What the Extraordinary DVD of CITIZEN KANE May Not Tell You.
Written: Jan 05 '00 (Updated Jun 21 '07)
Product Rating:
Pros: An intense dream/nightmare about the life we are encouraged to try to attain.
Cons: A film without sentimentality, originally conceived as a love story, requiring dedicated observation.
The Bottom Line: CITIZEN KANE is the finest monochromatic film ever made in America: the story of all of us (Orson Welles in particular) who decry but crave a life of luxury.
One wet Sunday last year, walking by the Red Vic Theater, in the upper Haight of San Francisco, I glanced at a lobby poster.
CITIZEN KANE was playing.
My afternoon was free, and I saw by my watch the show would start in five minutes.
I haven't seen it in a theater . . . for years, I thought.
On an impulse, I stepped up and bought a ticket.
Once inside, I was surprised to discover the theater full, mostly of young people. I found a seat between two talkative couples. But, from the moment the lights dimmed, and the RKO logo, followed by those brief, stark white credits on the silent black screen, no one spoke, and the crunch of popcorn dissipated. We sat rapt for almost two hours, and just as the lights came up again, the audience gave a rapid fire burst of applause.
Next to me, two girls were weeping.
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What else can we say about CITIZEN KANE, sixty years after its creation? It starts with . . . rosebud -- and ends . . . with all the things we get for Christmas, the stuff with which we furnish our homes, the gadgets we spend our money on, the photos of "happier times" we keep in the garage, the games and jigsaw puzzles that take up our lives, the junk around us when we die: everything that is given to others, sold second-hand, or buried, thrown away, cremated . . . gone.
It has all been said before.
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On its surface, CITIZEN KANE, as many of us know, is the fragmentary biography of a poor little boy from the West of America, who becomes World-famous when he is catapulted by chance into celebrity and power. In a series of Time/Life-like interviews by a faceless reporter we learn in contradictory fashion how he seasoned a life of pleasure and collecting by running a newspaper; how he made the Inquirer grow into a transcontinental chain; and how he lost control of that chain in the Great Depression. We follow him through two failed marriages, his thwarted ambitions in politics, and his lonely old age in a great Medieval replica he put together from pieces of real castles: Xanadu.
But underneath, CITIZEN KANE is nothing less than a symbolic biography of the primal Cain, and of the great majority of Americans, rich or poor, weak or powerful. We, like Charles Foster Kane, follow the practices of Western Civilization by taking part in tribal rituals, exorcising kindness, losing hope, gathering useless goods about us, often betraying our brothers, spouses, children for material possessions; and we buy a house, perhaps, but die feeling we should have accomplished more -- all those dreams of our childhood.
We have heard of "the boy genius," Orson Welles (1915-1985), just 24 years-old when he arrived in Hollywood, July 1939, to write, produce, direct and star in his first film! Child of a broken home in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he had burst on the New York theatrical scene in 1936, when he and John Houseman formed the astonishing Mercury Theater, which Welles parlayed into a National radio series. In 1938, a Mercury Theater on the Air Production of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" was so realistic, and Americans so gullible, that it was widely accepted as an actuality, and he became famous all over the World.
RKO, in receivership to the Rockefellers, was desperate for a gimmick which would jump start them with the American Public. What better publicity stunt than to give Orson Welles an exclusive contract to write, produce, direct, and star in a film for RKO? (Hopefully THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.) But Welles was already in Paradise; he would not sell his soul easily. Through his Attorney Arnold Weissberger, he demanded and got a 64 page contract guaranteeing him carte blanche over three films of his choice -- with FINAL CUT, unheard of in Hollywood of that day.
When he alighted from the train in Hollywood, Welles brought with him his knowledge of the theater, his experience in radio; and, due to an unsuccessful wrestling match with thousands of feet of film shot for his stage production of Too Much Johnson in 1938, he had a respectful notion that a film resembled a linear jigsaw puzzle -- a ribbon of dreams, as he later put it.
That jigsaw puzzle idea is the key to CITIZEN KANE'S convoluted, Swiss movement structure. Reflect on references to jigsaw puzzles and magic in the film. (Welles had an aunt back in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who believed in "the Black Arts" and cast spells; Welles himself had an interest in magic all his life.) A first-time viewer's attention is called to the fact that, in the famous opening sequence, when we see the dying Kane fondle a little globe enclosing a rustic winter scene, snow swirls within the globe . . . but also within the room he sits.
