by Pauline Kael
THOMPSON
Well, if you get around to your memoirs—don’t forget, Mr. Rawlston wants to be sure of getting first chance. We pay awful well for long excerpts.
RAYMOND
Maybe he’d like to buy the excerpts of what Mr. Kane said about him.
THOMPSON
Huh?
RAYMOND
He thought Rawlston would break his neck sooner or later. He gave that weekly magazine of yours three years.
THOMPSON
(Smugly) He made a bit of a mistake.
RAYMOND
He made a lot of mistakes.
Welles, who did such memorable casting in the rest of the movie, used a number of his own faceless executive assistants in the vapid roles of the Luce men. They are the performers in Citizen Kane that nobody remembers, and they didn’t go on to become actors. William Alland, whose voice was fine as the voice of “News on the March” but who was a vacuum as Thompson, the reporter, became a producer and investment broker; another of Welles’s assistants, Richard Wilson, who also played a reporter, is now a director (Three in the Attic); still another, Richard Barr, is the well-known New York theatrical producer. Among the “News on the March” men, there were some bit players who did have potential faces (Alan Ladd was one of them), but they weren’t presented as personalities. Nevertheless, in a movie as verbally explicit as Citizen Kane the faceless idea doesn’t really come across. You probably don’t get the intention behind it in Kane unless you start thinking about the unusual feebleness of the scenes with the “News on the March” people and about the fact that though Thompson is a principal in the movie in terms of how much he appears, there isn’t a shred of characterization in his lines or in his performance; he is such a shadowy presence that you may even have a hard time remembering whether you ever saw his face, though this movie introduced to the screen a large group of performers who made strong, astonishingly distinct impressions, sometimes in very brief roles. Perhaps the acting and the group movement of the faceless men needed to be stylized, the dialogue more satirical; as it was done, it’s just dull rather than purposefully blank. Welles probably thought it didn’t matter how bad these actors were, because they should be colorless anyway; after R.K.O. gave him the go-ahead on the project, he didn’t reshoot the test scene he had made of the projection-room sequence. But the movie misses on the attitudes behind Luce’s new journalism. It’s true that for the practitioners of Timese impersonality becomes their personal style and reporters become bureaucrats, but there’s also a particular aura of programmed self-importance and of awareness of power—the ambitiousness of colorless people.
Among the minor absurdities of the script is that the “News on the March” men never think of sending a cameraman along with the inquiring reporter, though Gable had just played a newsreel cameraman in Too Hot to Handle, in 1938, and though in The Philadelphia Story, which had opened on Broadway in 1939, and which Mankiewicz’s brother Joe produced for the screen in 1940, which Kane was being shot, the magazine team, also obviously from Luce, includes a photographer. There’s something rather pathetic—almost as if Kane were a Grade B movie that didn’t have a big enough budget for a few extra players—about that one lonely sleuthing reporter travelling around the country while a big organization delays the release of an important newsreel documentary on the head of a rival news chain. Maybe Mankiewicz, despite his attempt to place Hearst historically through the “March of Time” framework, still thought in terms of the older journalism and of all the gimmicky movies about detective-reporters. And Mankiewicz was by temperament a reckless, colorful newspaperman. That deleted material about the Luce organization’s wanting Raymond’s memoirs, with Raymond’s teaser “He made a lot of mistakes,” is part of an elaborate series of scandalous subplots, closely paralleling scandals in Hearst’s life, that were cut out in the final script. In the movie, Susan says to Thompson, “Look, if you’re smart, you’ll get in touch with Raymond. He’s the butler. You’ll learn a lot from him. He knows where all the bodies are buried.” It’s an odd, cryptic speech. In the first draft, Raymondliterally knew where the bodies were buried: Mankiewicz had dished up a nasty version of the scandal sometimes referred to as the Strange Death of Thomas Ince. Even with this kind of material cut down to the barest allusions, Mankiewicz, in Citizen Kane, treated the material of Hearst’s life in Hearstian yellow-journalism style.
