The Citzen Kane Book

by Pauline Kael

  Seeing the movie again recently, I liked the way it looked; now that the style no longer boded a return to the aestheticism of sets and the rigidly arranged figures of the German silents, I could enjoy it without misgivings. In the thirties, Jean Renoir had been using deep focus (that is, keeping the middle range and the background as clear as the foreground) in a naturalistic way. The light seemed (and often was) “natural.” You looked at a scene, and the drama that you saw going on in it was just part of that scene, and so you had the sense of discovering it for yourself, of seeing drama in the midst of life. This was a tremendous relief from the usual studio lighting, which forced your attention to the dramatic action in the frame, blurred the rest, and rarely gave you a chance to feel that the action was part of anything larger or anything continuous. In Welles’s far more extreme use of deep focus, and in his arrangement of the actors in the compositions, he swung back to the most coercive use of artificial, theatrical lighting. He used light like a spotlight on the stage, darkening or blacking out the irrelevant. He used deep focus not for a naturalistic effect but for the startling dramatic effect of having crucial action going on in the background (as when Kane appears in a distant doorway). The difference between Renoir’s style and Welles’s style seems almost literally the difference between day and night. Welles didn’t have (nor did he, at that time, need) the kind of freedom Renoir needed and couldn’t get in Hollywood—the freedom to shoot outside the studio and to depart from the script and improvise. Kane is a studio-made film—much of it was shot in that large room at R.K.O. where, a few years earlier, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire had danced their big numbers. However, Welles had the freedom to try out new solutions to technical problems, and he made his theatrical technique work spectacularly. Probably it was the first time in American movies that Expressionism had ever worked for comic and satiric effects (except in bits of some of the early spoof horror films), and probably it would have been impossible to tell the Kane story another way without spending a fortune on crowds and set construction. Welles’s method is a triumph of ingenuity in that the pinpoints of light in the darkness conceal the absence of detailed sets (a chair or two and a huge fireplace, and one thinks one is seeing a great room), and the almost treacherously brilliant use of sound conceals the absence of crowds. We see Susan at the deserted cabaret; we see her from the back on the opera-house stage and we imagine that she is facing an audience; we get a sense of crowds at the political rally without seeing them. It was Welles’s experience both in the theatre and in radio that enabled him to produce a huge historical film on a shoestring; he produced the illusion of a huge historical film.

  But, seeing Kane now, I winced, as I did the first time, at the empty virtuosity of the shot near the beginning when Kane, dying, drops the glass ball and we see the nurse’s entrance reflected in the glass. I noticed once again, though without being bothered by it this time, either, that there was no one in the room to hear the dying Kane say “Rosebud.” I was much more disturbed by little picky defects, like the obtrusive shot up to the bridge before the reporter goes into the hospital. What is strange about reseeing a movie that one reacted to fairly intensely many years ago is that one may respond exactly the same way to so many details and be aware each time of having responded that way before. I was disappointed once again by the clumsily staged “cute” meeting of Kane and Susan, which seemed to belong to a routine comedy, and I thought the early scenes with Susan were weak not just because while listening to her dull, sentimental singing Welles is in a passive position and so can’t animate the scenes but—and mainly—because the man of simple pleasures who would find a dumb girl deeply appealing does not tie in with the personality projected by Orson Welles. (And as Welles doesn’t project any sexual interest in either Kane’s first wife, Emily, or in Susan, his second wife, we don’t know how to interpret Susan’s claim that he just likes her voice.) Most of the newspaper-office scenes looked as clumsily staged as ever, and the first appearance of Bernstein, Kane’s business manager, arriving with a load of furniture, was still confusing. (He seems to be a junk dealer—probably because an earlier scene in American introducing him was eliminated.) I disliked again the attempt to wring humor out of the sputtering confusion of Carter, the old Dickensian editor. It’s a scene like the ones Mankiewicz helped prepare for the Marx Brothers, but what was probably intended to make fun of a stuffed shirt turned into making fun of a helpless old man trying to keep his dignity, which is mean and barbarous. I still thought Susan became too thin a conception, and more shrill and shrewish than necessary, and, as Emily, Ruth Warrick was all pursed lips—a stereotype of refinement. I was still uncomfortable during the visit to Jed Leland in the hospital; Leland’s character throughout is dependent on Joseph Cotten’s obvious charm, and the sentimental-old-codger bit in this sequence is really a disgrace. The sequence plays all too well at a low conventional level—pulling out easy stops. I still didn’t see the function of the sequence about Kane’s being broke and losing control of his empire, since nothing followed from it. (I subsequently discovered that things weren’t going well on the set at one point, and Welles decided to go back to this scene, which had been in an earlier draft and had then been eliminated. What it coördinated with was, unfortunately, not restored.) This sequence also has the most grating bad line in the movie, when Kane says, “You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.”

