The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  In the heady New York days of the Mercury Theatre, when it had been doing theatre and radio, “Jack” Houseman was Welles’s crucial lieutenant and heartfelt admirer. Houseman was the producer and manager who smoothed the way so the genius could do what he wanted. A great affection prompted that alliance in which Houseman believed in Welles’s unique talent and Welles counted on Jack as a forgiving manager. But in Hollywood, in the hiatus as they puzzled over a script, there had been a falling out between the two men at Chasen’s restaurant. Then, as Mankiewicz began to work with Welles, and to fill the gap left by Houseman, it was agreed that Mankiewicz would retire to the Antelope Valley Inn in Victorville (in the desert northeast of Los Angeles) to do the work. Since he was inclined to drink, he would have a secretary, and Houseman went with them—to see that the work got done before the sun went down. Houseman agreed to do this last service for Orson—but he had an ulterior motive.

  Welles’s plan was to make a picture—it was to be called American at the outset—based on the idea of a great American press lord. The model of William Randolph Hearst (among others) had been talked about—and just as surely this connection had been withheld from RKO, for they would have shied away from anything as legally dangerous. But our understanding of the film depends on another connection. The most astonishing American in sight for Herman Mankiewicz was George Orson Welles himself, still only twenty-five in 1940 as he worked on the script, and so precocious, so arrogant, so charming, so able, and so infuriating that it was hard to look away from him. That is how Orson was loathed as much as he was revered, for he did not let his talents settle lightly. He bullied, he teased, he patronized, and he outdid everyone in sight in creating, bullshitting, talking, eating, and living up to the ominous warning “There but for the grace of God goes God.”

  Moreover, it had been determined in advance that Welles was to play Kane. So if Hearst was one point of reference, out of an adolescent playfulness bound to spell ruin, Orson Welles was the other. And there at the Antelope Inn, ready to steer or help Mankiewicz, was the man who knew Welles better than anyone alive, Jack Houseman. So Mankiewicz wrote a draft (with Houseman feeding him Orson lines and anecdotes), but only after he and Welles had talked, and only in advance of Welles rewriting the Mankiewicz draft with his own.

  “Mankiewicz’s contribution?” Welles returned the question Peter Bogdanovich had asked him. “It was enormous.” He then goes on to give a full, plausible account of how they knocked the idea back and forth to its great advantage. Conclusion? Just as the credit claims, the two men wrote the script together, not always in the same room, but wrestling with the same problems. Look for anything else like Kane in Mankiewicz’s erratic career and you will not find it, whereas Welles would be obsessed with the same themes all his life.

  More important still, the way Orson talked, breathed, laughed, and lost his temper energized the script. Kane became a great role because it had its essential actor. Nor should we exclude the likelihood that Welles guessed how Houseman would help add those touches—and counted on it. He wanted it to be about him. He knew no other way. Welles made one ugly mistake. At a key moment, he did seek to reduce Mankiewicz’s credit, and that may have come out of a regret that he had not done it alone—there was a possessive megalomaniac in Welles (as there is in Kane). It is possible that, on his own, Welles would not have produced as intricate or subtle a script. But that is another way of pointing out how much Citizen Kane conformed with the collaborative nature of the factory film. Yes, it would prove to be a rare portrait of self-destructive willfulness in the American character, but it had needed two such misfits to get it clever and beautiful.

  The film was shot in apparent bliss. A bond developed between Welles and Gregg Toland, the leading cameraman of the day, who had volunteered to be his teacher and guide. Welles was fulsome in his praise of Toland until the end of his life, and in the joint credit (on-screen together) that they shared at the close of the film: Orson Welles, direction and production; Gregg Toland, photography. As for the acting, almost entirely from beginners from the Mercury Company, it is human and chewy, like a parade of characters from Dickens. (In some ways it is a very nineteenth-century movie.) It is an immense contribution to the ranks of American character actors and the beginning for Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Erskine Sanford, and Everett Sloane, not forgetting Welles himself, who would be a ham in his time but who fed upon Charles Foster Kane as if it were his last meal. Kael was right in one thing: Welles played the part with nothing less than proud radiance.