Twenty-one
WELLES IS RIGHT, of course, about Rosebud—it is dollar-book Freud. But it is such a primitive kind of Freudianism that, like some of the movie derivations from Freud later in the forties—in The Seventh Veil, for instance—it hardly seems Freudian at all now. Looking for “the secret” of a famous man’s last words is about as phony as the blind-beggar-for-luck bit, yet it does “work” for some people; they go for the idea that Rosebud represents lost maternal bliss and somehow symbolizes Kane’s loss of the power to love or be loved. The one significant changes from Hearst’s life—Kane’s separation from his parents—seems to be used to explain Kane, though there is an explicit disavowal of any such intention toward the end. Someone says to Thompson, “If you could have found out what Rosebud meant, I bet that would’ve explained everything.” Thompson replies, “No, I don’t think so. No. Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained anything. I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life. No. I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, a missing piece.”
Nevertheless, the structure of the picture—searching for the solution to a mystery—and the exaggerated style makes it appear that Rosebud is the key to Kane’s life, and the public responds to what is presented dramatically, not to the reservations of the moviemakers. Rosebud has become part of popular culture, and people remember it who have forgotten just about everything else in Citizen Kane; the jokes started a week before the movie opened, with a child’s sled marked “Rosebud” dragged onstage in the first act of Native Son, and a couple of years ago, in Peanuts, Snoopy walked in the snow pulling a sled and Charlie Brown said, “Rosebud?” The Rosebud of Rosebud is as banal as Rosebud itself. It seems that as a child Herman Mankiewicz had had a sled, which may or may not have carried the label “Rosebud” (his family doesn’t remember); he wasn’t dramatically parted from the sled, but he once had a bicycle that was stolen, and he mourned that all his life. He simply put the emotion of the one onto the other.
Though Rosebud was in the long first draft, it didn’t carry the same weight there, because the newspaper business itself undermined Kane’s idealism. In that draft, Kane, like Hearst, in order to reach the masses he thought he wanted to serve and protect, built circulation by turning the newspapers into pulp magazines, and, in order to stay in business and expand, squeezed nonadvertisers. The long script went as far as to show that, in the process of becoming one of the mighty, Kane-Hearst, like Louis B. Mayer and so many other tycoons, developed close ties to the underworld. Mankiewicz was trying to give a comprehensive view of the contradictions that emerge when an idealist attempts to succeed in business and politics. Fragments of this are left, but their meaning is no longer clear. For example, the point of the sequence of Kane’s buying up the staff of the Chronicle, the paper that was outselling his Inquirer by featuring crime and sex, was that the Chronicle’s staff would change him by deflecting him from an idealistic course (and Jed tries to point this out to Bernstein), but as it appears in the film it almost seems that in buying the Chronicle’s staff Kane is corrupting them.
It is just a fragment, too, that Kane’s first wife, Emily, is the niece of the President of the United States. Hearst’s only wife, Millicent, the daughter of a vaudeville hoofer, was a teen-age member of a group called The Merry Maidens when he met her. Emily was probably made the niece of the President in order to link Kane with the rich and to make a breach in the marriage when Kane was held responsible for the assassination of the P
resident (as Hearst was accused of having incited the death of President McKinley).
In the condensation, the whole direction was, for commercial reasons, away from the newspaper business that dominated the early script, and, for obvious reasons, away from factual resemblances to Hearst’s life. This was generally accomplished by making things funny. For example, Hearst had actually been cheated out of the office of mayor of New York by fraud at the polls, and this incident was included in American. In Citizen Kane it became, instead, a joke: when Kane loses the election for governor, the Kane papers automatically claim “FRAUD AT POLLS.” This version is, of course, a quick way of dramatizing the spirit of yellow journalism, and it’s useful and comic, but the tendency of this change, as of many others, was, whether deliberately or unconsciously, to make things easier for the audience by playing down material on how wealth and the power it buys can also buy the love of the voters. Hearst (the son of a senator whose money had got him into the Senate) did buy his way into public office; as a young man, he was twice elected to Congress, and he had tried to get the Democratic nomination for President just before he decided to run for mayor of New York. The movie flatters the audience by saying that Kane couldn’t buy the people’s love—that he “was never granted elective office by the voters of his country.”
