Citizen Kane
| Citizen Kane | |
|---|---|
| File:Citiza kane.jpg Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Orson Welles |
| Written by | Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz |
| Produced by | Orson Welles |
| Starring | Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Ruth Warrick, Everett Sloane, George Coulouris, Ray Collins, Agnes Moorehead, Orson Welles |
| Distributed by | RKO Radio Pictures |
Release dates | May 1, 1941 |
Running time | 119 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $686,033 (est.) |
Citizen Kane is a 1941 mystery/drama film released by RKO Pictures. It was the first feature film directed by Orson Welles, who had previously directed two short films. It is widely considered to be a masterpiece by critics and viewers alike, and is often cited as being one of the greatest and most innovative works in the history of film; it has often been called "the greatest film ever made". It is the story of Charles Foster Kane, a man whose fight for power in the publishing world transformed from sheer thrill-seeking to ruthless war, and how his life affected everyone in his orbit. The storyline follows a reporter seeking to find what Kane meant by his dying word: "Rosebud."
Citizen Kane is rumored to be based on the lives of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the reclusive aerospace and movie mogul Howard Hughes, and the Chicago utilities magnate Samuel Insull. Welles maintained that the film's main character, Charles Foster Kane, is a composite of several historical individuals. In F for Fake, Welles claims Kane was originally intended to be based on Hughes (to be played by Joseph Cotten) but he changed it to Hearst. During production, Citizen Kane was referred to as RKO 281. The film premiered on May 1, 1941.
Sonny Bupp, who played Kane's young son, Charles Foster Kane III, is the last cast member still alive. Robert Wise, who was the last living crew member, died of heart failure on September 14, 2005.
Synopsis
Produced in 1941, the film deals with the inability of Charles Foster Kane (played by Orson Welles) to truly love anything but power. Instead Kane has only "love on [his] own terms." As a result, Kane eventually alienates every loved one around him and dies a lonely recluse in an opulent but crumbling estate.
Kane dies in the opening scene of the film at his estate Xanadu; this is followed by a newsreel pastiche documenting Kane's public life (this segment was produced by RKO's actual newsreel department).
A reporter, Jerry Thompson, and a group of associates watch the newsreel. They find it functional but not especially profound as it didn't tell the whole story, so Thompson is chosen to find the meaning behind Kane's last word, "rosebud". The reporter interviews the key figures who, for better or worse, played a part in Kane's life, which is told in a series of flashbacks.
We first see Kane's tainted childhood, followed by his entrance into the newspaper business and his establishment of "yellow journalism"; his rise to power; his first marriage to a President's niece, his run for governor, and the "love nest" scandal that ended them both; his second marriage to a woman whom he molded as an opera singer; and his ever-dominant attitude that led to destruction within his entire inner circle of friends and loved ones, including himself.
In the end, however, Thompson concludes that "rosebud" is a missing piece in a mythological puzzle, and that no one word can describe a man's life. The film's chilling conclusion reveals the meaning behind "rosebud" ... it was the name of a sled from Kane's childhood, and represented a lost childhood innocence. The sled is thrown in the fire to be burned (having been dismissed as junk), and the story ends exactly as it began, with a shot of a "no trespassing" sign. This resolution came to be considered one of the greatest twist endings in cinematic history.
Overview
What is revealed was described by Jorge Luis Borges, in a 1941 review, as a "metaphysical detective story. [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... Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and reconstruct him. 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. 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."
The film combines revolutionary cinematography (by Gregg Toland, with whom Welles shared a title card, which was an unprecedented gesture of Welles' appreciation for Toland's overall contribution to the film) with an Oscar-winning screenplay (by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz — though most film history circles consider Mankiewicz's contribution to the screenplay to be far greater than that of Welles), and a lineup of first time film actors, associates of Mr. Welles from his stint at the Mercury Theater, such as Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead.
Filmmaking innovations
Film 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 (much like D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation did in 1915). Examination of the techniques used by Welles and his crew reveals elements of expressionism in the use of light and shadow, noting the influence of German and Russian filmmakers. Welles' acting style can also be seen as an early example of method acting. For example, the scene where Kane vents his anger from the top of a staircase, at his political opponent Jim Gettys. Welles tripped and broke his ankle during the filming of the scene, but the cameras continued to roll and the shot made it into the final print of the film. Some view this as an example of Welles' workhorse ethic. As a director, Welles disliked actors who subscribed to method acting, considering them unreliable. In particular he dismissed the practice of internalizing as being a hindrance rather than contributing to the production as a whole. He liked to work with actors who were malleable to his vision and always prepared to change a delivery at the drop of a hat without too much worry over motivation. Welles, as an actor, frequently practiced cold reading and spent more time memorizing lines (which never took him long) than doing any mental prep work. It is commonly agreed, however, that there are instances in Citizen Kane where Welles became consumed with his role. In one famous scene in the movie, Kane destroys his second wife's bedroom with his bare hands after she has left him. According to biographers, after Welles destroyed the room and shooting finished he stumbled off the set with bloody hands muttering to himself, "I felt it. I felt it."
