At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  James Naremore identifies Tarkington’s Ambersons as “less interesting as a recreation of historical truth than as a projection of political and psychological attitudes back upon an imaginary past”.18 In adapting the book, Welles takes on board the author’s political and psychological history without the imposition of too much historiographic criticism.

  * * *

  The jigsaw-puzzle structure of Citizen Kane, while extending in historical scope from 1871 to 1941, focuses most of its many flashbacks on two key periods: 1893–1900, the tail end of the ‘Gilded Age’, and 1916–1919. The bulk of the chronologically structured Ambersons slots into 1904–1912, an era mostly skipped over by Kane.

  Chronologically tabling the main events of each film illustrates their historical comprehensiveness, the way they complement each other as narratives of the post-Civil War era.

  Year The Magnificent Ambersons (131 minute version)19 Citizen Kane20 American History

  1864/5 Charles Foster Kane born. End of Civil War.

  1868 Colorado Lode deeded to Mrs. Kane.

  1871 Kane leaves Colorado with Walter P. Thatcher.

  1873 Major Amberson’s fortune and the beginning of “the magnificence of the Ambersons”. The Great Panic.

  1885 Eugene Morgan’s botched serenade. Isabel Amberson marries Wilbur Minafer. George Amberson Minafer born soon after.

  circa 1890 Kane takes over NY Inquirer and publishes his ‘Declaration of Principles’. Fights traction trusts, copper swindles, slum lords (to 1898).

  1895 George (ten) fights with other boy in street.

  1898 Kane propagandises for war with Spain and wins circulation war. Goes to Europe and romances Emily Norton. Spanish-American War.

  1900 Marries Emily on White House lawn.

  1901 Breakfast with Emily (1).

  1902 George (seventeen) home from school. Breakfast with Emily (2).

  1904 Ball in honour of George. The Ambersons and Morgans drive through snow. Wilbur dies. Breakfast with Emily (3).

  1905 Excavations for subdivision on the Amberson property. George insults Eugene. Isabel spurns Eugene’s proposal on George’s insistence. George and Isabel abroad. Breakfast with Emily (4).

  1906 Breakfast with Emily (5).

  1909 Breakfast with Emily (6).

  1910 Isabel returns to Indianapolis and dies; Major Amberson dies. The family finances in disarray.

  1911 Jack Amberson leaves Indianapolis. George and Aunt Fanny leave the mansion. George begins work with explosives.

  1912 George’s accident. Eugene visits Fanny in the boarding house. [END]

  1915 Kane meets Susan Alexander.

  1916 Kane’s failed political campaign for NY state governor.

  1917 Divorces Emily, marries Susan. US enters WWI.

  1918 Death of Emily and their son, Charles Jr.

  1919 Susan’s opera debut in Chicago and tour.

  1920 Susan’s suicide attempt.

  1929 Market crash.

  1932 Kane loses control of his empire to Thatcher. Susan leaves Kane.

  1941 Kane dies. The quest for Rosebud. [END]

  In Kane and Ambersons, American history in the fifty years after the Civil War, at least in the Midwest and on the East Coast, is represented by wealthy and influential people. The lives of Charles Forster Kane, Walter Parks Thatcher, the Amberson family, and Eugene Morgan are entangled with what contemporary audiences would have seen as moments of irrevocable urban transformation. Kane’s success in yellow journalism is specific to the conditions of fin-de-siècle New York City: a large and dense urban population, mass literacy, and the technologies of newspaper production. Ambersons is more explicitly technologically determinist. Indianapolis’s economy, its social hierarchy, its whimsical customs, and its very material form are permanently altered by a revolution in transportation. While technology is driven by the entrepreneurial spirit of innovators, once set in motion it is unstoppable.

  The old order – for all its corruption, backwardness, and social unfairness – does not vanish without tender lament. Remembrance of things past furnishes Welles’s characters with emotional logic. In fact, the agitators for change tend to wind up the most regretful. Kane, who more successfully than anybody disrespects tradition and imposes his personality on American society via the technology of the news business, aches for his interrupted childhood. Automobile entrepreneur Eugene Morgan is ambivalent about automobiles, conceding that “with all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization”.

