Citizen Kane is a
1941 American drama film, directed by and starring
Orson Welles. The film, which was Welles' first
feature film, was nominated for
Academy Awards in nine categories: it
won for
Best
Original Screenplay by
Herman
Mankiewicz and Welles. It was released by
RKO Pictures.
The story is a
roman à clef that
criticizes the life and legacy of
William Randolph Hearst, an American
newspaper magnate, and Welles' own life. Upon its release, Hearst
prohibited mention of the film in any of his newspapers. The film
traces the life and career of Charles Foster Kane, a man whose
career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social
service, but gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power.
Narrated principally through
flashbacks,
the story is revealed through the research of a newspaper reporter
seeking to solve the mystery of the newspaper magnate's dying word:
"Rosebud."
There is a semi-official consensus in film circles that
Citizen
Kane is the greatest film ever made, which has led
Roger Ebert to quip that: ‘So it's settled:
"Citizen Kane" is the official greatest film of all time.’ It
topped both the
AFI's
100 Years…100 Movies list and the
10th
Anniversary Update, as well as all of the
Sight & Sound polls of the 10
greatest films for nearly half a century.
Plot
Charles Foster Kane (
Orson Welles), the enormously wealthy
media magnate, has lost his power and been
abandoned by his loved ones, and has been living alone in his vast
palatial estate
Xanadu for the
last years of his life, with a "No trespassing" sign on the gate.
He dies in a bed holding a
snow globe,
and utters "Rosebud..." before his death.
Kane's death then becomes sensational news around the world.
Reporter Jerry Thompson (
William
Alland) tries to find out about Kane's private life and, in
particular, to discover the meaning behind his last word. The
reporter interviews the great man's friends and associates, and
Kane's story unfolds as a series of flashbacks. Thompson approaches
Kane's second wife, Susan Alexander (
Dorothy Comingore), now an alcoholic who
runs her own club, but she refuses to tell him anything. Thompson
then goes to the private archive of Walter Parks Thatcher (
George Coulouris), a deceased banker who
served as Kane's guardian during his childhood. It is through
Thatcher's written memoirs that Thompson learns about Kane's
childhood. Thompson then interviews Kane's personal business
manager Mr. Bernstein (
Everett
Sloane), best friend Jedediah Leland (
Joseph Cotten), Susan for a second time, and
Kane's butler Raymond (
Paul
Stewart).
In several flashbacks, it is told that Kane's childhood was spent
in poverty (his parents ran a boarding house), then changed when
the "world's third largest gold mine" was discovered on an
apparently worthless property his mother had acquired (the title
deeds left to her by a lodger unable to pay his bill). He is forced
to leave his beloved mother (
Agnes
Moorehead) when she sends him away to live with Thatcher, to be
both educated and protected from his abusive father. After gaining
full control over his possessions at the age of 25, Kane enters the
newspaper business with sensationalized
yellow journalism. He takes control of the
newspaper, the
New York Inquirer, and hires all the best
journalists (he hires them away from the
Chronicle, the
main rival of the
Inquirer).
His attempted rise to
power is documented, including his manipulation of public opinion
for the Spanish American War of
1898; his first marriage to Emily Monroe Norton (Ruth Warrick), a President's niece; and his
campaign for the office of governor of New York State
in which Kane creates alternative newspaper
headlines depending on whether he wins.
Kane's life gradually goes downhill. The relationship between him
and his wife disintegrates over the years. A "love nest" scandal
with Susan Alexander ends both his first marriage and his political
aspirations. Kane marries his mistress, but as a result of his
domineering personality, he forces Susan into an
operatic career for which she has no talent or
ambition, destroys his relationships and pushes away his loved
ones. Kane spends his last years building his vast estate and lives
alone after Susan leaves him, interacting only with his
staff.
Thompson is unable to solve the mystery and concludes that
"Rosebud" will forever remain an enigma. He theorizes that "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".
In the ending of the film, it is revealed to the audience that
Rosebud was the name of the
sled from
Kane's childhood, from the time before he was taken from his
parents and gained his wealth. The sled, thought to be junk, is
destroyed by Xanadu's departing staff in a basement furnace. The
film ends as it began, with a view of the "No Trespassing" sign
posted on the fence of Xanadu.
Credited cast
Theatrical release poster
Screenplay
Development
- Mankiewicz as co-writer
Richard Carringer, author of
The Making of Citizen Kane
(1996), described the early stages of the screenplay:
- "Welles's first step toward the realization of Citizen
Kane was to seek the assistance of a screenwriting
professional. Fortunately, help was near at hand. . . . When Welles
moved to Hollywood, it happened that a veteran screenwriter,
Herman Mankiewicz, was
recuperating from an automobile accident and between jobs. . .
Mankiewicz was an expatriate from Broadway who had been writing for
films for almost fifteen years."
