Background
Mann, Delbert was born on January 30, 1920 in Lawrence, Kansas, United States. Son of Delbert Martin and Ora (Patton) Mann.
Mann, Delbert was born on January 30, 1920 in Lawrence, Kansas, United States. Son of Delbert Martin and Ora (Patton) Mann.
Mann was educated at Vanderbilt and Yale universities, and after war service in the air force he worked in stock as a director. In 1949 he joined NBC and became a director on Philco Playhouse and many other series, handling the original productions of Marty and The Bachelor Party.
It is a long way from the TV originality of Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty and Bachelor Party to Mann’s hollow adaptations of nineteenth-century classics.
In the 1960s, Mann lost interest and submitted to facile romances. Only Dear Heart and Mister Bnddwing are watchable—for the sake of Glenn Ford and Geraldine Page in the first and Jean Simmons in the latter. Mann has since turned to devour himself. Once the prophet of TV realism, he makes bland TV versions of Great Novels. His David Coppeifield is drab beside Cukor's, and Jane Eyre, despite George C. Scott and Susannah York, is not as enjoyable as the Orson Welles-Joan Fontaine haunted house version.
Mann became a stalwart of TV movies, versatile but anonymous, known for his proficiency. He did a version of All Quiet on the Western Front that used Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine; Bronte was Julie Harris doing her one-woman show on Charlotte Bronte; The Gift of Love was schmaltz; The Last Days of Patton hired George C. Scott back to his best-knowm role
Board trustees Vanderbilt University, 1962-2007. 1st lieutenant United States Army Air Force, World War II. B-24 pilot and squadron intelligence officer, 1944-1945.
Member Directors Guild American (past president 1967-1971) (Directors Guild award, 1955), Kappa Alpha.
Delbert Mann was among the most welcomed of directors who broke into movies from TV in the mid-1950s. Marty was a modest artistic achievement, but a popular novelty, given Oscars as tokens of Hollywood's good intentions. Marty was already flawed by the sentimentality that has increased in Mann’s work—not least in the casting of Ernest Borgnine, a stock heavy only able to work through pathos. But The Bachelor Party was a far better film, beautifully acted and with an accurate sense of American middle-class anxieties, such as only John Cassavetes has since explored.
Perhaps Mann was warned off such mundane subjects. For he switched disastrously to stage adaptations, the first hopelessly inadequate, the second shamelessly ticking off every cliché in Rattigan’s original—the well-made film. Middle of the Night was Chayefsky again with touching performances from Fredric March and Kim Novak. But Burl Ives and Sophia Loren Under the Elms were hopelessly shaded by the looming poetry of O’Neills language.
Married Ann Caroline Gillespie, January 13, 1942 (deceased October 10, 2001). Children: David Martin, Frederick G., Barbara Susan (deceased 1976), Steven P.