  Both films locate their Merrie England in the decades immediately following the Civil War: pastorals to contrast with the dirty cities of the twentieth century. In Kane it is the wintry Colorado of 1871. In Ambersons it is Indianapolis as the “midland town” of the 1880s, with its quaint bygone fashions, unhurried horse-drawn street cars, and moonlit serenades. Those customs barely linger on into the new century. Around Christmas 1904, we witness a spectacular “pageant of the tenantry” in honour of spoilt brat George Amberson Minafer. It is “the last of the great, long-remembered dances that everybody talked about”; the following day George topples his horse-drawn sleigh and Eugene’s primitive horseless buggy comes to the rescue. The characters observe that the town is getting dirtier, more industrial. The Ambersons and the Morgans chug through the snow singing ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. The final shot of this sequence does not fade to black but is masked out by an iris, another of Welles’s quotes from the language of silent film to roughly, if anachronistically, suggest old times.21 The sequence signifies not only the town’s inescapable descent into modernity, but also the last moment of harmony between the two families.

  Here and elsewhere Welles puts a personal spin on winter as the age-old symbol of death. In Kane, snow is associated with childhood from the vantage of old age. It works as a Proustian memory trigger: flakes swirling through a snow globe twice prompt the tycoon to mutter “Rosebud”, the name of his old snow sled – the last utterance on his deathbed.22 In Welles’s later films Mr. Arkadin and Chimes at Midnight, snow coincides respectively with dying Jakob Zouk’s nostalgic desire for a Christmas goose liver and Master Shallow’s happy reflection on “the days that we have seen!”

  The western had mythically reimagined the country’s violent post-Civil War frontier history for modern American audiences, usually as a triumphalist narrative. Kane is only a western for a few minutes, but the vanished frontier seems central to the character’s sense of self. Kane is suddenly ejected from his childhood in Colorado and, as heir to a fortune, sent east to be educated. The purely accidental beneficiary of a gold mine, he is thereafter geographically isolated from the engine of his wealth, the fortune wrestled from the frontier. Upon assuming his inheritance, Kane tells Thatcher, “I’m not interested in gold mines, oil wells, shipping, or real estate.” Sixty years later, still in rebellion against his former banker-guardian, he reflects: “If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.” A few years later he dies thinking of Rosebud.

  Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893) had argued that in the process of westward expansion the United States had founded its uniquely democratic institutions and way of life, but by then the frontier had been finally conquered. In 1898 Kane, the frontier exile, champions the Spanish-American War as a patriotic cause through ludicrous fabricated news stories. This aspect of Kane’s history is faithfully based on Hearst’s press campaign.23 Smyth argues that this shift from American expansionism to empire seems to represent the beginning of “national decay, a betrayal of [Kane’s] western frontier ‘childhood’ and the Lincoln Republic”.24

  Kane in Colorado, 1871; the Ambersons and the Morgans in Indianapolis, 1904

  NOTES

  1 Welles quoted in Bazin, Bitsch, and Domarchi, ‘Interview with Orson Welles (II)’, 64.

  2 Michael Denning makes a similar connection between the Welles and Dos Passos projects; he considers the postwar thrill
er The Stranger the third volume in Welles’s ‘USA trilogy’, although he admits only Kane “succeeds in uniting social content with formal experimentation”. Denning, ‘The Politics of Magic: Orson Welles’s Allegories of Anti-Fascism’, in James Naremore (ed.), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 201–2.

  3 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1998), 4–5. My chapter title is indebted to Denning’s groundbreaking study.

  4 Karl Radek quoted in David Caute, Politics and the Novel During the Cold War (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2010), 34.

  5 John P. Diggins, ‘Visions of Chaos and Visions of Order: Dos Passos as Historian’, American Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3, November 1974, 331.

  6 George Packer, ‘The Spanish Prisoner’, New Yorker, 31 October 2005, at http://www.new-yorker.com/magazine/2005/10/31/the-spanish-prisoner (accessed 6 June 2015).