However, according to film author Harlan Lebo, he was also "one of
Hollywood's most notorious personalities." Mankiewicz was the older
brother of producer-director
Joseph
Mankiewicz and was a former writer for
The New Yorker and the
New York Times and had moved to
Hollywood in 1926. By the time Welles contacted him he had
"established himself as a brilliant wit, a writer of extraordinary
talent, [and] a warm friend to many of the screen world's brightest
artists ... [he] produced dialogue of the highest caliber." Yet
Mankiewicz's behavior, according to Welles's close friend and
associate
John Houseman, was also a
"public and private scandal. A neurotic drinker and compulsive
gambler..." Houseman adds, however, that he was also one of the
most intelligent, informed, witty, humane and charming men I have
ever known." Despite those apparent contradictions in his
personality, Welles "recognized the writer's abilities and trusted
him to produce," wrote Lebo. Orson Welles himself later commented,
"Nobody was more miserable, more bitter, and funnier than Mank—a
perfect monument to self-destruction. But when the bitterness
wasn't focused straight at you -- he was the best company in the
world."
- Ideas and collaboration
According to film historian Clinton Heylin, "the idea of
Citizen Kane was the original conception of Orson Welles,
who in early 1940 first discussed the idea with
John Houseman, who then suggested that both he
and Welles leave for Los Angeles and discuss the idea with
scriptwriter
Herman Mankiewicz. He
adds that Mankiewicz "probably believed that Welles had little
experience as an original scriptwriter. . .[and] may even have felt
that
John Citizen USA, Welles's working title, was a
project he could make his own."
Still incapacitated with a broken leg, Mankiewicz was happy to work
with Welles, and an "alliance" formed, noted Houseman. This
combination of a "brash new director, a nervous studio, and an
erratic genius" gave birth to
Citizen Kane, in what
Houseman called, "an absurd venture."
Houseman recalled that Mankiewicz, during his convalescence, had
"revived a long-simmering idea of creating a film biography in
which a man's life would be brought to the screen after his death
through the memories and opinions of the people who knew him best."
And Welles himself, writes Lebo, also had ideas "that meshed well
with this concept and had considered a newspaper publisher the best
subject for the story:
- "I'd been nursing an old notion—the idea of telling the same
thing several times—and showing exactly the same thing from wholly
different views," Welles said. "Mank liked it, so we started
searching for the man it was going to be about ... some big
American figure ... Howard Hughes was
the first idea. But we got pretty quickly to the press lords."
Welles then assigned Mankiewicz, writes Lebo, "to work on an
original screenplay—not an adaptation as his first two projects
would have been." Welles next traveled to New York and desperately
"pleaded and persuaded Houseman to return to Los Angeles to manage
Mankiewicz and his writing schedule."
- Hearst as story model
For some time, Mankiewicz wanted to write a screenplay about a
public figure – perhaps a gangster – whose story would be
told by the people that knew him. He had already written an
unperformed play
The Tree Will Grow about
John Dillinger. Orson Welles liked the idea
of multiple viewpoints but was not interested in playing Dillinger.
Mankiewicz and Welles talked about picking someone else to use as a
model. They eventually hit on the idea of using
William Randolph Hearst as their
central character.
But film critic and author Pauline Kael discovered that Mankiewicz
"was already caught up in the idea of a movie about Hearst" when he
was still working at the
New York Times, in 1925. She
learned from his babysitter, Marion Fisher, that she once typed as
"he dictated a screenplay, organized in flashbacks. She recalls
that he had barely started on the dictation, which went on for
several weeks, when she remarked that it seemed to be about William
Randolph Hearst, and he said, 'You're a smart girl.' "
In Hollywood, Mankiewicz had frequented Hearst's parties until his
alcoholism got him barred. And Hearst was also a person known to
Welles. "Once that was decided," wrote author Don Kilbourne,
"Mankiewicz, Welles, and
John
Houseman, a cofounder of the Mercury Theatre, rented a place in
the desert, and the task of creating
Citizen Kane began."
In later years, Houseman gave Mankiewicz "total" credit for "the
creation of
Citizen Kane's script" and credited Welles
with "the visual presentation of the picture."
Mankiewicz was put under contract by
Mercury Productions and was to receive no
credit for his work as he was hired as a script doctor. According
to his contract with RKO, Welles would be given sole screenplay
credit, and had already written a rough script consisting of 300
pages of dialogue with occasional stage directions under the title
of
John Citizen, USA.
Debate over authorship
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One of the long standing debates of
Citizen Kane has been
the proper accreditation of the authorship of the screenplay, which
the opening credits attribute to both
Herman J. Mankiewicz and
Orson Welles. Mankiewicz biographer Richard
Meryman notes that the dispute had various causes, including the
way the movie was promoted. For instance, when RKO opened the movie
on Broadway on May 1, 1941, followed by showings at theaters in
other large cities, the publicity programs that were printed
included photographs of Welles as "the one-man band, directing,
acting, and writing." In a letter to his father afterward,
Mankiewicz wrote, "I'm particularly furious at the incredibly
insolent description of how Orson wrote his masterpiece. The fact
is that there isn't one single line in the picture that wasn't in
writing -- writing from and by me -- before ever a camera turned."