  Kane was done with relished Germanic perfection, all the way through to the dense soundtrack, where you can hear breathing and a lot of spiffy radio tricks, as well as Bernard Herrmann’s first score. The film was cut and it came out at 119 minutes for $680,000. RKO honored the overage.

  As befitted a private or special film, Welles had shot on a closed set, but in a town that thrived on gossip, word got out soon enough that Citizen Kane might be an attack on William Randolph Hearst. Rightly so—whether or not you are tempted by the rumor, passed on adroitly by Gore Vidal, that “Rosebud” was Hearst’s private name for Marion Davies’s clitoris. We are already at a point where Davies and Hearst (if they had press agents still) might be relying on this wicked film for the survival of their reputations. But Welles did not need to offend Hearst or anyone—beyond in the schoolboy way in which he felt compelled to be naughty or defiant. That is borne out within the movie when Kane dares Boss Jim Gettys to break the love-nest story, instead of biding his time for another election. Like a kid, he cannot muster the patience.

  Something like a campaign sprang up in the picture business on behalf of Hearst, led by Louis B. Mayer (a gang leader by instinct and upbringing), to kill the film. I’m not sure how far this is to be believed, but the story goes that Mayer raised a fund among the various studios to pay off RKO’s costs and have the negative destroyed. I don’t think such a thing has ever happened in Hollywood, and it didn’t happen in 1941, because George Schaefer would have nothing to do with it. As Welles admitted, Schaefer “was a hero—an absolute hero. He was marvelous with me.” The boss had reason. RKO was screening the picture for Hollywood people and getting very favorable responses. But Welles was annoyed when Schaefer rejected the idea of showing Kane all over the country in tents with the ad “The film they tried to stop.”

  The Hearst press did what they could to oppose or ignore the film. Welles claimed that it never played in major theaters or chains. But it did open on May 1, 1941, and it was Orson Welles’s final cut—no one has ever denied that. It is reckoned that in its first run it did about half a million in business. That was not enough, and those were not days when film companies took the long view of things. But in 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2002, a Sight & Sound poll of critics determined that it was the best film ever made. That is a vulgar label and one that groans the more with every passing decade. But just consider the number of times the film has been shown in classrooms and remember that Welles was up for 20 percent of the profits. In all the books on him, not one has been able to discover how far he benefited from that—and the contract did hold. That’s what deterred Ted Turner from colorizing the film while Welles was still alive.

  But the picture was well reviewed in newspapers and magazines that did get into print. The Hollywood Reporter said it was “a great motion picture.” Variety even thought it was “a film possessing the sure dollar mark.” Those were the trade papers for a business supposedly disapproving. In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther said, “It comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood.” Howard Barnes in the Herald Tribune wrote, “not only a great picture; it is something of a revolutionary screen achievement.” In the New York Post, Archer Winsten believed it would win “the majority of 1941’s movie prizes.” And in PM, Cecilia Ager said, “It’s as if you never really saw a movie before.”

  These are some of the reviews as Pauline Kael listed them in “Raising Kane”
in showing that the film was not reviled, or missed, even if it didn’t leave Welles a rich man. He made that point to Peter Bogdanovich years later, but by then the ways in which Welles had resisted becoming a rich man were legion. The film was nominated for nine Oscars, and it won for its screenplay. When Welles died, in 1985, aged seventy, he was living alone in a small house in the Hollywood hills. But he was not quite alone, for he existed in acclaim and fondness, and his authority and position have only grown in the years since.

  At its opening, Citizen Kane was not a sweeping commercial success—in company with so many of our best films. The antagonism of the Hearst media had something to do with that, though that legend has grown fat on not much. There were other reasons for what happened in the very delicate year of 1941. The film was difficult; it still is. It did not offer an easy, fluent arc such as audiences were trained to follow. It did not give you a figure to identify with or admire, because its mood and method are set on dismantling him, not building him. While the work of a young man full of vitality it seemed, the film comes out of the depth of despair and solitude, when very little in the American movie had suggested that that was where America wanted to be. Kane had gone awhile under the working title American, but no one then anticipated that that word could be a synonym for personal disaster.