  What’s still surprising is how well a novice movie director handled so many of the standard thirties tricks and caricatures—the device of the alternative newspaper headlines, for example, and the stock explosive, hand-waving Italian opera couch (well played by Fortunio Bonanova). The engineering—the way the sequences are prepared for and commented on by preceding sequences, the way the five accounts tie together to tell the story—seems as ingenious as ever; though one is aware that the narrators are telling things they couldn’t have witnessed, one accepts this as part of the convention. The cutting (which a reading of the script reveals to have been carried out almost exactly as it was planned) is elegantly precise, and some sequences have a good, sophomoric musical-comedy buoyancy.

  What had changed for me—what I had once enjoyed but now found almost mysteriously beautiful—was Orson Welles’s performance. An additional quality that old movies acquire is that people can be seen as they once were. It is a pleasure we can’t get in theatre; we can only hear and read descriptions of past fabulous performances. But here in Kane is the young Welles, and he seems almost embarrassed to be exposed as so young. Perhaps he was embarrassed, and that’s why he so often hid in extravagant roles and behind those old-man false faces. He seems unsure of himself as the young Kane, and there’s something very engaging (and surprisingly human) about Welles unsure of himself; he’s a big, overgrown, heavy boy, and rather sheepish, one suspects, at being seen as he is. Many years later, Welles remarked, “Like most performers, I naturally prefer a live audience to that lie-detector full of celluloid.” Maybe his spoiled-baby face was just too nearly perfect for the role, and he knew it, and knew the hostile humor that lay behind Mankiewicz’s putting so much of him in the role of Hearst the braggart self-publicist and making Kane so infantile. That statement of principles that Jed sends back to Kane and that Kane then tears up must surely refer to the principles behind the co-founding of the Mercury Theatre by Welles and Houseman. Lines like Susan’s “You’re not a professional magician are you?” may have made Welles flinch. And it wasn’t just the writer who played games on him. There’s the scene of Welles eating in the newspaper office, which was obviously caught by the camera crew, and which, to be “a good sport,” he had to use. Welles is one of the most self-conscious of actors—it’s part of his rapport with the audience—and this is what is so nakedly revealed in this role, in which he’s playing a young man his own age and he’s insecure (and with some reason) about what’s coming through. Something of the young, unmasked man is revealed in these scenes—to be closed off
forever after.

  Welles picks up assurance and flair as Kane in his thirties, and he’s also good when Kane is just a little older and jowly. I think there’s no doubt that he’s more sure of himself when he’s playing this somewhat older Kane, and this is the Kane we remember best from the first viewing—the brash, confident Kane of the pre-election-disaster period. He’s so fully—classically—American a showoff one almost regrets the change of title. But when I saw the movie again it was the younger Kane who stayed with me—as if I had been looking through a photograph album and had come upon a group of pictures of an old friend, long dead, as he had been when I first met him. I had almost forgotten Welles in his youth, and here he is, smiling, eager, looking forward to the magnificent career that everyone expected him to have.

  Twenty

  JUST AS WELLES suggested the radio-bulletin approach to the H.G. Wells landing-of-the-Martians material to Howard Koch, he may very well have suggested the “March of Time” summary of Hearst’s career in his early talks with Mankiewicz. Welles had worked as an actor for the “March of Time” radio program in 1934 and 1935, and he had worked steadily as a narrator and radio actor (his most famous role was the lead in the popular weekly mystery show “The Shadow”) until he went to Hollywood. The “March of Time” is exactly the kind of idea the young Welles would have suggested. It’s the sort of technique that was being used in the experimental theatre of the late thirties—when the Federal Theatre Project (in which Welles and Houseman had worked together) staged the documentary series “The Living Newspaper,” and when members of the Group Theatre and other actors were performing anti-Fascist political cabaret. The imitation “March of Time” was not a new device, even in movies; it had already been used, though humorlessly, to convey the fact that a theme was current, part of “today’s news,” and to provide background information—as inConfessions of a Nazi Spy, of 1939. What was needed to transform that device and make it the basis for the memorable parody in Citizen Kane was not only Welles’s experience and not only his “touch” but the great sense of mischief that he and Mankiewicz shared. The smug manner of the “March of Time” was already a joke to many people; when I was a student at Berkeley in the late thirties, there was always laughter in the theatres when the “March of Time” came on, with its racy neo-conservatism and its ritual pomposity—with that impersonal tone, as if God above were narrating. There was an element of unconscious self-parody in the important tone of the “March of Time,” as in all the Luce enterprises, and, in his script, Mankiewicz pushed it further. He used consciously those elements which part of the public already found funny, bringing into a mass medium what was already a subject for satire among the knowledgeable.

  Mankiewicz’s “On Approaching Forty” had not appeared in The New Yorker, but a few weeks after it was printed in 1936, Wolcott Gibbs, who was to take Mankiewicz’s old chair as The New Yorker’s drama critic (and who was the first occupant of that chair not to emigrate to Hollywood), published the celebrated Profile “Time—Fortune—Life—Luce,” which was written in mock Timese (“Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind,” and so on, concluding with “Where it all will end, knows God!”), and this was probably not merely the spur to Mankiewicz but the competition. Mankiewicz’s pastiche was fully worked out in the first long draft of the script, the processed prose and epigrams already honed to perfection (“For forty years appeared in Kane newsprint no public issue on which Kane papers took no stand. No public man whom Kane himself did not support or denounce—often support, then denounce.”). And even on paper—without Welles’s realization of the plan—the section is good enough to invite the comparison that I suspect Mankiewicz sought with the Gibbs parody. (Mankiewicz’s widow keeps the Oscar statuette for Citizen Kane on the mantel, along with the latest Who’s Who in America with the marker set at her sons’ listings, and on the shelf next to the mantel are the bound volumes of The New Yorker in which her husband’s reviews appeared.)