And film historian Otto Friedrich said it made Mankiewicz "unhappy
to hear Welles quoted in
Louella
Parsons's column, before the question of screen credits was
officially settled, as saying, 'So I wrote
Citizen
Kane.'
According to film critic
Pauline Kael,
Rita Alexander, who was hired to be Mankiewic's personal secretary,
stated that she "took the dictation from Mankiewicz from the first
paragraph to the last ... and later did the final rewriting and the
cuts, and handled the script at the studio until after the film was
shot. ...[and said] Welles didn't write (or dictate) one line of
the shooting script of
Citizen Kane. She added that
"Welles himself came to dinner once or twice...[and] she didn't
meet him until after Mankiewicz had finished dictating the long
first draft."
As a result, Mankiewicz went to the
Screen Writers Guild and declared that
he was the original author. Welles later claimed that he planned on
a joint credit all along, but Mankiewicz claimed that Welles
offered him a bonus of ten thousand dollars if he would let Welles
take full credit." According to Pauline Kael, "he had ample proof
of his authorship, and when he took his evidence to the Screen
Writers Guild ... Welles was forced to split the credit and take
second place in the listing."
Kael argues that Mankiewicz was the true author of the screenplay
and therefore responsible for much of what made the movie great.
This angered many critics of the day, most notably
critic-turned-filmmaker (and close friend of Welles)
Peter Bogdanovich, who rebutted many of
Kael's claims in an article for
Esquire titled
The Kane
Mutiny.
By the time the movie was released, however, Mankiewicz's
contribution to the film was generally known, according to Kael.
The
Hollywood Reporter
wrote the credit as "Written by Herman Mankiewicz;" Burns Mantle,
in his newspaper column, referred to Mankiewicz having written it;
and
Ben Hecht wrote, "This movie was not
written by Orson Welles. It is the work of Herman J. Mankiewicz."
Kael notes that "Under the present rules of the Guild, Welles's
name would probably not have appeared." She also came to an ironic
conclusion:
- "And so it was by an awful fluke of justice that when Academy
Awards night came, and Welles should have got the awards he
deserved as director and actor, the award he got (the only Academy
Award he has ever got) was as co-author of the Best Original
Screenplay."
According to film biographer David Thomson, however, "No one can
now deny Herman Mankiewicz credit for the germ, shape, and pointed
language of the screenplay..."Film historian Robert L. Carringer,
after weighing both sides of the argument, including sworn
testimony from Mercury assistant Richard Baer, could only conclude,
"We will probably never know for sure, but in any case Welles had
at last found a subject with the right combination of
monumentality, timeliness, and audacity." Harlan Lebo agrees, and
adds, "of far greater relevance is reaffirming the importance of
the efforts that both men contributed to the creation of
Hollywood's greatest motion picture."
Sources
William Randolph Hearst
The principal source for the story of
Citizen Kane was the
life of media tycoon
William
Randolph Hearst, and the film is seen by critics as a
fictionalized, unrelentingly hostile
parody
of Hearst. According to film historian Don Kilbourne, "much of the
information for
Citizen Kane came from already-published
material about Hearst... [and] some of Kane's speeches are almost
verbatim copies of Hearst's. When Welles denied that the film was
about the still-influential publisher, he did not convince many
people."
Welles himself insisted that there were also differences between
the men. In 1968, he told
Peter
Bogdanovich, "You know, the real story of Hearst is quite
different from Kane's. And Hearst himself—-as a man, I mean—-was
very different." Hearst's biographer, David Nasaw, finds the film's
depiction of Hearst unfair:
Welles' Kane is a cartoon-like caricature of a
man who is hollowed out on the inside, forlorn, defeated, solitary
because he cannot command the total obedience, loyalty, devotion,
and love of those around him.
Hearst, to the contrary, never regarded himself as a
failure, never recognized defeat, never stopped loving Marion
[Davies] or his wife.
He did not, at the end of his life, run away from the
world to entomb himself in a vast, gloomy art-choked
hermitage.
Susan Alexander
Movie tycoon
Jules Brulatour's
second and third wives,
Dorothy
Gibson and
Hope Hampton, both
fleeting stars of the silent screen who later had marginal careers
in opera, are believed to have provided inspiration for the Susan
Alexander character.
Orson Welles also claimed that business
tycoon
Harold Fowler
McCormick's lavish promotion of his second wife,
Ganna Walska, was a direct influence on the
screenplay. McCormick spent thousands of dollars on voice lessons
for her and even arranged for Walska to take the lead in a
production of
Zaza at the Chicago
Opera in 1920. Like the Susan Alexander character, she had a
terrible voice, pleasing only to McCormick. But unlike Alexander,
Walska got into an argument with director Pietro Cimini during
dress rehearsal and stormed out of the production before she
appeared.
Roger Ebert, in his DVD
commentary on
Citizen Kane, also suggests that the
Alexander character was based on Walska, and had very little to do
with
Marion Davies. The film's
composer Bernard Herrmann also suggests that Kane is based on
McCormick but also in great part on Welles himself.