The most innovative technical aspect of Citizen Kane is the unprecedented 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 legendary cinematographer Gregg Toland through his experimentation with lenses and lighting. Specifically, Toland often used telephoto lenses to shoot close-up scenes. Anytime the 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 (one piece of film is printed onto another piece of film). However, many 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 reshot with the background action.
Another unorthodox method used in the film was the way low-angle cameras 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. Welles' crew used muslin draped above the set to produce the illusion of a regular room with a ceiling, while the boom mikes were hidden above the cloth.
One of the story-telling techniques introduced in this film was using a series of jump cuts shot on the same set while the characters changed costume and make-up between cuts so that the scene following the cut would look as if it took place 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. Prior to this technique, filmmakers often had to use a long period of screen time to explain the character's changed circumstances. For example, in Erich von Stroheim's masterpiece Greed, the breakdown of the marriage of the main characters takes almost an hour of screen time, even in the most abbreviated cut.
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 panning a camera 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 the Kane mansion.
The film broke new ground with its use of special effects makeup, believably aging the cast many decades over the course of the story. The details extended down to hazy contact lenses to make Cotten's eyes look rheumy as an old man. Welles later claimed that his own dashing appearance as a young man also involved a lot of makeup (including some strategically applied tape to give him a mini-facelift).
Welles brought his experience with sound from radio along to filmmaking, producing a layered and complex soundtrack. In one famous scene the elderly Kane strikes Susan in a tent on the beach, and as the two characters silently glower at each other 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 sound effects to create a mood - such as the chilly echo of the monumental library, where the reporter is confronted by an intimidating, officious librarian.
During the filming (June 29–October 23, 1940), 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.
Conflict with William Randolph Hearst
Much of Kane's life is seen by critics as a fictional parody of (or attack on) media baron William Randolph Hearst. The most notable reference to Hearst comes early in the film, as Kane (played by Welles) provides a quote that mirrors Hearst's own comment on the Spanish American War: "You provide the pictures, I'll provide the war." (An often-debated Hollywood legend says that the reference to "Rosebud" was also an attack on Hearst: allegedly, it was a nickname used by Hearst to refer to the clitoris of his mistress, Marion Davies, or to Marion Davies herself; Marion's mother was named Rose). According to Louis Pizzitola, author of Hearst Over Hollywood, "rosebud" was a nickname that a friend of Hearst's, Orrin Peck, gave to Hearst's 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.
On hearing about the film, Hearst offered RKO Pictures $800,000 to destroy all prints of the film and burn the negative. Although it's 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 Davies (as talentless singer Susan Alexander) than himself in the film. Davies was a light comedic actress who was talked by Hearst into starring in pompous costume dramas many thought were out of her depth. Roger Ebert, in his full-length commentary of Citizen Kane, suggested that the Alexander character had very little to do with Davies, but, rather, that it was based on Ganna Walska, mistress and later wife of Chicago heir Harold McCormick. 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. Unlike Alexander, Walska got into an argument with director Pietro Cimini during dress rehearsal and stormed out of the production before she appeared. Like Alexander, contemporaries said she had a terrible voice, pleasing only to McCormick.
Several candidates for the basis of the Kane personality have been suggested, the most likely being that of Jules Brulatour, millionaire head of distribution for Eastman Kodak and co-founder of Universal Pictures. 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 also believed to have provided inspiration for the Susan Alexander character.
When RKO refused Hearst's offer to suppress the film, Hearst was so angry that he banned every newspaper and station in his media conglomerate from reviewing or even mentioning the movie. Although these efforts damaged the film's success, they ultimately failed considering that 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.
Welles, however, saw the difference 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."
Technical Mistakes
Late in the film, a white parrot links one scene with the next. The parrot is superimposed; we can see the background through its eye.
The "beach party" scene was shot in a studio against a blank grey screen. The background, which was matted in later, is stock footage from an earlier RKO Pictures jungle movie. In one shot, we can see pteranodons flying in the background.
When Kane utters the word "rosebud" before he dies, surprisingly , no one seems to be around. He seems to be alone in a room and he does not say it out loud, just whispers. Then, one wonders how the world comes to know about it.
Awards and recognition
Academy Awards
Wins:
- Best Original Screenplay - Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz
Nominations:
- Best Picture - Orson Welles
- Best Director - Orson Welles
- Best Actor - Orson Welles
- Best Film Editing - Robert Wise
- Best Art Direction - Perry Ferguson, A. Roland Fields, Van Nest Polglase, Darrell Silvera
- Best Cinematography (black and white) - Gregg Toland
- Best Sound Mixing - John Aalberg
- Best Music Score - Bernard Herrman
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.
