(1941)

Starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Agnes Moorhead; dir: Orson Welles

Citizen Kane is not helped by the inevitable halo effect of ‘best film ever’ status. As Mark Twain said, ‘a classic is a book no one ever reads’, and in this spirit it’s time to reclaim Kane for the movie buffs.

Few observers cite the environment into which Citizen Kane was released in May 1941. There are two salient contextual points to make here.

The first is that Welles was by then already a media legend, through his theatre innovations and most especially his notorious 1938 War of the Worlds radio hoax. Welles’ whiz kid status was aided greatly by his works’ inherent critique of mass media. His all black stage production of Macbeth begged the question of African-Americans’ invisibility and erasure from the arts. The Mercury Theatre’s War of the Worlds broadcast had a point he cheekily made explicit in Kane: "Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio", Charles Foster Kane tells a newsreel reporter. This dynamic – half in, half outsider to the media establishment – reaches its apogee in Citizen Kane, whose dazzling display implicitly belittles all the more pedestrian films which precede it.

The second contextual point is that war was looming large, as any survey of 1941 newspaper front pages makes all too plain: war stories dominate the opening fold of The New York Times through 1940-41 and the tempo of this drumbeat was increasing. In Kane‘s opening mock newsreel an Inquirer truck can be glimpsed driving past with its billboard sign trumpeting ‘War Map In Color’, before the shot of Kane on the balcony with Hitler (the latter clearly an actor, but could this have been Woody’s inspiration for Zelig, which it so strongly resembles?). When Kane boasts ‘I’ll make the war’, our head knows (even those who don’t know it’s a direct Hearst quote) that it’s a reference to the Spanish-American War, but in this context it still rattles with a contemporaneous chill.

But actually none of this matters. Citizen Kane is possibly unique amongst ‘A’ features in never having been allowed the chance to find a first run audience, to be tested in the marketplace so that the ‘voice of the people’ could be heard. With most movies this is the foundation of their later critical reception and subsequent historicising. The all out assault by press baron Hearst minimised Citizen Kane’s advertising, reportage (and hence word of mouth), its distribution (through the intimidation of Hearst minions like gossip columnist Louella Parsons ringing up cinema owners threatening their blackballing by Hearst) and thus its chances with the booming movie matinee audiences of 1940s America (not to mention what was left of the rest of the world, whose markets were seriously distorted by the accelerating war).

Ownership by the punters was thus prevented. This is a crucial factor in the makeup of its eventual ownership - the cognoscenti, the elites of the cinematheque and film festivals who nurtured its lionisation and cultivated its hagiography. In bypassing, however involuntarily, the popcorn crowd and verdict of the turnstiles, Citizen Kane became, in one sense, the first film to go straight-to-video.

But it could have been worse. As a sop to Hearst, MGM’s Louis B.Mayer offered RKO $800 thousand dollars (against the $600K+ it had cost RKO to make) to burn the negative and remove the ‘problem’. This craven capitulation to the powerful against the interests of the artist is a portent, for anyone who cares to look, at Hollywood’s supine response to the intimidatory tactics of Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC just years later. It’s evidence that the Hollywood Blacklist was no aberration, just a cost of business as usual.

How different could it all have been? It’s well known that for some time the project’s working title was simply American, a phrase which resonates strongly as it recurs throughout the film. It’s not surprising to hear that future RKO owner Howard Hughes was an early focus of the screenplay. But, according to the American Film Institute, whose source appears to be Kane script editor and future producer of several films noir (On Dangerous Ground, They Live By Night, The Blue Dahlia) John Houseman, the film’s original inspiration was none other than John Dillinger (!). Seen in this light, the Mercury Theatre’s view of American plutocracy certainly takes on a fresh perspective. When the worm turned, and McCarthy’s HUAC started its postwar hunt for leftists, Orson’s unsurprisingly was among the names named.

Kane is an effective character study but the brush strokes are broad, big picture – Charlie Kane is stubborn, self-destructive, wilful and perversely idealistic. As Welles matured, and more importantly, suffered setbacks, his artistry gained nuance and achieved an intimacy lacking here. His Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil is a far more tragic figure than Charles Foster Kane and, ironically, more human. Welles’ true masterpiece came at the end of his career.

This comparison is illuminated by the film noir question: ‘does Citizen Kane qualify?’ On some thematic touchstones of the genre it does, at least superficially. The protagonist’s fate is bleak, but hardly doomed. Crucially, Charlie Kane never loses control of his eventual destiny but is the agent of everything he ends up with, unlike the vulnerable sap of classic noir, whose fatal flaw is not only particular and on a much more human scale of frailty, but propels him into a maelstrom of societal retribution which he is powerless to stop, or even influence.

Stylistically however, Gregg Toland’s gleefully extravagant camerawork presents us with a couple of early scenes so deliciously, deliriously noir it’s hard to imagine the genre advancing as quickly as it did from 1941 without them: the library sequence in particular is an apotheosis of Expressionism that’s still breathtaking.

It’s here, in the on-screen evidence of the vitality of the artistic collaborations which the end credits make so clear (Toland’s for cinematography matching Welles’ as director; Manckiewicz’s dominating Welles’ as co-screenwriter) that Pauline Kael’s egregious claim that Welles claimed more authorship than warranted falls down. It’s clear that the chemistry and the excitement of the collaboration drove all the key contributors to career-best work in Citizen Kane. Just one year earlier Toland was working with no less a director than John Ford in the underrated The Long Voyage Home, but there is barely a hint in that film of the bravura carnival of experimentation and visual effects that make Kane so dazzling. Robert Carringer’s study, The Making of Citizen Kane (1996) is the argument-settling work that this film deserves, and like other pragmatically oriented assessments of authorship in the collaborative craft of cinema, like Thomas Schatz’ The Genius of the System, benefits from exhaustive research based on recently opened studio archives.

‘Dazzling’ is the enduring quality one is left with in Citizen Kane. Boyish, boisterous and brash, it is clearly a young man’s film. Overreaching, it nevertheless succeeds and then excels. If some of its devices have become familiar with overuse (I’m thinking of the group photo of the ‘best journalists’ which comes to life) it’s not faint praise to say that their freshness still inheres. Inevitably, much of its power functions at a surface level - but what a surface! Audiences are still spellbound – the conjuring power of Welles the magician is undimmed.

In its energy, busyness and solipsism Citizen Kane ultimately reflects back primarily on itself, and comes to embody its prototypical identity: American.

- Roger Westcombe