The ensuing conversation among reporters is derived from a colorful presentation of a scene inside a movie theater in the 1937 Theatre Guild production of Sidney Kingsley’s Ten Million Ghosts; it is also one of the most self-reflexive moments in the film—shot in an actual RKO screening room that has been made to look more like a region of the underworld. The air is smoky and the reporters are sinister shadows; indeed they remain shadows throughout, even in the closing scenes, when a group of them tour the bric-a-brac of Kane’s estate. The corners of forties-style suits are outlined against a blank white movie screen, and the editor Mr. Rawlston (Philip Van Zandt) is shown from a radically low angle, gesturing against a Nuremberg light beaming down from the projection booth. Rawlston and his yes-men correctly perceive the emptiness and inconclusiveness of the newsreel, but their solution is to find an “angle.” “It isn’t enough to tell us what a man did,” Rawlston says, “you’ve got to tell us who he was.” The solution to this problem is the dying word “Rosebud,” a gimmick worthy of Hearst himself, a device that will unify the story and give the newsreel viewers a sentimental insight into Kane’s character.
Rawlston gives Thompson a tap on the shoulder and a shark’s smile, ordering him to go out and get “Rosebud” “dead or alive.” Notice, however, that the audience is not allowed to feel comfortably superior to this scene. We already have been made curious about “Rosebud,” which, after all, has exactly the same function for Welles and Mankiewicz as it does for Rawlston. Welles indirectly admitted this fact in one of his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, where he talked about his discomfort with the sled idea: “Rosebud remained, because it was the only way we could get off, as they say in vaudeville.” In other words, without “Rosebud” the movie would lack a neatly rounded plot and a nicely punctuated ending, in much the same way as Rawlston’s newsreel lacks the proper impact until some oversimplified “key” has been concocted to explain Kane’s life.
The projection room segment therefore serves to criticize the script and the whole process of filling a blank movie screen; it becomes ironically appropriate to have Herman Mankiewicz, Joseph Cotten, and Erskine Sanford barely visible in the shadows of the room, playing the roles of reporters who scoff at Kane’s dying words. Everybody, the audience included, has been involved in a dubious pursuit; Welles has stimulated our curiosity only to make us feel cautious. The three opening sections of the film have helped initiate the search for “Rosebud,” but they are filled with so many ironies and opacities that they threaten to undermine the search before it has started.
The story now becomes a series of reminiscences by the witnesses to Kane’s life, who create a “rounded” picture of the man. And here it is important to note that the script is fundamentally different from a movie like Rashomon: it does not becloud events by presenting separate versions of an unknowable reality, but instead gives different facets of a single personality—a method similar to the one Herman Mankiewicz’s brother, Joseph, would later use successfully in such pictures as All About Eve and The Barefoot Contessa. Kane’s life is depicted more or less chronologically, through the memories of five characters who knew him at progressively later stages in his life. We never have the feeling that these characters are distorting the truth (even though Cotten’s character, Jedediah Leland, recounts domestic events he could not possibly have seen), and if we discount the opening and closing moments of the film, and the details of Thompson’s search, the private life of Kane is shown in nearly as straightforward a fashion as the public facts of the newsreel. For all of its juggling of time, therefore, Kane has a logical, rational structure; it is a film about complexity, not about relativity.