Actually, it wasn’t the voters but crooked politicians who defeated Hearst. When the Tammany boss Charles F. Murphy refused to help Hearst get the Democratic nomination for mayor, he ran as an independent, campaigning against the corrupt Tammany “boodlers,” and he printed a cartoon of Murphy in prison stripes. Kane gives Boss Jim Gettys this treatment. Murphy was so deeply wounded by the cartoon that he arranged for Hearst’s ballots to be stolen, and, it is said, even managed to rig the recount. That reckless cartoon was the turning point in Hearst’s political career. The movie gives Gettys a different revenge; namely, exposing Kane’s “love nest”—which was something that also happened to Hearst, but on another occasion, long after he had abandoned his political ambitions, when his Los Angeles Examiner was attacking the Los Angeles Times, and the Times used his own tactics against him by bringing up his “double life” and his “love nest” with Marion Davies. The movie ultimately plays the same game. Citizen Kanebecomes a movie about the private life of a public figure—the scandals and tidbits and splashy sensations that the Hearst press always preferred to issues. The assumption of the movie was much like that of the yellow press: that the mass audience wasn’t interested in issues, that all it wanted was to get “behind the scenes” and find out the dirt.
Twenty-two
AS THE NEWSPAPER business and the political maneuvering were pared away, the personal material took on the weight and the shape of the solution to a mystery. Even so, if the movie had been directed in a more matter-of-fact, naturalistic style, Thompson’s explanation that Rosebud was just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle would have seemed quite sensible. Instead, Welles’s heavily theatrical style overemphasized the psychological explanation to such a point that when we finally glimpse the name on the sled we in the audience are made to feel that we’re in on a big secret—a revelation that the world missed out on. However, Rosebud is so cleverly worked into the structure that, like the entrance that Hecht and MacArthur prepared for Walter Burns, it is enjoyable as beautiful tomfoolery even while we are conscious of it as “commercial” mechanics. I think what makes Welles’s directorial style so satisfying in this movie is that we are constantly aware of the mechanics—that the pleasure Kane gives doesn’t come from illusion but comes from our enjoyment of the dexterity of the illusionists and the working of the machinery. Kane, too, is a clock that laughs. Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show. It is Welles’s distinctive quality as a movie director—I think it is his genius—that he never hides his cleverness, that he makes it possible for us not only to enjoy what he does but to share his enjoyment in doing it. Welles’s showmanship is right there on the surface, just as it was when, as a stage director, he set Julius Caesar among the Nazis, and set Macbeth in Haiti with a black cast and, during the banquet scene, blasted the audience with a recording of the “Blue Danube Waltz”—an effect that Kubrick was to echo (perhaps unknowingly?) in 2001. There is something childlike—and great, too—about his pleasure in the magic of theatre and movies. No other director in the history of movies has been so open in his delight, so eager to share with us the game of pretending, and Welles’s silly pretense of having done everything himself is just another part of the game.
