by Pauline Kael
The script for Citizen Kane was scrutinized and approved by both R.K.O. Radio Pictures and the Hays office. No one in those organizations nor anyone associated with me in the production of the picture believed that it represented anything but psychological analysis of an imaginary individual. I regret exceedingly that anyone should interpret Citizen Kane to have a bearing upon any living person, or should impugn the artistic purposes of its producers.
Several of the magazines responded to his plea for the pressure of publicity by reviewing the picture before it opened, obviously with the intention of helping to get it released. A review in Time on March 17, 1941, began:
As in some grotesque fable, it appeared last week that Hollywood was about to turn upon and destroy its greatest creation.
It continued:
To most of the several hundred people who have seen the film at private showings, Citizen Kane is the most sensational product of the U.S. movie industry. It has found important new techniques in picture-making and story telling…. It is as psychiatrically sound as a fine novel…. It is a work of art created by grown people for grown people.
In Newsweek, also on March 17, 1941, John O’Hara began his review with
It is with exceeding regret that your faithful bystander reports that he has just seen a picture which he thinks must be the best picture he ever saw.
With no less regret he reports that he has just seen the best actor in the history of acting.
Name of picture: Citizen Kane.
Name of actor: Orson Welles.
Reason for regret: you, my dear, may never see the picture.
I saw Citizen Kane the other night. I am told that my name was crossed off a list of persons who were invited to look at the picture, my name being crossed off because some big shot remembered I had been a newspaperman. So, for the first time in my life, I indignantly denied I was a newspaperman. Nevertheless, I had to be snuck into the showing of Citizen Kane under a phony name. That’s what’s going on about this wonderful picture. Intrigue.
Why intrigue? Well, because. A few obsequious and/or bulbous middle-aged ladies think the picture ought not to be shown, owing to the fact that the picture is rumored to have something to do with a certain publisher, who, for the first time in his life, or maybe the second, shall be nameless. That the nameless publisher might be astute enough to realize that for the first time in his rowdy life he had been made a human being did not worry the loyal ladies. Sycophancy of that kind, like curtseying, is deliberate. The ladies merely wait for a chance to show they can still do it, even if it means cracking a femur. This time I think they may have cracked off more than they can chew. I hope.
Along the way, O’Hara said such things as
My intention is to make you want to see the picture; if possible, to make you wonder why you are not seeing what I think is as good a picture as was ever made…. And aside from what it does not lack, Citizen Kane has Orson Welles. It is traditional that if you are a great artist, no one gives a damn about you while you’re still alive. Welles has had plenty of that. He got a tag put to his name through the Mars thing, just as Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote better than any man in our time, got a Jazz Age tag put to his name. I say, if you plan to have any grandchildren to see and to bore, see Orson Welles so that you can bore your grandchildren with some honesty. There never has been a better actor than Orson Welles. I just got finished saying there never has been a better actor than Orson Welles, and I don’t want any of your lip.
Do yourself a favor. Go to your neighborhood exhibitor and ask him why he isn’t showing Citizen Kane.
The same day—March 17, 1941—Life, which was to run several more features on the movie in the following months, came out with four pages of pictures and a review:
Few movies have ever come from Hollywood with such powerful narrative, such original technique, such exciting photography. Director Welles and Cameraman Gregg Toland do brilliantly with a camera everything Hollywood has always said you couldn’t do. They shoot into bright lights, they shoot into the dark and against low ceilings, till every scene comes with the impact of something never seen before. Even the sound track is new. And for narrative Welles has tapped a segment of life fearfully skirted by the U.S. cinema: the swift and brutal biography of a power-mad newspaper tycoon, a man of twisted greatness who buys or bullies his way into everything but friends’ love and his nation’s respect. To a film industry floundering in a rut, Citizen Kane offers enough new channels to explore for five years to come.
Hearst must have known he would be in for a bad time if the picture should be withheld; the Luce magazines—Time and Life—had always been eager to embarrass him, and certainly wouldn’t let the subject drop. (The financial backing that Welles said he had to buy the picture was probably from Henry Luce.) One surmises that Hearst decided not to try to block its release—though the petty harassment of R.K.O. and others involved went on, like a reflex to a blow.
Here is a representative selection from the reviews:
Variety: A film possessing the sure dollar mark.
Times (Bosley Crowther): Suppression of this film would have been a crime…. Citizen Kane is far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture to be seen here in many a moon…. It comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood.
Herald Tribune (Howard Barnes): A young man named Orson Welles has shaken the medium wide-awake with his magnificent film, Citizen Kane. His biography of an American dynast is not only a great picture; it is something of a revolutionary screen achievement…. From any standpoint Citizen Kane is truly a great motion picture.
Post (Archer Winsten): It goes without saying this is the picture that wins the majority of 1941’s movie prizes in a walk, for it is inconceivable that another will come along to challenge it…. Orson Welles with this one film establishes himself as the most exciting director now working…. Technically the result marks a new epoch.