Thompson’s quest is initiated with a thunderclap and a gothic rainstorm, in a scary but comic contrast to Rawlston’s last words (“It’ll probably turn out to be a very simple thing”). We see a garish, dripping poster of a blonde woman, and the camera moves upward, sliding over the roof of the El Rancho and down through the skylight. (The name of the club is significant: El Rancho was the name Hearst gave his California ranch in the days before he built San Simeon.) Here again we are made to feel that the search for “Rosebud” is tawdry and sensational, notably so in a deep-focus shot that concludes Thompson’s abortive interview with Susan. Thompson steps into a phone booth and his hat brim is silhouetted at the right corner of the screen; he closes the door, and the headwaiter (Gus Schilling) moves just a fraction to the left so that he is framed by one of the rectangular glass panels; in the distance, her head bowed drunkenly over a table, is Susan. We are made aware of her sordid life, and we see a chain of predators arrayed in front of her. The waiter is trying to spy on Thompson, who has been trying to learn about Kane; Thompson, in turn, has to convey information to his boss at the other end of the line. “Hello, Mr. Rawlston,” he says. “She won’t talk.” The composition of the shot is all the more troubling because the extreme depth of perspective makes the chain of predators seem to extend out into the audience, bringing the viewers by implication into the film’s corrupt world.
The El Rancho scene ends with still another kind of self-conscious flourish, a blackout joke. Thompson tries bribing John, the headwaiter, who comments innocently, “Thank you . . . thanks. As a matter of fact, just the other day, when the papers were full of it, I asked her. She never heard of Rosebud.” Fade out, with an ironic, playful chord of Herrmann’s music. Nearly all the fragments of the narrative have been structured this way, with a mild shock or a witty image at the beginning and a joke or an ironic twist at the end. It is exactly this quality that made Pauline Kael describe Citizen Kane as the epitome of “thirties comedy,” a genre that she points out was fathered on Broadway by George S. Kaufman in the twenties; Kael is particularly good at describing the “fullness and completeness” with which the film manipulates this tradition, becoming, at least in its opening parts, a collection of sketches “arranged to comment on each other.” The striking thing about Kane, however, is that the cynical, wisecracking style of the Kaufmans and Hechts has been put to the service of something more difficult, the movie achieving a rare commingling of brittle artifice, tough social realism, and romantic tragedy. The “thirties comedy” is there, of course, especially in some of the early scenes, but the ultimate feeling is very different, affected by Welles and Toland’s Germanic staging, by the unsentimental acting of players like Dorothy Comingore (whose voice bears a prophetic resemblance to Marilyn Monroe’s), and by the indirect influence of impressionist novelists like Joseph Conrad and Scott Fitzgerald. To call Kane essentially a comedy or a “newspaper” yarn is to place the main emphasis on only a few features in the first third of the story, and to oversimplify its scope and tone.
Figure 3.1: Thompson reports to his boss after meeting Susan.
Just how complex this tone is may be seen in the next sequence—Thompson’s visit to the Thatcher Library—which begins with another joke. Herrmann plays his “power” motif with a flat, stale brass; the camera tilts down from the model of a huge, ugly statue of Thatcher and locates Thompson speaking with a stereotypical lady librarian, who reminds him of the rules pertaining to all manuscripts. Obviously the library has been designed to emphasize Thatcher’s vanity and coldness: the inner vault seems as long as a football field, and at the far end is a small safe from which an armed guard extracts a volume of a diary, bringing it forward as if he were bearing the Eucharist. The whole ridiculous edifice appears to have been constructed to house Thatcher’s tiny memoirs, but the effect of the imagery is more than simple invective.
The mannish librarian stands at military attention while the guard, caught in the beam of a Nuremberg light, brings forth a glowing book. Thompson is closer to the foreground, so he looks a bit like Kafka’s Joseph K. come before the Courts of Law. The gothic lighting is meant partly to create a comic irony, yet at the same time it produces an awesome scene, an effect of wonder coexisting with the satire. Lawrence Goldstein and Jay Kauffman, in their book Into Film, have described the vault as a
“way station between heaven and hell . . . the guard becomes a divine messenger bringing the fiercely glowing documents out of the darkness [like] the tablets offered Moses; and the hard mahogany table that will receive the documents burns with the glint of a sacred altar.” Throughout Kane, this aura of sacredness is mixed with elements of hokum and profanity so that we are aware of banal material goods being mystified into a spiritual netherworld. The lighting style, like nearly everything in the movie, resists being described either as pure satire, as seriousness, or as old-fashioned “movie magic”; instead it is carefully designed to underscore one of the film’s leading themes—the transformation of money into myth.