  7 Parkinson.

  8 Denning, ‘The Politics of Magic: Orson Welles’s Allegories of Anti-Fascism’, 209.

  9 FBI report quoted in Joseph McBride, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 45; Louis Pizzitola, Hearst over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 370. Also see James Naremore, ‘The Trial: The FBI vs. Orson Welles’, Film Comment, Vol. 27, No. 1, January–February 1991, 22–7.

  10 Denning, ‘The Politics of Magic: Orson Welles’s Allegories of Anti-Fascism’, 199.

  11 Robert L. Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 111–7.

  12 J. E. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 325–6.

  13 Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 84.

  14 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 87–8.

  15 Welles quoted in Denning, ‘The Politics of Magic: Orson Welles’s Allegories of Anti-Fascism’, 188.

  16 Welles quoted in Catherine L. Benamou, It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 186.

  17 Robert Carringer, ‘The Scripts of Citizen Kane’, in Naremore (ed.), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook, 117.

  18 Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles, 90.

  19 The timeline is adapted from Robert L. Carringer, The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 39–41.

  20 The source is the shooting script except where the film departs. Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, Citizen Kane ‘3rd Revised Final’ (16 July 1941). Orson Welles Manuscripts, Manuscripts Department, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana (henceforth Lilly Library).

  21 For an examination of the anachronistic iris shot, see David Bordwell, ‘The Magnificent Ambersons: A Usable Past’, www.davidbordwell.net, 30 May 2014, at http://www.da-vidbordwell.net/blog/2014/05/30/the-magnificent-ambersons-a-usable-past (accessed 7 June 2015).

  22 Welles always gave Mankiewicz credit for the ‘Rosebud’ plot device, which he thought gimmicky. The snow globe as memory trigger was also possibly a Mankiewicz invention, as it occurs in the first draft, written by Mankiewicz with Houseman. See Carringer, ‘The Scripts of Citizen Kane’, 82.

  23 Ben Proctor, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 1863–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 95–103.

  24 Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema, 333–4.

  CHAPTER 2

  AN EMPIRE UPON AN EMPIRE

  Citizen Kane (1941)

  Citizen Kane retells the life of Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), one of America’s wealthiest businessmen, in the format of a newsreel and as it can be gleaned from the stories of five witnesses. These are, in order of appearance, Kane’s bank manager and guardian, Walter Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris), his second wife, Susan Alexander Kane (Dorothy Comingore), his general manager, Mr Bernstein (Everett Sloane), his friend Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), and his valet, Raymond (Paul Stewart).

  The film begins one night in 1941 at Xanadu, Kane’s sprawling, unfinished estate on the Florida Gulf Coast. Kane mutters “Rosebud”, drops a snow globe, and dies. We then see a rough cut of a newsreel obituary. Reporter Thompson (William Alland) is sent to interview Kane’s former associates in the hope that solving the mystery of that final word will provide a personal insight the newsreel lacks.

  Thompson approaches Susan at the El Rancho nightclub in Atlantic City, where she has been performing. Drunk, she refuses to talk, but the headwaiter (Gus Shilling) confides Susan does not know the meaning of “Rosebud”.

  An unpublished memoir by Thatcher lies in his grand memorial library in Philadelphia. In it, Thatcher recalls removing the boy Kane from his parents in 1871. Having come unexpectedly into great wealth from the proceeds of a gold mine, Mrs Kane’s wish is that her son be educated privately and removed from the violence of his father. The boy dislikes Thatcher on sight and butts him with his snow sled.

  Thatcher’s narrative skips to about 1890, when Kane is twenty-five and now in possession of his inheritance. Kane decides to take over the day-to-day running of a minor asset, the New York Inquirer. Thatcher is soon appalled by Kane’s muckraking attacks on copper barons, slum lords, and urban transit monopolies (the ‘Traction Trust’, in which Kane, ironically, has a large stake). Kane is also stoking war by falsely reporting “GALLEONS OF SPAIN OFF JERSEY COAST!” Confronted at the Inquirer offices by Thatcher in 1898, Kane declares his self-appointed “duty and privilege” as protector of the people, and his indifference to the newspaper’s considerable financial losses.