Welles’s magic as a director (at this time) was that he could put his finger right on the dramatic fun of each scene. Mankiewicz had built the scenes to end at ironic, dramatic high points, and Welles probably had a more innocently brazen sense of melodramatic timing than any other movie director. Welles also had a special magic beyond this: he could give élan to scenes that were confused in intention, so that the movie seems to go from dramatic highlight to highlight without lagging in between. There doesn’t appear to be any waste material in Kane, because he charges right through the weak spots as if they were bright, and he almost convinces you (or does convince you) that they’re shining jewels. Perhaps these different kinds of magic can be suggested by two examples. There’s the famous sequence in which Kane’s first marriage is summarized by a series of breakfasts, with overlapping dialogue. The method was not new, and it’s used here on a standard marriage joke, but the joke is a basic good joke, and the method is honestly used to sum up as speedily as possible the banality of what goes wrong with the marriage. This sequence is adroit, and Welles brings out the fun in the material, but there’s no special Wellesian magic in it—except, perhaps, in his own acting. But in the cutting from the sequence of Kane’s first meeting with Susan (where the writing supplies almost no clue to why he’s drawn to this particular twerp of a girl beyond his finding her relaxing) to the political rally, Welles’s special talent comes into play. Welles directs the individual scenes with such flourish and such enjoyment of flourish that the audience reacts as if the leap into the rally were clever and funny and logical, too, although the connection between the scenes isn’t established until later, when Boss Jim Gettys uses Susan to wreck Kane’s political career. As a director, Welles is so ebullient that we go along with the way he wants us to feel; we’re happy to let him “put it over on us.” Given the subject of Hearst and the witty script, the effect is of complicity, of a shared knowingness between Welles and the audience about what the movie is about. Kane’s big smile at the rally seals the pact between him and us. Until Kane’s later years, Welles, in the role, 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. It’s a beautiful kind of emotional nakedness—ingenuously exposing the sheer love of playacting—that most actors lose long before they become “professional.” If an older actor—even a very good one—had played the role, faking youth for the young Kane the way Edward Arnold, say, sometimes faked it, I think the picture might have been routine. Some people used to say that Welles might be a great director but he was a bad actor, and his performances wrecked his pictures. I think just the opposite—that his directing style is such an emanation of his adolescent love of theatre that his films lack a vital unifying element when he’s not in them or when he plays only a small part in them. He needs to be at the center. The Magnificent Ambersons is a work of feeling and imagination and of obvious effort—and the milieu is much closer to Welles’s own background than the milieu of Kane is—but Welles isn’t in it, and it’s too bland. It feels empty, uninhabited. Without Orson Welles’s physical presence—the pudgy, big prodigy who incarnates egotism—Citizen Kane might (as Otis Ferguson suggested) have disintegrated into vignettes. We feel that he’s making it all happen. Like the actor-managers of the old theatre, he’s the man onstage running the show, pulling it all tog
ether.
Twenty-three
MANKIEWICZ'S SCRIPT, though nominally an “original”—and in the best sense original—was in large part an adaptation of the material (much of it published) of Hearst’s life. Hearst’s life was so full of knavery and perversity that Mankiewicz simply sorted out the plums. Mankiewicz had been a reporter on the New York World, the Pulitzer paper, where Hearst himself had worked for a time before he persuaded his father to give him the San Francisco Examiner. When Hearst got the Examiner, he changed it in imitation of the World, and then expanded to New York, where he bought a paper and started raiding and decimating the World’s staff. One of his favorite tactics was to hire away men he didn’t actually want at double or treble what Pulitzer was paying them, then fire them, leaving them stranded (a tactic memorialized in The Front Page when Walter Burns hires and fires the poetic reporter Bensinger). Kane’s business practices are so closely patterned on Hearst’s that in reading about Hearst one seems to be reading the script. Descriptions—like the one in the Atlantic Monthly in 1931—of how Hearst cynically bought away the whole of Pulitzer’s Sunday staff might be descriptions of Kane’s maneuver. In 1935, Fortune described Hearst’s warehouse in the Bronx in terms that might have been the specifications for the warehouse in the film, and by 1938 even the Reader’s Digest was reprinting, from the Saturday Evening Post, a description of Hearst’s empire in phrases that might be part of the script:
All his life, Mr. Hearst bought, bought, bought—whatever touched his fancy. He purchased newspapers, Egyptian mummies, a California mountain range, herds of Tibetan yaks. He picked up a Spanish abbey, had it knocked down, crated, shipped to New York, and never has seen it since.