  What happened next to Citizen Kane was what happened to more or less every “old” film. For it was an age in which just about every movie had to be “new.” Other pictures, the used ones, went away. RKO was a company that suffered several ownership changes, from Floyd Odlum to Howard Hughes to General Tire and Rubber to Desilu (Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, the actress who had once been an RKO contract player). It was only in 1957 that a despairing film company sold off a package of its old pictures, seven hundred in all, to television for $15 million. In those days, with the weekly attendance at theaters down to forty-one million (it had dropped nine million in just the previous year) and television penetration at 79 percent of households (it had gone up 7 percent in the previous year), movie companies were still uncertain about the value of old films for TV. That RKO trade-away was for just over $20,000 a picture.

  So in the 1940s and the early 1950s, Citizen Kane floated, against a background in which Orson Welles himself was peripatetic, fascinating, restless, but hardly a tidy genius. His second picture, The Magnificent Ambersons, had been butchered. A documentary project in South America, It’s All True, came to nothing. He tried to do Around the World in 80 Days onstage. He did a cheap version of Macbeth. He married Rita Hayworth (his second wife) and put her in a fanciful, nasty noir, The Lady from Shanghai. He was working on a version of Othello in Europe. His most noticed thing was his acting turn as Harry Lime in The Third Man.

  No one step in that crazy-paving progress was dull, but how did it add up? Or look like anything other than a fat man staggering around? Not everyone recollected Kane with warmth or in a way that urged newcomers to see it. James Agee, one of the better critics in America, said that Welles was “fatuously overrated as a genius.” In 1952, Manny Farber wrote an essay for Commentary called “The Gimp,” which focused on Kane’s malign influence. He called it “an exciting, but hammy picture.” He gave a lot of credit for arrangements of space and light to Toland, but he found the film “marred by obvious items of shopworn inspiration: camera angles that had been thoroughly exploited by experimental films, and the platitudinous characterization of Kane as a lonely man who wanted love from the world but didn’t get it because he had no love of his own to give.”

  As so often, Farber gave as he took away. He didn’t like Kane, or Welles for that matter, but he had an intuition that “Citizen Kane seems to have festered in Hollywood’s unconscious,” and he made this brief but very compacted observation:

  But by now the lesson has been learned, and the ghost of Citizen Kane stalks a monstrous-looking screen. The entire physical structure of movies has been slowed down and simplified and brought closer to the front plane of the screen so that eccentric effects can be deeply felt. Hollywood has in effect developed a new medium which plays odd tricks with space and human behavior in order to project a content of popular “insights” beneath a meager surface.

  Festering or ripening? It’s a matter of taste, maybe. But the observation—that a younger generation of filmmakers had seen Kane and been changed by it—is persuasive. In that sense, Kane is the link between German expressionism and American film noir, even if Welles would say that Toland taught him all he needed to know about moviemaking in a couple of days. Not that the mood of Kane is one that Toland had been developing. In fact, he loved sunlight and terrain—just look at The Westerner (1940) or Wuthering Heights (1939). He was Sam Goldwyn’s chief photographer, so he shot what he was assigned to: Eddie Cantor in Roman Scandals (1933) and Peter Lorre in Mad Love (1935); The Long Voyage Home (1940) and Ball of Fire (1941); Kane, The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). You can trace Toland’s interest in deep focus, though the emotional tone of Kane and Best Years of Our Lives is the difference between fatalism and hope. There’s only one film before Kane, John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home, that looks anything like Kane—so long as you forget the look of the Mercury stage shows (Caesar, for instance), which we know Toland had seen and admired.

  Toland died in 1948, without ever shooting an official film noir. But if you track the work of Stanley Cortez, the links are more suggestive. Cortez (brother of the actor Ricardo Cortez) had made very few films when Welles hired him to do his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). That picture is ostensibly a family drama, but its feeling for noir is undeniable. Welles didn’t like Cortez as much as he had Toland (he said he was too slow), but Cortez would carry on a vision that is hardly equaled—he did Since You Went Away (1944), Smash-Up (1947), Secret Beyond the Door (1947), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Shock Corridor (1963), and The Naked Kiss (1964). This is a history of adventurous noir projects, even if few of the films seem to qualify thematically.