  Years pass, and during the Depression Kane has to give up control of his business to Thatcher. Thompson moves on to New York City. The elderly Mr Bernstein recalls Kane taking over the Inquirer in the 1890s and remaking its journalistic policies. Early on Kane prints a ‘Declaration of Principles’ which promises to defend the rights of the common people. By 1898 he has raised circulation of the Inquirer to beat its biggest competitor, the Chronicle, mainly by poaching its staff. In 1900 Kane marries Emily Norton, niece of the President.

  The next interview subject is Jedediah Leland, Kane’s bitter former best friend and a one-time ‘dramatic critic’ for Kane newspapers in New York and Chicago. Leland recalls Kane’s first marriage to Emily. A montage of breakfasts between the years 1901 and 1909 shows the fading of affection and interest. Leland recalls how Kane met the twenty-two-year-old Susan Alexander in West Manhattan on a wet evening in 1915. Kane was on his way to explore his late mother’s belongings in warehouse storage.

  In 1916 Kane runs for state governor of New York against ‘Boss’ Jim Gettys (Ray Collins). Kane addresses a rally at Madison Square Garden and his chances seem strong. However, Gettys has discovered Kane’s affair with Susan, makes Emily aware of it, and now attempts to blackmail Kane into pulling out of the race. Kane refuses. The affair is exposed in the Chronicle and Kane loses the election. Leland, critical of Kane’s megalomania, asks to be reassigned to Chicago.

  Kane divorces Emily, marries Susan in 1917, and by 1919 has built the Chicago Municipal Opera House to stage Susan’s debut performance. Leland, as the Chicago Inquirer’s dramatic critic, begins to write a damning notice of her debut but passes out drunk. Kane finishes the review as Leland intended and then fires him.

  Susan is now prepared to speak to Thompson. We see the dreariness of her enforced singing training, another view of her disastrous debut, her hysterical reaction to Leland’s bad review, and her gruelling tour promoted by Kane’s national network of metropolitan Inquirers. Her opera career ends only with her suicide attempt. Thereafter she lives a bored life mostly assembling jigsaw puzzles at Xanadu. She finally walks out on Kane in 1932 because of his narcissism and inability to love.

  Thompson’s next interview is with Raymond at Xanadu, w
ho remembers Kane destroying Susan’s room after she leaves him. Her snow globe prompts him to mutter “Rosebud.” Almost ten years later, in isolation in Xanadu, Kane dies after mysteriously muttering the word again.

  Thompson fails in his quest to discover the meaning of the word. He speculates that “maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost, but it wouldn’t have explained anything. I don’t think any word explains a man’s life.”

  The final shots show Kane’s numerous possessions being catalogued or consigned to an incinerator. The sled from Colorado is thrown into the fire, and as it burns up we see the decal in close-up: “Rosebud”.

  * * *

  The short film sequences intended as prologue and interludes for the stage production of Too Much Johnson constitute Welles’s first, albeit unfinished, attempt to invent a cinematic city, in this case a stylised historical Manhattan. Film preservation scholar Scott Simmon notes how references in the playscript drafts and the “traffic mix of automobiles with horse-drawn carriages” in the film sequences fix the period setting at about 19101 – a transitional moment of urban history that Welles would properly explore a little over three years later in The Magnificent Ambersons.

  Welles rewrote Gillette’s 1894 sex farce by screwballising the dialogue. The silent film sequences were designed in tribute to vintage slapstick.2 Welles and crew prepared by watching films by Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd. He later told one biographer that Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923) had been a key reference.3

  The prologue was meant to be a long chase sequence taken to comically absurd lengths: the characters run, crawl, and leap across the roofs and through ad hoc passageways in the industrial cityscape. One sequence was filmed in the now-vanished Little Syria section of the Lower West Side.4 Working with cinematographer Harry Dunham, Welles obtained a variety of unusual shots to emphasise the dangers to Billings (Joseph Cotten) as he escapes the husband he has a cuckolded (Edgar Barrier).