Pieces of old and new material are combined in crazy, magical montages, as in Kane's dictatorial excursion to the beach, which uses clips from an early horror film. The renowned beginning of the film "quotes" a bracketing sequence from BEAU GESTE (Wellman, 1939), a radio version of which Welles worked on early in 1939 with Laurence Olivier. Much of the musical score in the equally famous "News on the March" sequence (itself a jigsaw film puzzle) is quoted from movies of the time - i.e., the score for GUNGA DIN (RKO, Newman, 1939). And of course, Susan, the second Mrs Kane, spends scene after scene trying to put together . . . jigsaw puzzles.
Like the varied puzzling testimonies that make up CITIZEN KANE, the past couple of years have seen several unreliable projects based on Welles' work, early and late: CRADLE WILL ROCK, RKO 281, THE BIG BRASS BAND, not to mention the superb "completion" of TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), true end of black and white film noir. But what interests us now seems to be what interested the "News on the March" correspondent then: a simple, not totally accurate explanation of the "facts" of a human life -- William Randolph Hearst or Orson Welles, take your pick -- and a good measure of destructive gossip.
How truly American.
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Can anything new be said about the film itself?
Let me give it a try.
According to David Thomson, James Naremore and other biographers, when Charles Foster Kane, the real Charles Foster Kane, the one in the script, was born in the high desert at Victorville, California, he was known simply as AMERICAN. His gestation was a long one. He was born out of Joseph Conrad's classic short story THE HEART OF DARKNESS . . . at first as THE SMILER WITH A KNIFE . . . and at one point, an assassin on THE ROAD TO SANTIAGO. All of these works had been considered as a subject for The Mercury Theater's crucial first film in Hollywood.
Herman J. Mankiewicz was brought aboard, and may indeed have been Charles Foster Kane's father. He was a veteran professional writer, with a drinking problem, who had written his first screenplay, THE ROAD TO MANDALAY, for Lon Chaney in 1926. He had been fired by every major studio in Hollywood by 1939, when he found himself (in the past and future company of Howard Koch, Abraham Polonsky and Arthur Miller) writing a radio play in New York for "The Mercury Theater on the Air"(known by then as "The Campbell Playhouse").
Mankiewicz after his last firing (for gambling in the MGM commissary) had broken his leg. Some claimed he drove his car drunkenly into the great iron gates of the L. B. Mayer estate. Others said the fracture was caused in a car accident, with a friend in the desert, when he tried to return to New York to find work. In any case, he rebroke the leg falling down the steps of Chasen's Restaurant in Hollywood, and Welles, who proved to have notoriously fragile legs himself, heard of it and put him, like dozens of other talented people, on the Mercury payroll at $200 a week.
Young Welles liked the flair of the older man, his stories of bygone newspaper days, and newer ones about Hollywood, where Welles would soon move his radio show, closer to the Mercury movie project. Mank, as he was called, managed to go to lunch with Welles in New York, and they hit it off. Despite the fact Mankiewicz forgot a crucial clue in his first project (an adaptation of an Agatha Christie detective story), Welles brought him, still bedridden, back to Hollywood. He was to write, per his contract, under the editorial supervision of Producer John Houseman, subject to Welles' overview and final judgment. Mank soon completed, among others, scripts for "Dodsworth," "Vanity Fair," and "Huckleberry Finn."
Welles spent a fruitless year on false starts for The Mercury Theater's first projects. Most of the vehicles (THE HEART OF DARKNESS, etc.) were vetoed by RKO on budget or censorship considerations. He was desperate. The Mercury Theater members were restless, frightened. During an infamous dinner at Chasen's, Welles lost his temper at John Houseman's complaints and threw a flaming chafing dish at him. It was an act that harbinged the end of their legendary partnership. He was to lose his Jed Leland, the steady, reliable Houseman, but for a while they continued to cooperate professionally.
One evening, they all sat down to plan a movie -- almost any movie.
As Mankiewicz remembered it, Welles wanted to do a life of Alexander Dumas in the form of a MARCH OF TIME newsreel. (Welles, from 1934 on, played everyone from Mussolini to all the Dionne Quintuplets in a radio version of that popular documentary movie series.) Gradually, the subject transformed itself to that of "The Robber Barons," immensely wealthy men who controlled Iron, Steel, Horses, Shipping in the late 19th Century, and later on, newspapers, magazines, radio, motion pictures . . . .