Figure 3.2: Thompson visits the Thatcher Library.
The principle of contrast that guides the film is repeated when from one of the darkest moments we move to one of the lightest. The “Thatcher” portion of the film, which grows out of Thompson’s reading of the diary, is at first somewhat Dickensian in mood, as befits Thatcher’s generation. Thatcher himself is a coldhearted moneybag, and his story tells how a poor child rises suddenly to great expectations. Within a few moments we see Charles Foster Kane being lifted from a snowy playground in front of his mother’s boardinghouse and set down at a richly Victorian Christmas celebration, although in both places the atmosphere is chilly, the boy surrounded by menacing adult figures. George Coulouris (made up to look rather like John D. Rockefeller) plays Thatcher in broad caricature, delivering his lines at top speed; in a charmingly exuberant and altogether antirealistic montage that foreshadows the opening of The Magnificent Ambersons, he constantly turns to face the camera, muttering in disgust as the young Kane grows up, founds a newspaper, and then attacks Wall Street. But Kane rises only to have an ignominious fall; the narrative as a whole covers the period between the winter of 1871 and the winter of 1929, when Kane, ironically forced to turn part of the control of his newspapers over to his former guardian, broods on his failure, telling Thatcher that he would like to have been “everything you hate.” By the end we are made to feel that capital has always been in charge of Kane’s life and that the market crash has done little more than solidify the power of America’s major bankers by placing the Inquirer in Thatcher’s hands. At the same time a nostalgic evocation of the nineteenth century has given way to a somber present; indeed the deep-focus shot of the room where Kane signs part of his rights away bears a vague resemblance to the tomb-like Thatcher Library.
The portrait of Kane that emerges from these memoirs contains as many ironies and ambiguities as the plot. In the boardinghouse scene, where for once we might expect to see Kane as the innocent victim of social determinism, he is depicted as something of a brat; in fact, the close-up of Mrs. Kane hovering protectively over her child is almost comic, because he looks like such a mean kid. By contrast, he is at his most charming and sympathetic during the early scene in the newspaper office, where his potential danger is underlined but where he is shown as a darkly handsome, confident young man, loyal to his friends and passionate about his work. This is, in fact, the point of Welles’s full-scale entry into the film, and it is predictably stunning: Thatcher, who has been reading a succession of Inquirer headlines, lowers a paper (“Galleons of Spain off Jersey Coast”) to reveal Kane sitting at his editorial desk. Here at last, greeted by a triumphal note of Herrmann’s music, is the young Welles of Mars panic fame, propped easily in a swivel chair, clad in shirtsleeves, sipping coffee. He has been made up to look casually rich and beautiful, and he glances at Thatcher with a bemused, Machiavellian glint in his eye. In the same shot Leland and Bernstein enter the frame, Leland calmly taking a cigar from the desk (he is an addict, as we see later), and Bernstein scurrying past on official business. Throughout the scene, Welles makes himself a calm figure at the center of a storm, blithely dictating a telegram that echoes one of Hearst’s most famous comments to a reporter (“Dear Wheeler, you provide the prose poems and I’ll provide the war”) and, in a large, climactic close-up, thumbing his nose at Thatcher’s warnings (“You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year I’ll have to close this place—in sixty years”).