Other
sources say the Alexander role — and the disastrous opera
singing — is a composite of Hampton, Davies, Walska, and the
story of Samuel Insull, who built the
Chicago Civic
Opera House
in 1929 for his daughter, who hoped to become
famous and sing at the Metropolitan
Opera but never did.
Samuel Insull
Citizen Kane is in part based on the life of
Samuel Insull and his wife Gladys. Playwright
Herman J. Mankiewicz based Susan Alexander’s catastrophic operatic
debut in
Citizen Kane on Gladys Wallis Insull’s New York
role as Lady Teazle in a charity revival of
The School for Scandal. The
review of Susan Alexander's debut in
Kane echoes
Mankiewicz's actual 1925 review of Gladys Insull. His 1925 review
began: "As Lady Teazle, Mrs. Insull is as pretty as she is
diminutive; with a clear smile and dainty gestures. There is a
charming grace in her bearing that makes for excellent deportment.
But Lady Teazle seems much too innocent to lend credit to her part
in the play."
Welles as Kane
Orson Welles as Charles Foster
Kane
There are autobiographical elements to the film. Orson Welles lost
his mother when he was only nine years old and his father when he
was 15. After this, he became the ward of Chicago's Dr. Maurice
Bernstein—and Bernstein is the last name of the only major
character in
Citizen Kane who receives a completely
positive portrayal.
The documentary
The
Battle Over Citizen Kane points out the great irony that
Welles's own life story resembled that of Kane far more than
Hearst's: an overreaching
wunderkind who ended up mournful and lonely
in his old age.
Citizen Kane's editor
Robert Wise summarized: "Well, I thought often
afterwards, only in recent years when I saw the film again two or
three years ago when they had the fiftieth anniversary, and I
suddenly thought to myself, well, Orson was doing an
autobiographical film and didn't realize it, because it's rather
much the same, you know. You start here, and you have a big rise
and tremendous prominence and fame and success and whatnot, and
then tail off and tail off and tail off. And at least the arc of
the two lives were very much the same..."
Peter Bogdanovich, who was friends
with Welles in his later years, disagreed with this on his own
commentary on the
Citizen Kane DVD, saying that Kane was
nothing like Welles. Kane, he said, "had none of the qualities of
an artist, Orson had all the qualities of an artist." Bogdanovich
also noted that Welles was never bitter "about all the bad things
that happened to him," and was a man who enjoyed life in his final
years.
In addition, critics have reassessed Welles’ career after his
death, saying that he wasn’t a failed
Hollywood filmmaker, but a successful
independent filmmaker.
Charles F. Murphy
The character of political boss Jim Gettys is based on
Charles F. Murphy, a
political leader in New York
City
's infamous Tammany Hall
political machine, who was an enemy of Hearst. In one scene
Gettys admonishes Kane for printing a cartoon showing him in prison
stripes. This is based on the fact that Murphy, who was a
horse-cart driver and owned several bars, was depicted in a 1903
Hearst cartoon wearing striped prison clothes. A caption, referring
to the restaurant Murphy frequented, said: "Look out, Murphy.
It’s a
short lock-step from Delmonico’s
to Sing
Sing
."
Rosebud
According to Welles author David Thomson, “Rosebud is the greatest
secret in cinema...”
Orson Welles, explaining the idea behind the word "Rosebud," said,
"It's a gimmick, really, and rather dollar-book Freud." The
symbolic sled 'Rosebud' used in the film was bought for $60,500 by
film director
Steven Spielberg in
1982, at the time the highest price paid for a piece of film
memorabilia. Spielberg commented, "Rosebud will go over my
typewriter to remind me that quality in movies comes first."
According to Peter Bogdanovich, Welles' reaction to Spielberg's
purchase of the sled was "I thought we burned it..."
According to Louis Pizzitola, author of
Hearst Over
Hollywood, "Rosebud" was a nickname that Orrin Peck, a friend
of William Randolph Hearst, gave to his mother, Phoebe Hearst. It
was said that Phoebe was as close, or even closer, to Orrin than
she was to her own son, lending a bitter-sweet element to the
word's use in a film about a boy being separated from his mother's
love.
In 1989, essayist
Gore Vidal cited
contemporary rumors that "Rosebud" was a nickname Hearst used for
his mistress
Marion Davies; a
reference to her
clitoris, a claim repeated
as fact in the 1996 documentary
The Battle Over Citizen
Kane and again in the 1999 dramatic film
RKO 281. A resultant joke noted, with heavy
innuendo, that Hearst and/or Kane died "with 'Rosebud' on his
lips."
Production
During production,
Citizen Kane was referred to as
RKO
281.
Filming took place between June 29, 1940 and
October 23, 1940 in what is now Stage 19 on the Paramount lot in
Hollywood
. Welles prevented studio executives of
RKO from visiting the set. He
understood their desire to control projects and he knew they were
expecting him to do an exciting film that would correspond to his
The War of the
Worlds radio broadcast. Welles' RKO contract had given him
complete control over the production of the film when he signed on
with the studio, something that he never again was allowed to
exercise when making motion pictures.