PM (Cecelia Ager): Before Citizen Kane, it’s as if the motion picture was a slumbering monster, a mighty force stupidly sleeping, lying there a sleek, torpid, complacent—awaiting a fierce young man to come kick it to life, to rouse it, shake it, awaken it to its potentialities, to show it what it’s got. Seeing it, it’s as if you never really saw a movie before: no movie has ever grabbed you, pummeled you, socked you on the button with the vitality, the accuracy, the impact, the professional aim, that this one does.
Esquire (Gilbert Seldes): Welles has shown Hollywood how to make movies…. He has made the movies young again, by filling them with life.
Cue (Jesse Zunser): It is an astounding experience to watch Orson Welles, 25-year-old Boy Genius of the Western World, in the process of creating on the screen one of the awesome products of his fertile imagination. You come away limp, much as if you had turned into Broadway and suddenly beheld Niagara Falls towering behind the Paramount Building, the Matterhorn looming over Bryant Park, and the Grand Canyon yawning down the middle of Times Square.
Hollywood Reporter: A great motion picture…. A few steps ahead of anything that has been made in pictures before.
Chicago Journal of Commerce (Claudia Cassidy): Anyone who has eyes in his eyes in his head and ears to hear with will enjoy Citizen Kane for the unleashed power of its stature on the screen.
Even Kate Cameron, in the Daily News, gave it four stars, and on Sunday, May 4th, Bosley Crowther (though he had some second thoughts of his own) wrote in the Times, “The returns are in from most of the local journalistic precincts and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane has been overwhelmingly selected as one of the great (if not the greatest) motion pictures of all time….” The Film Daily said, “Welles can prepare his mantel for a couple of Oscars.”
Sixteen
HAD IT NOT BEEN for the delays and the nervous atmosphere that made the picture seem unpopular and so become unpopular, it might have swept the Academy Awards. It had taken the New York Film Critics Award with ease, but early in
1942, when the 1941 Academy Awards were given, the picture had the aroma of box-office failure—an aroma that frightens off awards in Hollywood. The picture had been nominated in nine categories, and at the ceremony, each time the title or Orson Welles’s name was read, there were hisses and loud boos. The prize for the Original Screenplay was perhaps partly a love gesture to Herman Mankiewicz, one of their own; the film community had closed ranks against Orson Welles.
While the picture was being shot, Welles, like a good showman, had done his best to preserve the element of surprise, and he had been smart about keeping a tight, closed set. He didn’t want interference from anybody, and even though the R.K.O. executives had read the script, when one of them “dropped in” once to see what was going on, Welles coolly called a halt in the shooting, and the Mercury players went outside and played baseball until he left. There were visitors, of course. Invitations to attend the first official day of shooting were sent to the press, and Welles was simply careful about what he shot that day. And the crew didn’t go out to play baseball when Louella Parsons visited the set a few weeks later; they were just very careful, so that even though she had heard rumors that the picture was about Hearst, everything looked so innocent and Welles denied the rumors so disarmingly that she went on giving him an enthusiastic press. (She later described his outfoxing her on this occasion as “one of the classic double crosses of Hollywood.”) But Mankiewicz with his “Don’t let this get around,” was practically incapable of keeping a secret. He was so proud of his script that he lent a copy to Charles Lederer. In some crazily naïve way, Mankiewicz seems to have imagined that Lederer would be pleased by how good it was. But Lederer, apparently, was deeply upset and took the script to his aunt and Hearst. It went from them to Hearst’s lawyers (who marked various passages) before it was returned to Mankiewicz, and thus Hearst and his associates were alerted early to the content of the film. It was probably as a result of Mankiewicz’s idiotic indiscretion that the various forces were set in motion that resulted in the cancellation of the première at the Radio City Music Hall, the commercial failure of Citizen Kane, and the subsequent failure of Orson Welles. This was how, even before the film was finished, Hearst’s minions were in action, and how there was time for Mayer and his people to set about their attempt to suppress the film, and, having failed in that, to destroy it commercially.
In the aftermath of the pressures, and of the disappointing returns on the film, the members of the Academy could feel very courageous about the writing award. Mankiewicz had become a foolhardy hero in taking on Hearst; Kane was Mankiewicz’s finest moment. They wanted him to have a prize; he deserved it and he needed it. Hollywood loves the luxury of show-business sentimentality, and Hollywood loves a comeback. The members of the Academy destroyed Orson Welles that night, but they probably felt good because their hearts had gone out to crazy, reckless Mank, their own resident loser-genius, the has-been who was washed up in the big studios, who was so far down he had been reduced to writing Welles’s radio shows. At the beginning of the thirties, he had been earning $4,000 a week; at the end of the thirties, he was a ghost. What they couldn’t know was that Kanewas Welles’s finest moment, too; the reason they couldn’t know it was that their failure to back him that night was the turning point. Welles had made Citizen Kane at twenty-five, and he seemed to have the world before him. They’d had time to get used to Mank’s self-destructiveness, and he’d been down on his luck so long he was easy to love; besides, they admired the pranks that had got him thrown out of one studio after another. Welles was self-destructive in a style they weren’t yet accustomed to.