In this scene, as in other episodes from the same period in his life, Kane seems generous with money and disrespectful toward stuffy Victorian authority; perhaps most important, he says he is committed to the “people” as opposed to the “trusts.” Thatcher and the elderly editor Carter—a harrumphing old banker and a genteel incompetent—are perfect foils to his rebelliousness. They behave like outraged schoolmasters, making Kane’s yellow journalism and his attempt to start a war in Cuba seem like a combination of boyish pranksterism and creative energy. But Kane’s bullying attitude and what he actually says tend to suggest a totally different sort of character. He himself offers an explanation for our mixed emotions: “The trouble is,” he tells Thatcher, “you don’t realize you’re talking to two people.” On the one hand is the Kane we see, the pretty young man who claims to represent the interests of the public; on the other hand is the Kane who has investments in Wall Street and who knows down to the penny the amount of his holdings (“eighty-two thousand, three hundred and sixty-four shares of Public Transit Preferred”). “If I don’t look after the interests of the underprivileged,” he remarks, in one of the places where contradictions are reconciled, “maybe somebody will—maybe somebody without money or property.”
When Thompson closes the diary and exits the library (“Thanks for the use of the hall”), he goes to interview Bernstein, who maintains the spell of Kane’s charm. Bernstein talks mainly about the period between the founding of the newspaper and Kane’s marriage to Emily Norton, a woman who “was no Rosebud.” The only real apologist for Kane in the film, Bernstein is basically a likeable character and evokes sympathy. Except for the reporters, he is the only person who has remembered Susan after Kane’s death (“I called her myself the day he died. I thought maybe somebody ought to.”). He is also completely free of self-importance and moral superiority, and even his reactionary comment on the Panama Canal arises more from a defense of his dead friend than from any self-serving motive. He is realistic about old age and death (old age is the “only disease you don’t look forward to being cured of”), as well as about his position in life (“Me? I’m chairman of the board. I got nothing but time”); nevertheless, he seems spry and at peace with himself. Even the setting for his interview is conducive to a melancholy serenity: shadows fill the room, rain falls outside the high windows, and a fire burns in the hearth. Bernstein sits in a big leather chair, his face reflected in the polished surface of his desk as if in a quiet pool. Here, photographed in a long take that contains some of the most discreet camera movements in the film, he tells the little story about seeing a girl in a white dress on the Jersey Ferry (Welles’s favorite moment, beautifully acted by Everett Sloane, whose voice and manner come dangerously close to suggesting an old crone), and he reminds us that he is the only character who has been with Kane until “after the end.”
And yet the kindness and the cozy atmosphere do not conceal the fact that Bernstein’s friendship has been compromised. We soon learn that he has been more like a devoted child, and his devotion has had sinister consequences. All of his judgments rise logically out of his character as an overly faithful associate, from a different social class than Kane, who has become a kind of stooge. The furthest removed from the patrician Leland, Bernstein is described, in a scene that was dropped from the completed film, as having once been in the “wholesale jewelry business”; his talents, Kane says wryly, “seemed to be what I was looking for.” Thus, even though Kane will tell Emily in no uncertain terms that Bernstein may pay a visit to the family nursery, there remains a discreet distance between the two men; we see Leland and Kane arrive together at the Inquirer offices in a hansom cab, dressed in the height of New York fashion, while Bernstein tags along atop a delivery wagon, fulfilling his purpose as the guardian of Kane’s possessions. Later, at the political rally and at Susan’s concert, Bernstein is pho
tographed in the company of Kane’s goons; as Kane’s financial agent and unquestioning companion, he has been responsible for whatever dirty work needed doing, and it is clear that he has always placed loyalty above principle. Hence there is a deep irony in the comfortable serenity of his old age, a luxury that has come to him like a “tip” from his employer.
Bernstein’s reminiscences are chiefly about adventure and male camaraderie; even so, further ironies are obvious. Kane sweeps into the Inquirer and turns it overnight into a twentieth-century paper, flamboyantly promising to be a knight-errant for the people, “a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens.” Only a few moments before, however, he has cynically concocted a lurid news item about sex and murder, during which he tells Carter, “If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.” Bernstein himself acknowledges these warts on Kane’s character but interprets them as ingredients of a tragic flaw. “I guess Mr. Leland was right about the Spanish-American War,” he says, but he defends Kane anyway, describing him as a man connected with the destiny of the country.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 11