by Simon Callow
Public resistance to so much innovation was widely predicted: ‘Orson Welles never once makes concessions to ordinary film-goers. His film is so intelligently adult that half its audience will miss its point. This very subtlety may be Welles’s downfall (from a box office, not an artistic, point of view),’14 wrote Philip Hartung in Commonweal. ‘The excellent acting … will confuse fans looking for romance, glamor and heroes. Although these fans might overlook Gregg Toland’s photography, even they cannot miss its beauty. To Toland’s expert work Citizen Kane owes much of its success. Already Hollywood is abuzz over the technique. But just how much of it will be copied depends on box office. And who should get credit for what is hard to say,’ Hartung adds, anticipating the debates that have haunted the film’s subsequent fifty years of existence. ‘Welles deserves applause for hiring Toland, for giving him time and money to experiment. In any case, the finished result is yours.’ Belfrage in The Clipper was alone in identifying the exceptional use of sound in the film: ‘It is as profoundly moving an experience as only this extraordinary and hitherto unexplored medium of sound-cinema can afford in 2 hours … perhaps of all the delectable flavors that linger on the palate after seeing Citizen Kane, the use of sound is the strongest.’ Kenneth Tynan’s observation that if you close your eyes during Kane the experience is almost as rich remains one of the most acute remarks made about the film. Belfrage is equally enthusiastic about the multiple flashbacks, the same action described from different angles: ‘Here we are really in the cinema medium, in that and nothing else.’
It is notable how anxious all the reviewers are to assert the distinctive nature of film, versus any other medium: the glut of new media in such a tiny timespan had led to fierce arguments on the essential elements of each. ‘What other medium,’ cried Belfrage, ‘could show so forcefully that truth is not merely objective, but subjective also and at the same time?’ Tangye Lean advanced another version of the same conviction: one of the few who accepted ‘Rosebud’ as entirely successful, he notes ‘If you accept the discovery of “Rosebud” as something more significant than an O. Henry ending, a vast pattern of interrelated human themes becomes clear – as a different one does in the last volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.’ Technically, he rates the precise focus and the overlapping dialogue as crucial innovations. ‘We are forced by these devices to lay our own emphasis on the data, to make our own selection’ – an anticipation of André Bazin’s claim for Citizen Kane, nearly ten years later. ‘Orson Welles likes this confusion. He extends it beyond the technical management of light and sound. He will give us, partly because he is a first-class showman, five or ten superb minutes of chorus girls dancing as a background to a serious conversation, five minutes of a political speech by Kane, but only thirty seconds of a vital conversation in which his mother sends him into exile. But Welles would certainly answer that life itself treats the important things in this arbitrary fashion.’ Quoting Mr Bernstein’s undeniably Proustian speech about the girl on the ferry, (Welles’s favourite writing in the film, he always claimed, and pure Mankiewicz, as he freely acknowledged) Lean continues: ‘Orson Welles believes that the significant things that happen to us are the ones that get condensed, overlooked, forgotten. He does something to point the significance of the muddle, more than is done for us by life itself, but less than by a medical case history or a political novel.’
This is decidedly highbrow criticism. A magisterial rebuke from the populist but highly informed Otis Ferguson came in The New Republic. Offering the most sustained and perhaps most perceptive contemporary analysis, it is worth looking at in some detail. ‘It is the boldest freehand stroke in major screen production since Griffith and Bitzer were running wild to unshackle the camera; it has the excitement of all surprises without stirring emotions much more enduring; and in the line of narrative film, as developed in all countries but most highly on the West Coast of America, it holds no great place.’ Ferguson’s aesthetic was predicated on what might be called humanist realism. ‘The picture,’ he muses, sarcastically. ‘The new art. The camera unbound. The picture is very exciting to anyone who gets excited about how things can be done in the movies; and the many places where it takes off like the Wright Brothers should be credited to Mr Welles and his cameraman second … the whole idea of a man in these attitudes must be credited to Welles himself. And in these things there is no doubt the picture is dramatic. But what goes on between the dramatic high points, the story? No. What goes on is talk and more talk. And while the stage may stand for this, the movies don’t. And where a cameraman like Gregg Toland can be every sort of a help to a director, in showing him what he will pick up, in getting this effect or that, in achieving some lifting trick the guy has thought up, the cameraman can’t teach him how to shoot and cut a picture, even if he knows himself. It is a thing that takes years and practice to learn. And its main problem always is story, story, story – or, How can we do it to them so they don’t know beforehand that it’s being done? Low key-photography won’t help, except in the case of critics … the real art of movies concentrates on getting the right story and the right actors, the right kind of production and then smoothing everything out. And after that, in figuring how each idea can be made true, how each action can be made to happen, how you cut and reverse-camera and remake each minute of action, and run it into a line afterwards, like the motion in the ocean.’
It is extraordinary how widespread the unease was, once the initial rush had passed. In this, criticism of Kane mirrored the criticism of his work in the theatre. The gap between form and content seemed unbridgeable for him, in any medium. Citizen Kane was by far the greatest of all Welles’s firework displays, simply dazzling. And then? Even at the time, many people saw this, and felt it. Ferguson returned remorselessly to his theme, the following week. ‘Orson Welles was naturally entranced by all the things the moving camera could do for him; and while much has resulted from this preoccupation, I think his neglect of what the camera could do to him is the main reason why the picture leaves you cold even while your mouth is still open to its excitements. There may have been the heart and belief to put into it, but there wasn’t the time to learn how this might be done, or much regard for any such humdrum skill.’ Ferguson sternly insists on his gospel of true cinema. ‘This stuff is fine theatre, technically or any other way, and along with them the film is exciting for the recklessness of its independence, even if it seems to have little to be free for. There is surely nothing against it as a dramatic venture that it is no advance in screen technique at all, but a retrogression. The movies could use Orson Welles. But so could Orson Welles use the movies, that is, if he wants to make pictures. Hollywood is a great field for fanfare, but it is also a field in which every Genius has to do it the hard way; and Citizen Kane makes me rather doubt whether Orson Welles wants to make pictures.’ In this, Ferguson strangely echoes Mankiewicz’s anxiety in the cutting room: is it really film? Or simply celluloid put to theatrical uses? – an extension of the filmed sections of Too Much Johnson. Truffaut makes the telling observation that Welles favoured low angles so much because they create the equivalent of the spectator’s position in the theatre.
Perhaps the deepest of all Ferguson’s points is his crucial observation that you need time to acquire simplicity. Thrown in at the deep end, under gala conditions, Welles could never simply learn how to swim: he had to compete in all the most demanding categories, and win all the prizes. This he had certainly done, whatever the reservations. It was a curious grounding in his art, however. Welles was, of course, given time and his concept of movie-making matured. ‘I am so bored with the aesthetics of the cinema.’15 he told Huw Wheldon in 1960, oddly echoing Ferguson (‘story, story, story’) with every word of whose aesthetic he could eventually find himself in whole-hearted agreement. ‘The story teller’s first duty is always to the story.’ But nothing he made subsequently was given anything like the exposure or the attention of Citizen Kane. His reputation as a stylistic virtuoso was establ
ished for all time, and he was forever judged as such – either a brilliant stylistic virtuoso or a failed stylistic virtuoso. His artistic personality, at least as far as the average critic was concerned, was fixed. Just as he felt himself to be in perpetual competition with the fifteen-year-old prodigy he had been, so his films were forever in competition with this first freakish triumph. Kane’s line: ‘If I hadn’t been born rich, I might have been a really great man’ was another personal resonance for Welles: not financially rich, of course: rich in talent, rich in opportunity. So much for his directing. As for his acting performance, that, too, was a source of controversy and confusion. For the most part, he and the Mercury Players were wildly applauded (which may have come as a surprise to the cast themselves who, as Augusta Weissberger reports, left the first screening dejected, convinced, like all actors from the dawn of film, that their best work had been maliciously excised). Bosley Crowther’s review in The New York Times is typical: ‘Mr Welles has directed with the sureness and distinction of a seasoned master and the entire cast … perform it in a manner which puts to shame the surface posturings of some of our more popular stars.’ There were, inevitably, rumbles of dissension even in this area. ‘Of the actors you can say that there are good jobs done and also still better ones to be done,’ wrote Ferguson. ‘Dorothy Comingore … is too ham as the opera singer (subtlety never hurt anyone, and those of us who aren’t gaping yokels are not alone, Mr Citizen Orson). Joseph Cotten had a part that was possibly short on savor because when he was with the great man he had to be something of a chump and when he was talking to him afterwards he had to be something of a Mr Chips, with a twinkle and lip-smacking … the man to remember was Everett Sloane, who seemed to understand and seemed to represent it, the little man with the big mind, the projection without the face motion and flapping of arms. You may be surprised, when you take the film apart, that his relations to any analysis of Kane were as much as anything the things that made him real.’
The flashback technique of the film ensures that we think of the actors as actors at all times, monitoring their make-ups and noting the angle of their stoops as they proceed towards and away from the grave. Only Agnes Moorhead is exempt from this consideration, and her performance, with the sturdy gravity of an American primitive artist, has an actuality that gives Kane’s mother an intensified feel quite different from any of the other characters. Perhaps this was Moorhead’s instinct; perhaps the character lends itself to such an approach. Moorhead always spoke of Welles’s abilities as a director of actors with immense warmth, so no doubt Welles had encouraged and helped her. These scenes are filled with a degree of emotion rarely encountered elsewhere in the film. It may be, too, that he had a special understanding of the severely loving mother who believes that success in the world is more important than the provision of maternal warmth. He allows himself a moment of sentimental pause in the scene of Kane’s wooing of Susan Alexander: ‘you know what mothers are,’ she says, and he hesitates before his ‘yes’. That we are able instantly to recall Kane’s mother, halfway through the film, only having met her for a few minutes, is high tribute to Moorhead.
Ferguson is interesting about Welles’s own performance: ‘it is as though Welles, as the man who conceived and produced this film story, had little enough grasp of the issues involved; but Welles as the actor somehow managed, by the genius that is in actors when they have it, to be more of the thing than he could realise. His presence in the picture is always a vital thing, an object of fascination to the beholder … without him the picture would have fallen all into its various component pieces of effect, allusion and display. He is the big part, and no one will say he is not worth it.’ Pauline Kael in her sloppily researched, entertainingly written introduction to the printed script, reveals greater delight in Welles’s performance than she had originally taken, finding his youthfulness and vulnerability touching now, where before it simply seemed bombastic. Another point she makes with great force echoes Ferguson: ‘Welles … has an almost total empathy with the audience. It’s the same kind of empathy we’re likely to feel for smart kids who grin at us when they’re showing off in the school play … without Orson Welles’s physical presence – the pudgy, big prodigy who incarnates egotism – Citizen Kane might … have disintegrated into vignettes. We feel that he’s making it all happen. Like the actor-managers of the old school, he’s the man onstage running the show, pulling it all together.’16
Citizen Kane is palpably an effort of Orson Welles’s will, as Xanadu, the success of the Inquirer and Susan Alexander’s career are efforts of Kane’s. Rosamond Gilder, in Theatre Arts Quarterly, was unconvinced: ‘Just as Orson Welles, producer and director, deserves credit for the excellence of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, co-author (with Herman J. Mankiewicz) and Orson Welles, actor, must be held responsible for the fact that it falls short of greatness … Orson Welles would be even more successful if he were willing to build his emotional scenes through the actor’s power to develop feeling from within himself. Instead he resorts frequently to the trick of bursting in with his lines without allowing another actor to finish.’ (So much for over-lapping dialogue!) It is hard to disagree with Gilder that Welles fails to create the inner emotional life of the character. Again, however, it is at least possible that this is the very point that Welles wants to make.
The questions What does the film mean? and What did Welles mean? clung to Citizen Kane from the beginning. Borges’s terrible verdict that it is a labyrinth without a centre is another way of saying that it is endlessly enigmatic. Otis Ferguson was unaware of any complexity in the film’s content: ‘His troubles are personal, and his death is that of a domineering and lonely man, known to all for his money, loved by none. The only possible moral of the picture is, don’t be that way or you’ll be sorry.’ For the FBI, to quote their report, ‘Citizen Kane was inspired by Welles’s close associations with communists over a period of years. The evidence before us leads inevitably to the conclusion that the film Citizen Kane is nothing more than an extension of the Communist Party’s campaign to smear one of its most effective and consistent opponents in the United States.’17 David Bordwell, in an elegant summary holds that ‘Citizen Kane is a tragedy on Marlovian lines, the story of the rise and fall of an overreacher. Like Tamburlaine and Faustus, Kane dares to test the limits of mortal power; like them, he fabricates endless personae which he takes as identical with his true self; and like them, he is a victim of the egotism of his own imagination,’18 an account of the film that would surely appeal to Welles. For Peter Bogdanovich, ‘it is not his best film, but its aura is the most romantic: the initial courtship of an artist with his art.’19 (Courtship scarcely seems the word: the ravishment of his art, the twenty-four-hour copulation with his art, more likely.) For Pauline Kael, Citizen Kane is a magic show; for the present writer it is about size and the doomed quest for significance. The little boy versus the big man, getting more and feeling less; getting bigger and seeming smaller, projecting the image bigger and bigger, so the centre seems further and further from the surface. It is curious that it did not occur to Welles to make Kane grow fat.
Citizen Kane may be any or all of these things and many more besides. Part of its seeming multifariousness is due to the circumstances of its creation. It is the work of many people influencing Welles, principally Toland and Mankiewicz. Contrary to reputation (the reputation Welles and RKO between them sought to give it) it is emphatically not the work of one man. A great deal of what is on the screen is there not because it grew out of his vision but because it was what his collaborators wanted. Only in the area of sound is it uniquely his. His own presence in the film of course lends it tremendous brio and colour, and an ineffable flavour. Truffaut’s observation that it is the only first film directed by a famous man has a deep relevance; public as he was, he had little time for private reflection. In his later career, he had all too much time for that; alas, the means to put his reflections into practice were no longer available to him. That he was a
ble – in cahoots with RKO’s special effects division – to accommodate the influences and weld them into something that seems coherent and organic is another brilliant trick of the great conjuror. The truth is that after Citizen Kane he needed to start all over again. It was an end, as much as a beginning for him. Well, why not? He was young, hugely acclaimed and with a splendid contract. He was only at the beginning. ‘Orson Welles is 26,’20 wrote Tangye Lean at the end of his review in Horizon, ‘with say 40 years work ahead of him.’ Welles became a symbolic figure for some in the struggle for film-makers’ independence, of the press, and of the system, a dangerous thing for his future: ‘There has never been a more exciting press show,’21 averred Cedric Belfrage in the little magazine, The Clipper. ‘For on that screen the slaves, the houris, and the camp-followers of the press lords saw some of the truth told about what enslaves, degrades, and makes prostitutes of them. And at the same time, they saw the whole spangled pyramid of Hollywood movie conventions, which they had had to support with their bodies in their advertisement-controlled “criticism”, toppled over by the heroic Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre nobodies.’