  Part of the fun of the “March of Time” parody for the audiences back in 1941 was that, of course, we kept recognizing things about Hearst in it, and its daring meant great suspense about what was to follow in the picture. But Mankiewicz tried to do more with this parody than is completely evident either in the final script or in the film itself. He tried to use the “March of Time” as a historical framing device to close one era and open the next, with Hearstian journalism giving way to the new Luce empire. In the movie, it seems a structural gimmick—though a very cleverly used gimmick, which is enjoyable in itself. In Mankiewicz’s original conception, in the long first-draft American, which ran three hundred and twenty-five pages, that device is more clearly integral to the theme. In Mankiewicz’s conception, the Hearst-Kane empire is doomed: Kane’s own death is being “sent” to the world by the filmed “March of Time” (called “News on the March” in the movie), which means the end of the newspaper business as Hearst knew it. The funny thing is that Mankiewicz, in commenting on Hearst’s lack of vision, overestimated Luce’s vision. After Luce took news coverage from newspapers into newsmagazines, he moved into photo-journalism and then news documentaries, but he didn’t follow through on what he had started, and he failed to get into television production. Now, after his death, the Luce organization is trying to get back into film activities.

  In Mankiewicz’s original conception, the historical line of succession was laid out as in a chronicle play. Hearst supplanted the old-style quiet upper-class journalism with his penny-dreadful treatment of crime and sex and disasters, his attacks on the rich, his phony lawsuits against the big corporations that he called “predators,” his screaming patriotism, his faked photographs, and his exploitation of superstition, plus puzzles, comics, contests, sheet music, and medical quackery. His youthful dedication to the cause of the common people declined into the cheap chauvinism that infected everything and helped to turn the readers into a political mob. The irony built into the structure was that his own demise should be treated in the new, lofty style of Luce.

  And it was in terms of this framework that the elements of admiration in the ambivalent portrait of Kane made sense. Hearst represented a colorful kind of journalism that was already going out. Mankiewicz was summing up the era of The Front Page at the end of it, and was treating it right at its source in the American system that made it possible for a rich boy to inherit the power to control public opinion as his own personal plaything.American (and, to a lesser degree, Citizen Kane) was a there-were-giants-in-those-days valedictory to the old-style big scoundrels. The word had been used straight by Mrs. Fremont Older in 1936 when she published the authorized biography, William Randolph Hearst, American. “American” was Hearst’s shibboleth; his Sunday magazine section was the American Weekly, and he had been changing his newspaper titles to include the word “American” whenever possible ever since Senator Henry Cabot Lodge accused him of being un-American in those days after the McKinley assassination when Hearst was hanged in effigy. Hearst’s attacks on McKinley as “the most despised and hated creature in the hemisphere” had culminated in an editorial that said “Killing must be done” shortly before it was. When the storm died down, Hearst became super-American. For Mankiewicz, Hearst’s Americanism was the refuge of a scoundrel, though by no means his last refuge; that, in the first draft, was clearly blackmail. What the title was meant to signify was indicated by Kane in the “News on the March” segment when he said, “I am, have been, and will be only one thing—an American.” That was pure flag-waving Pop before we had a name for it: “American” as it was used by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution. In addition, Mankiewicz may have wanted to score off his movie friends who since the middle thirties—the period of the Popular Front—had also been draping themselves in the flag. In that period, the Communist left had become insistent about its Americanism, in its rather embarrassing effort to tout American democracy, which it had called “imperialism” until the U.S.S.R. sought the United States as an ally
against Hitler. In the later title, “Citizen” is similarly ironic: Hearst, the offspring of an economic baron, and himself a press lord and the master of San Simeon, was a “citizen” the way Louis XIV at Versailles was a citizen. And joining the word to “Kane” (Cain) made its own point.

  Both the parodistic use of Timese and the facelessness of Luce’s company men served a historical purpose in the first script. But American was much too long and inclusive and loose, and much too ambitious, and Mankiewicz rapidly cut it down (copies of these gradually shorter drafts were saved) until it reached the hundred and fifty-six pages of the final shooting script—which still made for a then unusually long picture, of a hundred and nineteen minutes. In the trimming, dialogue that was crucial to the original dramatic conception of the Hearst-Luce succession was cut. (In terms of the final conception, though, it’s perfectly clear why.) This deleted exchange between Thompson, the investigating reporter for the Rawlston (Luce) organization, and Raymond, Kane’s butler, makes the point about the line of succession from Hearst to Luce all too explicitly: