The Magic World of Orson Welles

by James Naremore

  During Bernstein’s flashback, the sense of manifest destiny and the exhilaration of seeking Kane in action give the film most of its feel as a “newspaper” picture, although it is a picture of such ambition and intelligence that it makes others of the type seem shallow. It manages to show all the contradictions in liberal democracy through a single editorial desk, the newsroom literally becoming a focal point of social history, where we see the country moving through various stages of democratization—each attempt at progress generating new conflicts and new evils. Here, as later in The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles found a way to combine the chronology of individual characters with the chronology of the nation at large; America moves from the age of the tycoon, through the period of populist muckraking, and into the era of “mass communications,” with turn-of-the-century types like Kane being destroyed by the very process they have set in motion. Perhaps in this respect Bernstein’s defense of Kane has a historical validity. Kane is in fact the quintessential “American” that Mankiewicz’s original title for the film (American) had called him—a man designed to embody all the strengths and failings of capitalist democracy.

  As I have already suggested, the film’s ambiguity and ironic detachment about Kane, its acute sense of the relation between character and history, spills over into the portraits of the minor players. Bernstein and Leland, for example, are marvelously paired, the tensions and contrasts between them becoming indistinguishable from the separate aspects of Kane’s own personality. Leland, whom Thompson now visits in a geriatric ward, is often regarded as the spokesperson for the “moral” of the film, but while it is true that he serves as a sort of conscience for Kane, he is as flawed and human as the doggedly loyal Bernstein. Like everyone else, he has been placed in a social and psychological context: the last member, the ultimate refinement, of a fading and effete New England aristocracy (“one of those old families where the father is worth ten million bucks and then one day he shoots himself and it turns out there’s nothing but debts”), he is an aesthete who despises the capitalists but seems out of place among the workers. Clearly he lacks Kane’s vitality and is fascinated with Kane for that very reason. A dandy and a puritan, he is very much the “New England schoolmarm” Kane has named him; in fact, the film may be hinting that his involvement with Kane is partly motivated by sexual feelings. Mankiewicz and Welles were prohibited from showing a scene in a bordello where Kane unsuccessfully tries to interest Leland in a woman, but even without this scene Leland seems to have no active sex life. As a young man in the Bernstein section he barely conceals his admiration for Kane, who has been his benefactor and apparently shares his idealism. When he grows disillusioned, there is inevitably a “loose” woman involved: at the big Inquirer party, his frowns of disapproval and complaints about the war with Spain are intercut with images of Kane making time with one of the chorus girls, and when the “love nest” with Susan Alexander brings an end to Kane’s political career, it is Leland, not Emily Kane, who behaves like a jilted lover.

  In his old age Leland suggests an idealist who has degenerated into a cynic. (Joseph Cotten’s makeup here has always seemed to me a bit overdone, but he has been perfectly cast in the role, his voice suggesting a “weak” version of the slightly genteel, upper-class Southern lilt one hears in Welles’s own speech.) He has grown a bit smug, but his mock senility and his bitter jokes do not completely hold off despair. He tells Thompson that “a lot of us check out with no special conviction about death. But we do know what we’re leaving . . . we believe in something.” These words, which can be taken as a valid criticism of Kane, are relatively small comfort. Leland himself is so lacerated with age and disillusionment that he now has only cigars to sustain him. He is charming, of course, but his wit has a hollow, grotesque quality, resembling nothing so much as a dried-out Hollywood scriptwriter. The setting itself emphasizes sterility and death—a purgatorial hospital sunroof where a few ghostly figures in wheelchairs are attended by ugly nurses and where even the sunlight seems cold.

  The atmosphere of Leland’s interview is particularly ironic in view of the story he tells. Although Bernstein has suggested that “Rosebud” might be a woman, it is Leland who talks about Kane’s love life; a more intimate friend than Bernstein, he recounts the period between Kane’s first marriage and his attempt to turn Susan Alexander into an opera star. From a sociopolitical study of Kane, the script now begins to shift toward straightforward, though rather simplified, psychoanalysis.

  At this point in his history Kane is a greater public figure than ever, his politics constantly being played off against the crisis of his personal life. The two women he meets are as much physical and social opposites as Leland and Bernstein have been, yet in their own way both are connected to his desire to assert mastery, his need to find what Leland calls “love.” The celebrated breakfast-table montage showing the disintegration of Kane’s marriage to Emily (Ruth Warrick, whom Leland describes aptly as “like all the girls I knew in dancing school”) is followed by the comic toothache scene in Susan Alexander’s apartment, the allegro pace dissolving into a sweet, intimate rendezvous. Aided by what is surely the least ostentatious, most persuasive makeup job in the film, Welles turns rapidly from an ardent husband wooing a president’s niece into a tired businessman courting a salesgirl.

  Susan’s toothache is a typical Hollywood “meet-cute” device, and as if he were acknowledging his own cleverness Welles casts shadow pictures on the wall to amuse her: “Gee,” she says, “you know an awful lot of tricks. You’re not a professional magician are you?” Kane, however, is as much the victim of illusions as their creator. He sentimentally imagines that Susan has a mother like his own, and the scene where he presides quietly over her “recital” is followed immediately by the opening of his campaign for governor—the sexual conquest linked to a hubristic attempt to dominate the populace. In fact the closing line of Susan’s song concerns the theme of power: it comes from The Barber of Seville and roughly translates as “I have sworn it, I will conquer.”

  The ensuing political rally is almost pure expressionism and is a good example of how the film creates large-scale effects with a modest budget and the optical printer. In place of a crowd of Hollywood extras, the figures in the audience are obviously painted and abstracted, revealing both Kane’s delusions of grandeur and the crowd’s lack of individuality. Everything is dominated by Kane’s ego, from the initial “K” he wears as a stickpin, to the huge blowup of his jowly face on a poster, to the incessant “I” in his public speech; now and then, however, we cut away to the back of the hall, the oratory becoming slightly distant, Kane suddenly looking like a fanatical puppet gesticulating on a toy stage. He talks about “the workingman and the slum child,” and meanwhile the frock-coated men behind him are arranged to resemble the bloated rich of a Thomas Nast cartoon, one of them leaning on a polished walking stick while his silk top hat lies casually on the floor. The atmosphere is somehow both Germanic and purely American, Kane’s stem-winding campaign speech taking place in a setting that subtly evokes newsreel shots of Hitler’s harangues to his political hacks.

  Throughout the rally, Kane’s supporters—Leland, Bernstein, Emily, and his young son—have been isolated in ironic, individual close-ups, but his political rival, Boss Jim Gettys (Ray Collins), stands high above the action, the stage viewed over his shoulder so that he dominates the frame like a sinister power. It is Gettys who is truly in control of this campaign, and the showdown he subsequently arranges between himself, Kane, Emily, and Susan—a private conversation in perfect contrast to the rally—is one of the most emotionally effective scenes in the film. There are over a dozen shots in the sequence, one of them a rather long take, but no close-ups; the characters are dynamically blocked, with Kane, Susan, and Gettys alternately stepping into complete shadow as the tide of the conversation changes. On the whole, however, the scene is as much a triumph of ensemble acting as of direction. The evil Gettys, who is surely as much a monster as Kane, is under
played by Collins, who suggests a nice family man with just a touch of crudeness; knowing his power, he behaves courteously to Emily, even though he tells Kane that he is “not a gentleman.” “You see, my idea of a gentleman . . . Well, Mr. Kane, if I owned a newspaper and didn’t like the way somebody was doing things . . . I wouldn’t show him in a convict suit with stripes, so his children could see him in the paper, or his mother.”

  One mama’s boy has taken revenge on the other, and as a result Kane explodes. “I can fight this all alone,” he shouts, and then screams, “Don’t worry about me. I’m Charles Foster Kane! I’m no cheap, crooked politician trying to save himself from the consequences of his crimes. Gettys! I’m going to send you to Sing Sing!” What makes the scene even more powerful are the voices of the two women, who provide a virtually musical counterpart to the male contest. Emily’s voice is quiet, determined, and formal: “There seems to be only one choice for you to make, Charles. I’d say that it’s been made for you.” Meanwhile, Susan, who is completely ignored by everyone, pipes shrilly, “What about me? Charlie, he said my name’d be dragged through the mud.”

  Here, at the same moment as the political issues are about to be brought forward, the film has shifted almost completely into its examination of Kane’s sexual life. In fact the only concrete evidence we are given of Kane’s tyranny, the only person we will actually see being damaged by his actions, is Susan Alexander. The issue warrants a brief digression, because in this respect Citizen Kane contrasts vividly with the usual muckraking accounts of William Randolph Hearst’s career. Although Mankiewicz and Welles alluded to many of the deceptions described by writers like Ferdinand Lundberg, they underplayed the violence associated with the real Hearst empire, suggesting it only through occasional asides and the imagery of the political rally. Thus Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page, for all of its amoral, rover-boys comedy and cynical libertarianism, actually does a good deal more to convey the seamy side of Hearst’s endeavors. During the newspaper wars of early twentieth-century Chicago, Hearst had employed gangsters to rout his competitors; gunmen like Dion O’Banion had beaten up rival newsboys and even shot innocent civilians, while Hearst’s editors blamed the trouble on “labor agitators.” Through most of the century Hearst was a vigorous opponent of unions and child labor legislation, and his mining interests in Peru were more or less forced labor camps. Lundberg had charged that Hearst’s employees were not merely the victims of sweatshops: “They have, in many instances, been literally enslaved, indentured for long periods, and kept in employment against their will, under the muzzles of guns.” Citizen Kane’s only apparent reference to such crimes is to show Bernstein in the company of hired toughs and to have Leland berate Kane for his paternalistic attitude toward workers. Just when Leland meets the politically broken Kane in the abandoned newsroom and accuses him of swindling the public, the film veers off into the most intimate details of Kane’s love affair with Susan.

  Such a phenomenon is all the more interesting if we look back at some of the previous Hollywood movies about capitalists—The Power and the Glory (Fox, 1933), for example, or I Loved a Woman (Warner Brothers, 1933)—where, as in Kane, the treatment of the tycoon’s public life gives way to a preoccupation with his private affairs. Several critics have already stressed the similarity between The Power and the Glory and Citizen Kane; the earlier film is not especially liberal in tone—in fact it contains a vicious and even racist scene in which the protagonist, Spencer Tracy, heroically puts down a mob by insulting a thickly accented labor organizer. Nevertheless, screenwriter Preston Sturges’s flashback technique and certain of his characterizations were undoubtedly known to Mankiewicz and Welles. Spencer Tracy’s floozy mistress, for example, slightly resembles Susan Alexander, and the scene in a child’s nursery where the love affair is brought to an end is reminiscent of the climactic moments in Susan’s bedroom at Xanadu, though not nearly so cinematically powerful. Equally influential, it seems to me, is I Loved a Woman, which not only suggests certain features of Kane’s character but also foreshadows the whole Emily-Susan side of the plot. I Loved a Woman concerns John Hayden (Edward G. Robinson), a Chicago meatpacker’s son who begins life as an aesthete and becomes a monopolist and profiteer. “I’m a human puzzle,” he says at one point, referring to his penchant for art collecting. Hayden marries a cold, ambitious socialite, a scheming woman who gradually changes him from a fop into a ruthless meat baron. Miserable in this loveless marriage, he is attracted to a young opera singer (Kay Francis), who needs his financial backing. Midway through the film she invites him up to her apartment; there, in a scene remarkable for its parallels with Kane, the aspiring singer plays “Home on the Range” on an old piano while the tycoon sits back in a cozy chair and remarks that the song reminds him of his mother.

  Although I Loved a Woman contains some veiled references to the career of Samuel Insull, it, like The Power and the Glory, is a mediocre and sentimental film, interesting chiefly for its possible relationship to Kane. And what both of these earlier works show is that Mankiewicz and Welles were using one of the oldest and most effective ploys of Hollywood melodrama: they were disguising, condensing, and displacing the social issues—using a love story to illustrate the character flaws that would presumably make the tycoon a danger to the public. The only difference at this level between Kane and previous films is the degree to which its politics are tilted to the left.

  But even though the shift into sexual themes results in a kind of evasion, the basic issues are not entirely subverted. Susan Alexander is only very roughly similar to Marion Davies, but that is obviously not because Welles and Mankiewicz feared Davies’s wrath or wanted to protect her. Susan serves as a reminder to the audience of Hearst’s domineering patronage of his mistress, and, more important, she becomes a symbol for his treatment of the society at large. As Leland tells us, she represents for Kane a “cross-section of the American public.” She has had a middle-class mother who gave her music lessons, and when Kane meets her she is also a working girl, under-educated and relatively innocent. (Like most of the characters in the film, Susan has mixed motives; she is not the addle-brained gold digger some critics have made her seem.) She comes from a social level similar to that of Kane’s own parents, and his relationship with her is comparable to his relationship with the masses who read his papers. It is true that Kane showers her with wealth, but this merely confirms Leland’s remark in the desolated, postelection newspaper office: “You just want to persuade people that you love them so much that they ought to love you back.” In fact, all of Leland’s accusations and prophecies about Kane’s relationship to his readers are fulfilled in Susan’s part of the film. “You talk about the people as though you owned them,” Leland says. Kane’s treatment of Susan is a confirmation of this charge, and it also reminds us of the violence he is willing to use to have his way; thus in the last reels, which show Kane retreating more and more from public life, Susan is reduced from a pleasant, attractive girl to a harpy, and then to a near-suicide.

  The film emphasizes the fact that Susan sings unwillingly, at the command of her master. During the election campaign, Kane establishes his “love nest” and the relationship is summarized in a single shot: in the foreground Susan is poised awkwardly at a grand piano; farther back in the room, Kane is enthroned in a wicker chair, applauding slowly and grinning in satisfaction; still farther back in the frame, visible through the archway to another room, is a sumptuous double bed. After his marriage to Susan, Kane tells the reporters, “We’re going to become an opera star,” and he hires Signor Matiste to begin the arduous, comically inappropriate series of music lessons. The backgrounds in this part of the film grow more and more opulent while Susan becomes increasingly driven and humiliated. Her singing becomes not only a painful form of work but a kind of involuntary servitude as well. As a result, her resemblance to Marion Davies fades. She looks more like those Peruvians toiling at gunpoint in Hearst’s copper mines, even though she is certai
nly getting better pay.

  The choice of opera rather than movies for Susan’s career is also significant. It not only brings references to Welles’s boyhood, to Insull, McCormack, and Sybil Sanderson into the film, but it also highlights the difference in social class between Susan and the patrons for whom she works. We see her kneeling on satin pillows, pitifully frightened and garishly made up, singing “Ah! Cruel” to a dozing, tuxedoed audience, while up in the rafters a laborer holds his nose and shakes his head sadly. “I’m not high-class like you,” Susan tells Kane in an even shriller voice when she kneels again on the floor and reads the Leland-Kane review, “and I never went to any swell schools.” She attempts to quit the opera, reminding Kane, “I never wanted to do it in the first place.” Kane, however, orders her to continue, saying, “I don’t propose to have myself made ridiculous.” In a scene that is remarkable for the way it shows the pain of both people, his shadow falls over her face—just as he later towers over her in the “party” scene, when a woman’s scream is heard on the soundtrack.

  Leland has warned that the workingman will not always tolerate Kane’s patronage: “You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means your workingman expects something as his right and not your gift.” This, of course, is one reason why Susan leaves Kane. Naturally we sympathize with Kane when he recalls “Rosebud” and when the camera reveals his secret in the closing moments; in some ways the Susan Alexander plot has clouded the issues, replacing political with personal concerns, but in other ways it shows how the public and sexual concerns are interrelated. Rather like the symbols in a dream, Susan helps to censor the content even while she preserves its underlying significance.