NFR Project: 'Citizen Kane' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘Citizen Kane’

Dir: Orson Welles

Scr: Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles

Pho: Gregg Toland

Ed: Robert Wise

Premiere: May 1, 1941

119 min.

Is Citizen Kane still the greatest American film?

It’s tough for us brought up in the auteur-loving critics’ era of the 1960s and early ‘70s to think otherwise. Kane to them was proof positive that, even entrenched in the studio system, a film could be the creation of one person’s vision, of a single artisan’s, the director’s, will. Orson Welles, the boy genius and later figure of fun, had whipped an imaginary world into shape.

Welles is inescapably at the center of things – he is the film’s director, producer, co-writer and star performer, impersonating a man from youth to death with perfect assurance. It was his first film. He was 26 years old. However, Kane qualifies otherwise as a masterfully coordinated group venture, the expression of many talents all at the top of their game.

Welles’ talent is undeniable. But Herman J. Mankiewicz’s script, assisted by Welles, is a perfect construction. Mankiewicz knew Welles through his writing of scripts for the Mercury Radio Theatre broadcasts (1938). (It is said Mankiewicz took some cues from The Power and the Glory [1933], a vehicle for Spencer Tracy and the first Hollywood script by Preston Sturges, who also and amazingly for the movie business got a percentage of the profits.)

Welles famously watched John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) 40 times in the run-up to Citizen Kane. Something clicked when he saw Bert Glennon’s cinematography for that film. It told him what he wanted. Gregg Toland, an Oscar-winning Ford collaborator, volunteered himself to do Welles’ film, reportedly because he knew that Welles had no preconceptions on how to make a movie – giving him license to attempt – and succeed – at effects no one thought possible.

Toland’s work is incredible – amazing, layered deep compositions, frames within frames, just to start with. Low-angle setups that make the characters into titans, and long shots that make them look puny and alone. Ceilings, for the first time, in Hollywood movies. In only one instance does the camera record a scene conventionally – Kane and Susan’s first meeting.

The story is simple. American tycoon, notorious newspaper baron, Charles Foster Kane is dead. He is epitomized in a newsreel feature that summarizes his life, giving us a public view of a man – cycling us quickly through the elements of his curriculum vitae, giving us the end as the beginning. Reporters stick onto the last recorded word Kane said: “Rosebud.” The quest for Rosebud pulls us through the movie, propelling us from one character to another who remembers key moments of Kane’s life and who relive them via flashback.

Kane is controlling, imposing, spiteful. He’s the pampered son of a newly wealthy Colorado mother, who happens upon the deed to a rich gold mine. She sends him off to the East Coast, to be raised by . . . capitalists, basically. Inculcated with no virtues, he stumbles through colleges and finally achieves his majority at age 25, taking over a failing New York newspaper and building it into a publishing empire.

We see Kane mutate from idealistic youth to corrupt and impotent old man, losing everything and everyone he valued just as he accumulated tons of art objects on his palatial Florida estate, Xanadu. Throughout, his demand for love on his terms alone as the guiding principle of his life, rendering him a tragic figure. It’s a story that is an embodiment the New Testament adage, “For what profiteth a man to gain the whole world, and lose him own soul?” Kane is a victim; Kane is a monster.

The clever device of an intrepid (and faceless) reporter searching out the truth gives them film the forward thrust of the thriller. It tells us who Kane was, and resolutely refuses to answer what “Rosebud” was until the last moment, when it offers us a solution so facile that it confounds everything that went before it. Welles ends the film . . .and keeps the audience’s brains working.

Robert Wise’s editing is superb. He was at the beginning of a long and illustrious career in the movie trade, first as an editor and then, in 1944, becoming, a director (The Body Snatcher, Blood on the Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Sound of Music) His ability to maintain clarity while dealing with multiple narratives and shifts in time should not be underestimated.

His cast is full of unknowns. There are 10 actors whose debut on film this is, and they are all members of Welles’ Mercury Players, a theater company founded by Welles in 1937. In other words, he had a resident acting company on his hands, who were attuned to each other, who treated the script as though it was a richly appointed stage drama. Their understated, complex portrayals were miles ahead of their contemporaries in Hollywood.

And let us not forget Bernard Herrmann’s score, his first for a film. Herrmann had collaborated with Welles on several projects: listening to his scores for The Mercury Radio Theater (1938) gives you a glimpse of the solid technique he would bring to film scoring. Here, rather than a through-composed score (Welles tossed out half of it), the judicious application of instrumental support at key moments was another fruitful departure from the Hollywood way of doing things. Hermann is evocative, melodic: his parody of grand opera in a key part of the film is spot-on.

Everyone on the job was inspired and took the proceedings very seriously. Welles’ particular genius at this young age was not in his mellifluous voice; it was in his ability to engage people at the height of their professions and get them to collaborate fruitfully. It’s a gift that would stand him in great stead as his opportunities narrowed as the decades progressed.

Welles had the right of final cut. He had to fight for it ever after.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: How Green Was My Valley.