground with its ordinary-looking "stars", its colloquial dialogue and overlapping, interrupted conversations.

The crowded small sets and static camera work reflected Mann's theatrical background and, though they now seem dated, focused the audience's attention on the characters and their relationships. As well as the award for best director, the film won Oscars for best picture and best screenplay.

advertisementThe son of two schoolteachers, Delbert Martin Mann was born on January 30 1920 at Lawrence, Kansas, and grew up in Nashville, Tennesee.

After taking a degree in Political Science at Vanderbilt University he served during the Second World War with the US Army Air Corps as a B24 bomber pilot and squadron intelligence officer.

While studying at Vanderbilt, Mann had become involved in a community theatre group and after the war he took a master's degree in Drama from Yale on the GI Bill.

After graduation Mann worked as a regional theatre director in South Carolina before joining NBC in New York as a television floor manager.

He soon moved to directing, specialising in one-off dramas in the Philco and Goodyear Television Playhouse slots.

It was for this series that he first directed Chayefsky's Marty and, though reviews were lukewarm, the play's gritty social realism attracted considerable press coverage. Subsequently United Artists invited Mann to adapt it for the big screen, reputedly as a tax write-off.

After Marty, Mann went on to make The Bachelor Party (1957) and Middle of the Night (1959), both adapted from television plays.

Other projects included the Terrence Rattigan adaptation Separate Tables (1958), with Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth, David Niven and Burt Lancaster; The Outsider (1961), with Tony Curtis; and the Doris Day comedies Lover Come Back (1961), with Rock Hudson, and That Touch of Mink (1962), with Cary Grant.

His Kidnapped (1971) was notable for its unlikely casting of Michael Caine as a Scottish highlander. Caine later complained that it was the only film for which he had never been paid.

Mann continued to work in television, directing made-for-TV versions of David Copperfield (1969), Jane Eyre (1970) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1979).

His production of Heidi (1968) became notorious when its punctual broadcast by NBC eclipsed the final minute of a dramatic American football game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders in which the Raiders pulled off a last-minute coup, converting a Jets lead of 32-29 to a Raiders victory of 43-32.

The debacle became known as the "Heidi Game", though Mann himself was less upset by the barrage of viewers' complaints than by the fact that NBC, its switchboards jammed by irate football fans, decided to superimpose the final scores over the touching scene in which Heidi's wheelchair-bound friend Klara gets up and walks.

Delbert Mann, who died on November 11, married, in 1942, Caroline Gillespie. She predeceased him, and he is survived by their three sons.

[Antipodean Andy]

Never heard of him either, AR. Good post.

Delbert Mann (I) - Biography

After his 1941 graduation from Vanderbilt, Mann joined the Army and was assigned to the Air Corps, eventually becoming a pilot with the Eighth Air Force. As a B-24 bomber pilot with the "Mighty Eighth," Mann, flew thirty-five combat missions in the European Theater of Operations. After being demobilized at the end of WWII, interested in another kind of theater, he attended the Yale Drama School. From Yale, he moved on to a directing job with the Town Theatre of Columbia, South Carolina.

[Kyt]

I can't say I'd ever heard of himeither. But most producers tend to be forgotten over directors.

I wonder which units he flew in?