Filmmaking innovations
Cinematography
A deep focus shot: everything,
including the hat in the foreground and the boy (young Kane) in the
distance, is in sharp focus.
scholars and historians view
Citizen Kane as Welles'
attempt to create a new style of
filmmaking by studying various forms of movie
making, and combining them all into one. The most innovative
technical aspect of
Citizen Kane is the extended use of
deep focus. In nearly every scene in the
film, the foreground, background and everything in between are all
in sharp focus. This was done by renowned cinematographer
Gregg Toland through his experimentation with
lenses and lighting. Specifically, Toland often used telephoto
lenses to shoot close-up scenes. Any time deep focus was
impossible — for example in the scene when Kane finishes a bad
review of Alexander's opera while at the same time firing the
person who started the review — Toland used an
optical printer to make the whole screen
appear in focus (visually layering one piece of film onto another).
However, some apparently deep-focus shots were the result of
in-camera effects, as in the famous
example of the scene where Kane breaks into Susan Alexander's room
after her suicide attempt. In the background, Kane and another man
break into the room, while simultaneously the medicine bottle and a
glass with a spoon in it are in closeup in the foreground. The shot
was an in-camera matte shot. The foreground was shot first, with
the background dark. Then the background was lit, the foreground
darkened, the film rewound, and the scene re-shot with the
background action.
Another unorthodox method used in the film was the way
low-angle shots were used to display a point
of view facing upwards, thus allowing ceilings to be shown in the
background of several scenes.
Since movies were primarily filmed on
sound stages and not on location during
the era of the Hollywood studio system, it was
impossible to film at an angle that showed ceilings because the
stages had none. In some instances, Welles' crew used
muslin draped above the set to produce the
illusion of a regular room with a ceiling, while the boom
microphones were hidden above the cloth.
Time compression
One of the story-telling techniques introduced in this film was
using an episodic sequence on the same set while the characters
changed costume and make-up between cuts so that the scene
following each cut would look as if it took place in the same
location, but at a time long after the previous cut. In this way,
Welles chronicled the breakdown of Kane's first
marriage, which took years of story time, in a
matter of minutes.
Special effects
Welles also pioneered several visual effects in order to cheaply
shoot things like crowd scenes and large interior spaces. For
example, the scene where the camera in the opera house rises
dramatically to the rafters to show the workmen showing a lack of
appreciation for the second Mrs. Kane's performance was shot by a
camera booming upwards over the performance scene, then a curtain
wipe to a miniature of the upper regions of the house, and then
another curtain wipe matching it again with the scene of the
workmen. Other scenes effectively employed miniatures to make the
film look much more expensive than it truly was, such as various
shots of
Xanadu. A loud,
full-screen closeup of a typewriter typing a single word ("weak"),
magnifies the review for the
Chicago Inquirer.
Makeup
The film broke new ground with its use of special effects makeup,
created by makeup artist
Maurice
Seiderman, believably aging the cast many decades over the
course of the story.
Soundtrack
Welles brought his experience with sound from radio along to
filmmaking, producing a layered and complex soundtrack. In one
scene, the elderly Kane strikes Susan in a tent on the beach, and
the two characters silently glower at each other while a woman at
the nearby party can be heard hysterically laughing in the
background, her giddiness in grotesque counterpoint to the misery
of Susan and Kane. Elsewhere, Welles skillfully employed
reverberation to create a mood, such as the chilly echo of the
monumental Thatcher library, where the reporter is confronted by an
intimidating, officious librarian.
In addition to expanding on the potential of sound as a creator of
moods and emotions, Welles pioneered a new aural technique, known
as the "lightning-mix". Welles used this technique to link complex
montage sequences via a series of
related sounds or phrases. In offering a continuous sound track,
Welles was able to join what would otherwise be extremely rough
cuts together into a smooth narrative. For example, the audience
witnesses Kane grow from a child into a young man in just two
shots. As Kane's guardian hands him his
sled, Kane begrudgingly wishes him a "Merry Christmas". Suddenly we
are taken to a shot of his guardian fifteen years later, only to
have the phrase completed for us: "and a Happy New Year". In this
case, the continuity of the soundtrack, not the image, is what
makes for a seamless narrative structure.
Welles also carried over techniques from radio not yet popular in
the movies (though they would become staples). Using a number of
voices, each saying a sentence or sometimes merely a fragment of a
sentence, and splicing the dialogue together in quick succession,
the result gave the impression of a whole town talking — and,
equally important, what the town was talking about. Welles also
favored the overlapping of dialogue, considering it more realistic
than the stage and movie tradition of characters not stepping on
each other's sentences. He also pioneered the technique of putting
the audio ahead of the visual in scene transitions (a
J-cut); as a scene would come to a close, the audio
would transition to the next scene before the visuals did.
Music
In common with using personnel he had previously worked with in the
Mercury Theatre, Welles recruited his close friend
Bernard Herrmann to score Citizen Kane.