  Noir meant an existential agony; not just the underworld as a metaphor for human fate, but a means of working very economically. It was spurred by the disillusion and anxiety that came with the end of the war. The next generation of young filmmakers was excited by Kane’s prescient mood and look, and intrigued by the personal melodrama of Orson himself. Was he a rejected genius, or a flash in the pan? Could Hollywood be reformed? Could directors command their films? People from Nicholas Ray to Elia Kazan lived on that hope. But what about Welles? Had he really, as it seemed by 1950, given up on America? Who did he think he was? God?

  When Sight & Sound took its first poll, in 1952, Citizen Kane did not figure in the top ten. Then, in the 1950s, Welles came back with two films, Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil. Somehow he was still only in his early forties! Arkadin looked like a victim of money troubles. It was a surreal sketch on the edge of farce. But it was so plainly a remake of Citizen Kane, as if done in a rushed, partygoing weekend, tongue in cheek, and with a bravado mix of charm and cynicism. By contrast, Touch of Evil was far more finished and more respectful of reality. (Its Mexican-American border was a new place in American movies, rancid and risky—as time has proved.) It was lit up by virtuoso passages that no one could ignore or dismiss. It was funny, sexual, frightening, and rife with betrayals—if anyone cared for the idea of a ruined great man betrayed by a subordinate, it was there on-screen. Lo and behold, there was Welles using Marlene Dietrich (she had done a magic show with him in 1943 in Los Angeles) to warn him, and the world, that he was all washed up.

  Something happened with Welles in that period. Kane began to be shown on television. It was not the same film there, of course; it was a report of itself. But people sat entranced by the film, amazed to think that the small box could deliver beauty! There were theatrical revivals. And his new films suggested that Welles had not given up, or turned into a sleeping boy wonder. At the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958, Touch of Evil won the Grand Prix in the film contest, and then a panel of filmmaker
s voted on the best films of all time. The panel included young directors: Satyajit Ray, Robert Aldrich, and Alexander Mackendrick. Battleship Potemkin was voted number one, but Citizen Kane was in ninth place.

  Though hardly anyone quite appreciated it at that moment, we were at the start of a great wave of enthusiasm for film that would sweep though colleges and universities. In part, this was prompted by the French New Wave, by the freedoms in their best films and the shift in film knowledge that came with the vindication of publications such as Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. That French generation loved Citizen Kane. When François Truffaut made his movie about movie, Day for Night, in 1973, the director (played by Truffaut himself) had a recurring dream in which he is a boy out in the city at night. He comes to a cinema that is playing Citizen Kane and he uses his own cane to steal a still from it.

  As film courses proliferated, Citizen Kane became a new standard in curricula. Books began to appear. Charles Higham’s The Films of Orson Welles was published by the University of California Press in 1970 and it started a line of interpretation that said Welles was forever abandoning his own projects (just as Kane never finished Xanadu). In the same year, Pauline Kael’s “Raising Kane” was published in The New Yorker and then in book form, with Kane’s first script and the cutting continuity. The ensuing controversy fueled film classes examining Welles. And not to be forgotten, Welles had meanwhile delivered The Trial (1962), Chimes at Midnight (1965), The Immortal Story (1968), and F for Fake (1973). Here was a new age of Orson: a comic version of Kafka shot in the abandoned Gare d’Orsay; his finest piece of Shakespeare; an Isak Dinesen short story about the perils of trying to bring a story to life; and an essay on fraud, conjuring, and the myth of being Orson calculated to enrage enemies and delight admirers.

  When Welles died, in 1985, there were infinite tributes to the man who had done so many things in just seventy years—without ever keeping a buck—and who had left unfinished films behind. The Other Side of the Wind is still not seen: it’s about a movie director (played by John Huston). There were bootleg recordings of Orson hilarious as he made humiliating commercials for frozen peas, and there were anecdotes of him keeping dinner parties awake with all he knew of life. There were stories, too, of how, near the end, he would take lunch at Ma Maison in Los Angeles, ostentatiously ordering steamed fish to show the town he was in shape and ready for work. Then he would go home and have a big steak lunch, to feel better about himself.