Citizen Kane was little seen and virtually forgotten until its release in Europe in 1946, where it garnered considerable acclaim, particularly from French film critics such as Andre Bazin. In the United States, it was neglected and forgotten until its revival in the late 1950s, and its critical fortunes have skyrocketed since. Critics worldwide began listing it among the best films ever made. For Welles, however, this was too late. Hearst had been successful in blacklisting Welles in Hollywood so that no studio would agree to work with him.
The American Film Institute put the film at the top of its "100 Greatest Movies" list; it has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry; and it is consistently in the top 30 on the Internet Movie Database. Beginning in 1962, and every ten years since, it has been voted the best film ever made by the Sight and Sound critics' poll. The quote, "Rosebud," was listed as no. 17 on the American Film Institute's AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes. The film has also ranked number one in the following film "best of" lists: Editorial Jaguar, FIAF Centenary List, France Critics Top 10, Kinovedcheskie Russia Top 10, Romanian Critics Top 10, Time Out Magazine Greatest Films, and Village Voice 100 Greatest Films
Welles' career suffered a crippling blow with the box-office failure of Kane, and he spent the rest of his life struggling to make films on his own terms. He lived long enough to see his debut film acknowledged as a classic, and late in life he famously remarked that he'd started at the top and spent the rest of his life working his way down.
Criticism
Despite its status, Citizen Kane is not entirely without its critics. Boston University film scholar Ray Carney, although noting its technical achievments, criticized what he saw as the film's lack of emotional depth, shallow characterization and empty metaphors. Listing it amongst 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 of 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 Salaambo's empty reverberations." [1]
Most famously, film critic Pauline Kael attacked the authorship of Kane's screenplay in an essay entitled, "Raising Kane," that was originally published in The New Yorker in 1971 (and later reprinted in The Citizen Kane Book and available in print in her omnibus collection For Keeps) claiming that Welles overshadowed veteran screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz's contribution. She argued that Mankiewicz was the true author of the screenplay and therefore responsible for a lot of what made the movie great. This angered many critics of the day, most notably critic turned filmmaker (and close friend to Welles) Peter Bogdanovich, who rebutted many of Kael's claims.
Prints
Welles's original master film negative of Citizen Kane was destroyed in a fire in the 1970s. Until 1991, all existing theatrical prints of the film were made from copies of the original. When the film was purchased by Ted Turner's Turner Entertainment (which bought the rights to the MGM and RKO film libraries), film restoration 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.
In 2003, Orson Welles' daughter Beatrice sued Turner Entertainment and RKO Pictures, claiming that the Welles estate is the legal owner 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 ownership of the film was null and void. Beatrice Welles also claimed that, if the courts did not uphold her claim of ownership, RKO nevertheless owes the estate 20% of the profits, from a previous contract which has not been lived up to.
In the 1980s, this film became the catalyst in the fight against the trend of film colorization. When Ted Turner told members of the press that he was considering colorizing 'Citizen Kane', his comments led to an immediate public outcry. Welles had retained control over the film in his original contract, which would prevent any editing or other tampering with this film, without the expressed permission of Welles or his estate. 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 never had any intention of colorizing the film.
The Battle over Citizen Kane
In 1995, Michael Epstein and Thomas Lennon's acclaimed documentary, The Battle Over Citizen Kane was aired as part of the PBS television series The American Experience. Narrated by Richard Ben Cramer, it chronicled the lives of Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst and the furor caused by Citizen Kane. It was later packaged as a bonus disc with the Citizen Kane DVD, which features audio commentary by film critic Roger Ebert and director Peter Bogdanovich. In part, the documentary inspired the 1999 HBO biographical film RKO 281.
David Nasaw, who appears in The Battle Over Citizen Kane as a Hearst expert, questioned some of the traditional wisdom about the movie in his book The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. The documentary essentially lays the blame for Citizen Kane's failure at the feet of Hearst. Nasaw agrees Hearst's refusal to advertise the film hurt its chances of profitability, but also notes that 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). He goes on to say:
- 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.
The documentary points out the great irony that Welles' own life story resembled that of Charles Foster Kane far more than Hearst's: an overreaching wunderkind who ended up mournful and lonely in his old age. Director 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..." The documentary closed with an archived interview with Welles, who sadly closed the documentary:
- ...I have wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox, which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life.
Nominated for a Academy Award for Documentary Feature, lost to Anne Frank Remembered.
See also
- Beyond Citizen Kane
- Films that have been considered the greatest ever
- List of references to Citizen Kane in other work
References
Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst.New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
- The Making of Citizen Kane by Robert L. Carringer. University of California Press, 1985, 180 pp. ISBN 0520058763
External links