Herrmann was a longtime collaborator with Welles, providing music
for almost all his radio broadcasts including
The Fall of the
City (1937) and the
War of the Worlds (1938)
broadcast. The film was Herrmann's first motion picture score and
would be nominated for an
Academy Award for
Original Music Score but would lose out to his own score for
the film
All That Money Can
Buy.
Herrmann's score for Citizen Kane was a watershed in film
soundtrack composition and proved as influential as any of the
film's other innovations and established him as an important voice
in film soundtrack composition. The score eschewed the typical
Hollywood practice of scoring a film with virtually non-stop music.
Instead Herrmann used what he later described as '"radio scoring",
musical cues which typically lasted between five and fifteen
seconds to bridge the action or suggest a different emotional
response.
Herrmann realized that musicians slated to play his music were
hired for individual unique sessions; there was no need to write
for existing ensembles. This meant that he was free to score for
unusual combinations of instruments, even instruments that are not
commonly heard. In the opening sequence, for example, the tour of
Kane's estate Xanadu, Herrmann introduces a recurring
leitmotiv played by low
woodwinds, including a quartet of bass
flutes. Much of the music used in the newsreel was
taken from other sources; examples include the
News on the
March music which was taken from RKO's music library,
Belgian March by
Anthony Collins, and accompanies the
newsreel titles; and an excerpt from
Alfred Newman's score for
Gunga Din which is used as the background
for the exploration of Xanadu. In the final sequence of the film,
which shows the destruction of Rosebud in the fireplace of Kane’s
castle, Welles choreographed the scene while he had Herrmann’s cue
playing on the set.
For the famous operatic sequence which exposed Kane's protege Susan
Alexander for the amateur she was, Herrmann composed a
quasi-romantic scene,
Aria from Salammbô. There did exist
two treatments of this work by
Gustave
Flaubert's 1862 novel, including an opera by
Ernest Reyer and an incomplete treatment by
Modeste Mussorgsky. However,
Herrmann made no reference to existing music. Herrmann put the aria
in a key that would force the singer to strain to reach the high
notes, culminating in a high D, well outside the range of Susan
Alexander. Herrmann said he wanted to convey the impression of
a terrified girl floundering in the quicksand of a powerful
orchestra. On the soundtrack it was soprano
Jean Forward who actually sang the vocal part
for actress
Dorothy
Comingore.
In 1972 Herrmann said "I was fortunate to start my career with a
film like
Citizen Kane, it's been a downhill run ever
since!". Shortly before his death in 1985, Welles told director
Henry Jaglom that that the score was
fifty per cent responsible for the film’s artistic success.
However, Herrmann was vocal in his criticism of Pauline Kael's
claim not only on her position that it was Mankiewicz, not Welles,
who made the main thrust of the film but also in her assumptions
about the use of music in the film without consulting him:
- Pauline Kael has written in The Citizen Kane Book
(1971), that the production wanted to use Massenet’s "Thais" but
could not afford the fee. "But Miss Kael never wrote or approached
me to ask about the music. We could easily have afforded the fee.
The point is that its lovely little strings would not have served
the emotional purpose of the film."
Opera lovers are frequently amused by the parody of vocal coaching
that appears in a singing lesson given to Susan Alexander by Signor
Matiste. The character attempts to sing the famous cavatina "Una
voce poco fa" from
Il barbiere
di Siviglia by
Gioachino
Rossini, but the lesson is interrupted when Alexander sings a
high note flat.
An uncredited
Nat King Cole is
believed to provide the music in two key scenes in the film. He can
be heard playing piano, but not singing,
This Can't Be
Love, (actually sung by Alton Redd), in the scene where Susan
fights with Kane. Welles heard him playing at a bar and created the
scene around the song. Later he can be heard playing in the scene
where Thompson questions a down at heel Susan in the nightclub she
works, however Bernard Herrmann denied any knowledge of this to
musicologist
David Meeker.
Reception
NY City premiere, May 1, 1941
In a 1941 review,
Jorge Luis
Borges called
Citizen Kane a "metaphysical detective
story," in that "... [its] subject (both psychological and
allegorical) is the investigation of a man's inner self, through
the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives
he has ruined..." Borges noted that "Overwhelmingly, endlessly,
Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster
Kane, and invites us to combine them and reconstruct him." As well,
"Forms of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the
first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the
last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous
jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum."
Borges points out, "At the end we realize that the fragments are
not governed by a secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is
a
simulacrum, a chaos of
appearances."
Despite numerous positive reviews from critics at the time, the
film was not a box office success, just making back enough to cover
the budget, but not enough to
make
a profit.
Due to the
Second World War,
Citizen Kane was little seen and virtually forgotten until
its release in
Europe in 1946, where it
gained considerable acclaim, particularly from
French film
critics such as
André Bazin. In
the United States, it was neglected and forgotten until its revival
on television in the mid-1950s, and its critical fortunes have been
significantly transformed since then. Critics worldwide began
listing it among
the best films
ever made. The
Sight &
Sound Top Ten list, revised every ten years, began in 1952
and first listed
Citizen Kane in 1962.