All parts of the Great Jigsaw Puzzle that is American Life.
The story of a newspaper tycoon, perhaps?
Mankiewicz had worked for Examiner newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. He often visited Hearst's great San Simeon estate on the lonely coast north of LA, before Hearst decided Mankiewicz's drinking habits were a temptation for his mistress, Marion Davies. Welles was intrigued by Hearst. His father, an early day auto headlight manufacturer and general speculator, had chased women with Hearst as a young man. Welles' aristocratic first wife Virginia was newly married to screenwriter Charles Lederer, Marion Davies' favorite nephew. They had told him stories about Hearst.
It was agreed that Mankiewicz would write a first draft at an increased salary of $1000 a week, with provisions similar to those in his existing contract. Anything Mankiewicz wrote became "the property and in the authorship of The Mercury Theater." Later, when he realized how good the film would be, and that Welles, as was his habit, would be taking full credit, Mank brought the matter to arbitration. The continuity script shows -- in Welles' hand -- a circle and arrow drawn to move Mankiewicz's name above his own.
As Welles told his cast later, according to Ruth Warrick (Emily Kane), the first Mercury film was to be a story of the kind of man we Americans admire, emulate, want to be -- for all the wrong reasons.
Welles made peace with Houseman, had him and a secretary haul Mankiewicz out to the desert, far from temptation, to write. The result, AMERICAN, was to be about communication in the broadest sense (and, of course, the lack of it). Count the mediums by which the story is told: every way but by TV. The script went through at least six drafts after the first one, with both Houseman and Welles adding scenes, which had been their practice in radio.
The general outline of Mank's script followed a jigsaw puzzle of the lives of self-made or lucky plutocrats who dominated America from the Civil War onward: Hearst, observed nearby at his movie unit on the MGM Lot; Reaper King Harold McCormick, who married Edith Rockefeller, and for his Polish mistress, Ganna Walska, bankrolled an opera house in Chicago; John D Rockefeller, Sr, recently dead, whose grandson, Nelson Rockefeller, Jr, Welles knew in New York; Samuel Insull, much in the tabloids for his return to America to face prosecution, having absconded to Greece with a fortune . . . many others -- the railroad giant Huntington! (Anyone who hears the great bronze doors of the Huntington Memorial Library in LA thump shut around closing time knows the chill air of the Thatcher Memorial Library in CITIZEN KANE.)
The script was a melodramatic love story. (Jim Fisk, after all, quintesential boy plunger of Wall Street, built the Metropolitan Opera House for HIS mistress and was shot to death by a rival on the steps of her apartment house.)
The hero of AMERICAN was to be seen wooing his first wife Emily, and later, would be found in rather steamy situations: in brothels and love nests. His son was to be involved somehow in an attempt on the life of his granduncle, the President of the United States, and was to die a Fascist, amidst a riot in Rome.
John Houseman (seen as a kind of insignificant gofer in RKO 281), besides riding herd on Mank, and editing a number of drafts before passing them on to Welles, was put in charge of "The Newsreel." That device became not just the frame of the story but a short subject within the film, a kind of "March of Time" commenting on the hero's life, echoing not only Henry Luce's invention but the "Newsreel" literary innovations of John Dos Passos' USA, one of the most significant novels of the previous decade.
The Newsreel, "News on the March," was to present the life of Charles Foster Kane in the jig saw fashion we now see used for a celebrity like Hugh Heffner on ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT.
Welles himself added and revised scenes, evident from letters and memos among the principals. He wanted the story told in limited first person as he had done in radio. In early talks with Cinematographer Gregg Toland (who volunteered for the project), he worked out a concept for shooting and editing which was developed for the original Mercury proposal, Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS. It would emphasize light and shadow, as in memory; would present characters in emotional relation to space, size and distance.
The camera was to be placed in such a way to record the emotional distance between the characters in a scene.
That idea, in time, was implemented in the sound track, which Welles knew a lot about, again from radio. Sound, not just dialogue, was to tell the tale. Sound and dialogue were recorded at different registers depending on distance and importance, and the sound track was not to be "clean," but often in whispers, echoes, overlaps from one scene to the next, sometimes garbled, hard to understand, and thrown away, much like a stylized version of real life.