One may speculate that if the members of the Academy had supported Welles and voted Citizen Kane Best Picture of the Year, if they had backed the nation’s press and their own honest judgment, the picture might have got into the big theatrical showcases despite the pressures against it. If they had, Kane might have made money, and things might have gone differently for Welles—and for American movies. The Academy had plenty of sentiment but not enough guts. And so Orson Welles peaked early. Later, as his situation changed and his fortunes sank and Kane became the golden opportunity of his youth, his one great chance of freedom to accomplish something, then, when he looked back, he may really have needed to believe what he was quoted as saying in France: “Le seul film que j’aie jamais écrit du premier du dernier mot et pu mener à bien est Citizen Kane.” The literal translation is “The only film that I ever wrote from first word to last and was able to bring to a successful issue is Citizen Kane,” but I think that what it means is “The picture came out well.” What else can it mean when one considers the contributions of Mankiewicz and Toland and all the rest? Men cheated of their due are notoriously given to claiming more than their due. The Academy members had made their token gesture to Citizen Kane with the screenplay award. They failed what they believed in; they gave in to the scandal and to the business pressures. They couldn’t yet know how much guilt they should feel: guilt that by their failure to support Citizen Kane at this crucial time—the last chance to make Kane a financial success—they had started the downward spiral of Orson Welles, who was to become perhaps the greatest loser in Hollywood history.
Seventeen
LIKE D.W. GRIFFITH, Orson Welles came into the movies in order to make money so that he could continue in the theatre, and, like Griffith, he discovered that movies were the medium in which he could do what he had barely dreamed of doing in the theatre. Soon—even before he started onCitizen Kane—Welles was desperate for money to make movies. It took guile to get Kane approved. Robert Wise, whom the head of the R.K.O. editing department had assigned to the picture because he was close to Welles’s age, says, “Orson sneaked the project onto R.K.O. He told the studio that he was merely shooting tests.” Sets were built, and shooting began on June 29, 1940; the “test shots” were fully produced. The Mercury actors and associates were there anyway, most of them under personal contract to Welles, as Mankiewicz was. But Dorothy Comingore, not a member of the Mercury Theatre but a Hollywood bit player (who, as Linda Winters, had worked in Westerns and with the Three Stooges and in Blondie and Charlie Chan pictures), says that she lived on unemployment checks of $18 a week while she “tested for one month” for the role of Susan Alexander. She adds, “All these tests were incorporated into the film; they were never retaken.” After a month, with the studio buzzing about how brilliant the footage was, the movie was practically a fait accompli, and Welles was able to bulldoze Schaefer into approving the project. All the people who were already at work on Citizen Kane—the cameraman, the grips, the composer, the assistants, and the actors—met at Herman Mankiewicz’s house for breakfast, and Welles announced that the picture had been approved and could formally begin. They officially started on July 30, 1940, and they finished “principal photography” eighty-two shooting days later, on October 23, 1940, even though Welles—almost as accident-prone as Mankiewicz—broke his ankle during the scene when he ran down the stairs from Susan’s room while yelling that he’d get Boss Gettys.
Yet it took more than guile to function in the motion-picture business at that time. It helped to be mercenary, of course, but what really counted then was not to care too much about your work. After Citizen Kane, the contract that gave Welles the right of final cut was cancelled, so he did not have control of The Magnificent Ambersons, and it was shortened and mangled. The industry was suspicious of him, and not just because of the scandal of Kane, and the general fear of Hearst, and Kane’s unsatisfactory financial returns. Alva Johnston described the Hollywood attitude toward Welles in an article in the Saturday Evening Post in 1942, the year after Kane came out:
Big agents soon lost interest in boy genius. They learned that he wasn’t interested in money. Welles became known as a dangerous Red because, when his first picture project was shelved after the studio had wasted a good deal of money on it, he offered to make another picture for nothing.
Genius got a bad name on account of Welles.
It was brought into complete disrepute by Saroyan. The gifted Armenian came to Hollywood with a small agent and insisted on working without a salary, leaving it to M-G-M to set a value on his services after his work was completed. He said, “I’ll trust the studio.” The $10,000,000-a-year agency business is wholly based on the motto “Don’t trust the studio.” Since the Welles and Saroyan affairs, it has been practically impossible to interest a big agent in an intellectual giant.
When you write straight reporting about the motion-picture business, you’re writing satire. Motion-picture executives prefer to do business with men whose values they understand. It’s very easy for these executives—businessmen running an art—to begin to fancy that they are creative artists themselves, because they are indeed very much like the “artists” who work for them, because the “artists” who work for them are, or have become, businessmen. Those who aren’t businessmen are the Hollywood unreliables—the ones whom, it is always explained to you, the studios can’t hire, because they’re crazy. As soon as movies became Welles’s passion, and he was willing to work on any terms, he was finished in the big studios—they didn’t trust him. And so, somehow, Welles aged before he matured—and not just physically. He went from child prodigy to defeated old man, though today, at fifty-five, he is younger by a decade or two than most of the big American directors.