Hearst's response
Hearing about the film enraged Hearst so much that he banned any
discussion of it in any of his publications. Louie B Mayer,
presumably at Hearst's request, offered RKO Pictures $800,000 to
destroy all prints of the film and burn the negative. Although it
is often said that Hearst was upset because the film was about him,
one alternative theory is that Hearst was more upset about the
portrayal of
Marion Davies (as singer
Susan Alexander) than himself in the film. Welles and Hearst were
both very similar in that they both were ambitious, willing to bend
the rules, and do whatever it took to shock and be the best. The
feud became so big that it destroyed both men's careers.
When RKO rejected Hearst's offer to suppress the film, Hearst
banned every newspaper and station in his media conglomerate from
reviewing — or even mentioning — the movie. He also had
many movie theaters ban it, and many didn't show it through fear of
being socially exposed by his massive newspaper empire. The
documentary
The Battle
Over Citizen Kane lays the blame for
Citizen
Kane's relative failure squarely at the feet of Hearst. Even
though it did decent business at the box-office and went on to be
the sixth highest grossing film in its year of release, this fell
short of its creators' expectations but was still acceptable to its
backers. In
The Chief: The Life of William Randolph
Hearst, David Nasaw points out that Hearst's actions were not
the only reason
Kane failed, however: the innovations
Welles made with narrative, as well as the dark message at the
heart of the film (that the pursuit of success is ultimately
futile) meant that a popular audience could not appreciate its
merits (Nasaw, 572-573).
In a pair of
Arena
documentaries about Welles' career produced and broadcast
domestically by the
BBC in 1982, Welles claimed
that during opening week, a policeman approached him one night and
told him: "Do not go to your hotel room tonight; Hearst has set up
an undressed, underage girl to leap into your arms when you enter
and a photographer to take pictures of you. Hearst is planning to
publish it in all of his papers". Welles thanked the man and stayed
out all night. However, it is not confirmed whether this was true.
Welles
also described his only meeting with William Randolph Hearst: in an
elevator in a building in San Francisco
, where the film was being premiered. Welles
offered Hearst some free tickets but the tycoon declined to answer;
Welles later stated that Charles Foster Kane would probably have
accepted the offer.
Although Hearst's efforts to suppress it damaged the film's
success, they
backfired in the long
run, since almost every reference of Hearst's life and career
made today typically includes a reference to the film's parallel to
it. The irony of Hearst's efforts is that the film is now
inexorably connected to him. This connection was reinforced by the
publication in 1961 of
W. A. Swanberg's
extensive
biography titled
Citizen
Hearst.
Awards and honors
Academy Awards – 1941
Citizen Kane was the 16th film to get
more than six
Academy Awards nominations.
Of the 23 (13 would have been eligible for
Citizen Kane)
competitive awards which given at the time,
Citizen Kane
had 9 nominations. The Academy did not award
Citizen Kane
Best Actress for
Dorothy Comingore,
Best Supporting
Actor for
Joseph Cotten and
Everett Sloane,
Best Supporting
Actress for
Agnes Moorehead and
Best Special
Effects for
Vernon L. Walker.
It was the Winner of 1
Academy Award.
Boos were heard almost every time
Citizen
Kane was referred to during the Oscars ceremony that year.
Most of Hollywood did not want the film to see the light of day
considering the threats that William Randolph Hearst had made if it
did.
In
December 2007, Welles' Oscar for best original screenplay came up
for auction at Sotheby's in New York
, but failed
to reach its estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. The Oscar
which was believed to have been lost by Welles was rediscovered in
1994 and is owned by the
Dax
Foundation, a Los Angeles based charity. At the same sale
Welles' personal copy of the last revised draft of Citizen Kane
before the shooting script did sell for $97,000.
Others
The
National Board of
Review gave 1941 "Best Acting" awards to Orson Welles and
George Coulouris, and the film itself "Best Picture." That same
year, the
New York Times
named it one of the Ten Best Films of the year, and the
New York Film Critics Circle
Award for "Best Picture" also went to
Citizen
Kane.
Recognition
In 1989,
the United States Library of Congress
deemed the film "culturally, historically, or
aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the
National Film
Registry. Beginning in 1962, and every ten years since,
it has been voted the best film ever made by the
Sight and Sound poll of film critics
and directors. The film has also ranked number one in the following
film "best of" lists: Editorial Jaguar, FIAF Centenary List, France
Critics Top 10, Cahiers du cinéma 100 films pour une cinémathèque
idéale, Kinovedcheskie Russia Top 10, Romanian Critics Top 10, Time
Out Magazine Greatest Films, and Village Voice 100 Greatest Films.
Roger Ebert called
Citizen Kane
the greatest movie ever made.
[454]
American Film
Institute recognition
Criticism
Despite its status,
Citizen Kane is not entirely without
its critics.