For the beginning and end of the film, Bernard Herrmann (brought from Radio by Welles to Hollywood) composed a doomlike theme. In a unique step, Welles shot and cut these scenes to the music. This music, along with the virginal "rosebud theme" (when we meet Kane as a child in Colorado) was recapitulated in various keys throughout the film, until its melancholy surprise ending.
The voyeuristic camera would stealthily climb over the fence and pick its way through Kane's estate to outside the window where he is dying. Then, after his death, the newsreel and the scenes of childhood, youthful ambition and love would send the film racing along, but in the second half, the plan called quite deliberately for the film to be slowed w-a-ay down -- just as life does. These methods of aping the swift and slow motion of memory may be why some people complain, even today, they are put off by the film, parts of which seem cold, far away, spooky.
Few would contest that Director Welles executed the plan magnificently.
The concept gradually dictated that the love story be pared to virtually nothing. As Jed Leland comments in the finished movie, Charlie Kane had lost love because he had [received] no love to give. It was a logical, truthful observation, apropos of people we know around us, but not an idea that would endear the film to many women. Notice that seldom in CITIZEN KANE, after hugging his mother's knees as a boy, does Kane touch anyone with emotion -- except when he slaps his second wife.
Mankiewicz, bored, in pain and out of sorts, exiled to the desert, far from the watering holes he so enjoyed, began to insert little digs and in-jokes about Welles, his embarrassingly youthful Walter Parks Thatcher-like omnipotent employer and captor. Welles recognized the trend and encouraged it. (Indeed, it was to be the bedrock of his auteurial style in every movie he made afterward.) At least, someone added to a draft of American that Kane was to receive his inheritance on his 25th birthday, as Welles inherited his father's money on his own 25th birthday, May 25, 1940. Someone changed the name of Kane's retainer to Bernstein, perhaps after Welles' "stepfather" Maurice "Dadda" Bernstein. Even long suffering RKO Chief of Production George Schaefer, financial father of the project, as it were, who often felt betrayed, was given the honor of titling the film CITIZEN KANE.
Many such parts of the puzzle might be noted.
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After the "final" shooting script was completed (dated "June 18, 1940"), Welles continued to edit, add and delete scenes, often on the spot during production. Overnight he wrote the scene in which Kane gives up total control of his empire. He staged the brilliant sequence which in 30 seconds dramatizes Kane's entire marriage to Emily (suggested to Welles by the scenario of a 1931 play by his friend, Thorton Wilder). The melodrama of Mankiewicz's original script American disappeared, including the attempted murder of the President. The final vestiges of love as a dramatized emotion were trimmed, even a suggestion of unrequited love between Jed and Emily.
Welles' direction and his own performance are a kaleidoscope of all the pictures he created, and all the movie characters he played, in the following 40 years. And his handling of his players, many of them new to motion picture techniques, was sensitive and generous. On the strength of their performances, Joseph Cotton (Jed Leland) became a romantic star, as did for a time Ruth Warwick (Emily Norton Kane); Agnes Moorehead (Mother Mary Kane), Everett Sloane (Bernstein), George Colouris (Walter Parks Thatcher), and Ray Collins (Boss Jim Gettys) had long careers as featured character players. Dorothy Comingore (Susan Alexander Kane), the most experienced in movies of the leads, gave the performance of her life under Welles' direction. Her previous film had been PIONEERS OF THE FRONTIER (1940). Ten years and three pictures later her career was over with THE BIG NIGHT (Losey, 1951).
[By the way, Cinematographer Gregg Toland is the Radio Interviewer when Kane returns from Europe to announce: "There'll be no War!" And Co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz is one of the newspaper reporters in the film. Welles added such bits to all his future films.]
The result of all these efforts was a masterpiece which continues to grow in stature and influence through its profound and unsentimental power.
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A final note: On his ninth birthday, Orson Welles was allowed to bring his birthday cake blazing with candles into a darkened room where his beautiful young mother Beatrice Welles lay ill with hepatitis. She kissed him and told him to make a wish before he blew the candles out. Sixty years later, he remarked that, suddenly in the dark and frightened, he realized, in his zeal to have his cake, he had forgotten to make the wish. He said it was the great regret of his life.