Boston University
film scholar Ray Carney,
although noting its technical achievements, criticized what he saw
as the film's lack of emotional depth, shallow characterization and
empty metaphors. Listing it among the most overrated works
within the film community, he accused the film of being "an
all-American triumph of style over substance... indistinguishable
from the opera production within it: attempting to conceal the
banality of its performances by wrapping them in a thousand layers
of acoustic and visual processing". Of its director, he went on to
state, "Welles
is Kane — in a sense he couldn't have
intended — substituting razzle-dazzle for truth and hoping no
one notices the sleight of hand". He also criticized critics and
scholars for allowing themselves to be pandered to, stating
"critics obviously enjoy being told what to think or they'd never
sit still for the hammy acting, cartoon characterizations,
tendentious photography, editorializing blockings, and absurdly
grandiose (and annoyingly insistent) metaphors....When will film
studies grow up? Even Jedediah Leland, the opera reviewer in the
film, knew better than to be taken in by
Salammbo's empty
reverberations."
The Swedish
director Ingmar
Bergman once stated his dislike for the movie, calling it "a
total bore" and claiming that the "performances are
worthless". He went on to call Orson Welles an "infinitely
overrated filmmaker".
Similarly,
James Agate wrote, "I thought
the photography quite good, but nothing to write to Moscow about,
the acting middling, and the whole thing a little dull...Mr.
Welles's high-brow direction is of that super-clever order which
prevents you from seeing what that which is being directed is all
about."
Prints
The original camera negative of
Citizen Kane was destroyed
in a New Jersey film laboratory fire in the 1970s. Subsequent
prints were ultimately derived from a nitrate fine grain positive
made in the 1940s.
Modern techniques were used to produce a pristine print for a 50th
Anniversary theatrical revival reissue in 1991 (released by
Paramount Pictures).
The 2003 British
DVD edition is taken from an
interpositive held by the British Film Institute. The
current US DVD version (released by Warner Home Video) is taken
from another digital restoration, supervised by Turner's company.
The transfer to Region 1 DVD has been criticised by some film
experts for being too bright. Also, in the scene in Bernstein's
office (chapter 10) rain falling outside the window has been
digitally erased, probably because it was thought to be excessive
film grain. These alterations are not present in the UK Region 2,
which is also considered to be more accurate in terms of contrast
and brightness.
In 2003, Orson Welles' daughter Beatrice sued Turner Entertainment
and RKO Pictures, claiming that the Welles estate is the legal
copyright holder of the film. Her attorney
said that Orson Welles had left RKO with an exit deal terminating
his contracts with the studio, meaning that Welles still had an
interest in the film and his previous contract giving the studio
the copyright of the film was null and void. Beatrice Welles also
claimed that, if the courts did not uphold her claim of copyright,
RKO nevertheless owed the estate 20% of the profits, from a
previous contract which has not been lived up to.
On May 30, 2007, the appeals panel agreed that Beatrice Welles
could proceed with the lawsuit against Turner Entertainment, the
opinion partially overturns the 2004 decision by a lower court
judge who had found in favor of Turner Entertainment on the issue
of video rights.
In the 1980s, this film became the catalyst in the controversy over
the
colorization of black and
white films. When
Ted Turner told members
of the press that he was considering colorizing
Citizen
Kane, his comments led to an immediate public outcry. Welles
supposedly told friends that he intended to "keep Ted Turner and
his goddamned Crayolas away from my movie." The uproar was for
naught, as Turner Pictures had never actually announced that this
was an upcoming planned project. Turner later claimed that this was
a joke designed to needle colorization critics, and that he had
never had any intention of colorizing the film. Turner could not
have colorized the film had he wanted to. Welles' original contract
prevented any alteration to the film without his, and eventually
his estate's, express consent.
Popular culture references
Rosebud , the fourth episode
of Season 5, parodies Citizen Kane with
Montgomery Burns in the role of Charles
Foster Kane.
Cartoonist
Charles M. Schulz saw Citizen Kane 40 times and
included it in the 12/9/73 Sunday
Peanuts
comic strip. Linus is watching the movie for the first time and his
sister Lucy ruins the surprise ending by revealing that "Rosebud"
was Kane's sled.
On
Family Guy Season 3, Episode 13,
Peter Griffin says: "It (Rosebud) was
his sled. It was his sled from when he was a kid. There, I just
saved you two long boobless hours".
Multitudinous IMDB movie connections for Citizen
Kane:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033467/movieconnections
See also
References
Notes
Bibliography
- Bogdanovich, Peter and Welles, Orson This Is Orson Welles,
HarperPerennial 1992, ISBN 0-06-092439-X
- Callow, Simon. Orson Welles : Hello Americans London:
Johnathon Cape, 2006. ISBN 0-224-038-532.
- Carringer, Robert L. The Making of Citizen Kane.
University of California Press, 1985. ISBN 0-520-05876-3.
- Gottesman, Ronald, ed. Focus on Citizen Kane.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971.
- Heylin, Clinton. Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus
the Hollywood Studios, Chicago Review Press, 2005.
- Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph
Hearst.New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
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