Four days later, his mother died.
Later still, on the advice of his mentor, Roger "Skipper" Hill, Welles refused to see again his father Dick Welles unless the old man stopped drinking. Shortly, his father was found dead in a Chicago hotel room. Dick Welles, opposed to the child-rearing ideas of his artistic wife, had encouraged young Welles to seek audacious adventures, to live lavishly and to seize the American Dream of Material Wealth with both hands. Welles said, on several occasions, he caused his father's death.
As Welles had dealt with his life in CITIZEN KANE, he continued to do so in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942), when he selected for his leads people who resembled himself and his parents. He picked Tim Holt, an underused actor who looked like Welles, to play indulgent George Minifer; John Barrymore's ex-wife, Dolores Costello, an incredible image of Beatrice Welles, to be George's mother, Isabel; Joseph Cotton to portray Eugene Morgan the car manufacturer, a character like Dick Welles in his prime. And Richard Bennett, an alcoholic, washed up stage actor, father of the Bennett Sisters, brilliantly realized Major Amberson, a figure much like Dick Welles in later years.
Perhaps pieces of the Orson Welles' puzzle are in that story, too.
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Buried within the "final," much-to-be-changed, shooting script for CITIZEN KANE is another scene, shot but later deleted, set just before the final sequence of the finished movie. I have never seen it quoted in any discussion of CITIZEN KANE.
Kane stands with Raymond the Butler (Paul Stewart) in the family tomb. His only son, Charles Foster Kane II, is dead at the age of 31. The year is 1938, and workmen are setting a slab on the grave. After they leave, Kane looks at the simple inscriptions on the crypts of his father, mother and son; then, above the blank where he will soon lie, he stares at the inscription on an ornate, ancient wall imported from Persia.
He translates for Raymond (who couldn't care less):
The drunkenness of youth has passed
like a fever,
And yet I saw many things,
Seeing my glory in the days of my
glory.
I thought my power eternal
And the days of my life
fixed surely in the years,
but a whisper came to me
from Him who dies not.
I called my tributary kings together
And those who were proud rulers under me,
I opened the boxes of my treasure
to them, saying:
"Take hills of gold, mountains of silver,
And give me one more day upon the earth."
But they stood silent,
Looking upon the ground;
So that I died
And Death came to sit upon my throne.
O sons of men
You see a stranger upon the road,
You call to him and he does not stop.
He is your life
Walking towards time,
Hurrying to meet the kings of India
and China.
O sons of men
You are caught in the web of the world
And the spider Nothing waits behind it.
Where are the men with towering hopes?
They have changed places with owls,
Owls who lived in tombs
And now inhabit a palace.
Nothing can better sum up our affluent lives, or the meaning of CITIZEN KANE.
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On the morning of October 10, 1985, Welles was found dead of a heart attack, sitting in a chair, face down on his typewriter, much as Jed Leland had been found dead drunk by Bernstein and Kane. He had been working in the wee hours on yet another film project. That afternoon, the Hearst San Francisco Examiner devoted most of its front page, under a banner headline, to his death and life.
On Saturday, March 18, 2000, in observance of the sale of the San Francisco Examiner by the Hearst Family the previous day, KPIX Channel 5 (the CBS Affiliate in San Francisco) pre-empted its prime time evening schedule to present . . . CITIZEN KANE.
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George Orson Welles, the final piece of the puzzle, is laid to rest in the center of an old bullring in Spain.
The jigsaw puzzle that is America is complete.
Or is it?
As the weepling girls at the Red Vic suggested, America still exists as a Grand Idea, despite its unfortunate or sometimes poignant baggage. Whether that baggage be a National Forest, our real reasons for going to War, or . . . Rosebud.
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"Throw that stuff!"
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Update 8/23/02 -- As of August 15, 2002, the prestigious British Film Institute, after a poll of both leading critics and leading directors, declared CITIZEN KANE at the top of each list as the best film ever made. In that judgment, it joined almost every credible group to report such a list in the last 40 years.
Here is a a comparative list of all 100 of the AFI's rankings:
Udate 6/21/07: Last night, The American Film Institute announced on its "AFI 100 YEARS, 100 FILMS" over CBS that CITIZEN KANE had retained its position as the Best American Film ever made. The picture, on the basis of a large sampling of film experts, had first won that honor ten years ago.
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