Don't Make a Scene (Redux): Citizen Kane

The Story: Two minutes, fifteen seconds. That's how long this dizzying sequence lasts, and so, too, the bloom of the first marriage of newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane. It's a wise, but cynical scene, an amazing accomplishment for a 26 year old upstart, with one six-year marriage behind him, directing his first film.

Dizzying for the points it makes in so short a time, and also for all the "whip-pans" flashing us forward to the next precipitous drop in the two's affections. It's a simple set-up: we fade from Jed's ironic words, and like a stage production the lights dim on him and come up on the couple, where Kane, in the throes of wedded bliss, deigns to act as servant, bringing his new bride Emily Norton Kane breakfast. The camera dollies in on their loving conversation—only when Emily first mentions Charles' ungodly work schedule are they separated into their own film frames, where they will remain while their marriage declines. and their personalities change--his into fatuous megalomania, hers into brittle contempt. Only at the end, in antagonistic silence, do they share the same frame once again, as we dolly out and their lights go down, as Leland's come up. Curtains closed.

The acting is superb with both participants, Welles' body language speaking louder as his words become fewer and fewer. And in a subtle accompaniment, Bernard Herrmann's subtle waltz at the beginning of the montage, becomes increasingly shrill and sniping as the scenes continues, settling into an icy breath of high strings that brings an added frost to the final sequence–the same arrangement he would use for the chilling horror of Psycho twenty years later.

It's amazing work, from the use of sound—Kane's clinking coffee cup is as final a period as any movie-sentence has received—to the subtle way the conversation bridges from one to the other during the 'whip-pans." It's very smart. And very unfeeling and not sympathetic. And it's probably demonstrative of why so many people don't like Citizen Kane. It's a brilliant show-piece, but aloof. Vaguely superior and judgmental, but without the warmth of empathy.

Not unlike the subject of the film.

Citizen Kane is, above all, a love story...as the narrator of this scene tells us, it's how Kane lost it.

The Set-Up: Young Mr. Thompson (William Alland) is searching for the origin of the last word of Charles Foster Kane—"Rosebud." He is interviewing acquaintances of the late Mr. Kane, looking for clues. Now, he talks to Jedidiah Leland (Joseph Cotten), an old college buddy of Charlie's, who worked as a theater critic for Kane, and had a famous falling-out with him. Jed remembers Kane's first wife, Emily Norton (soap opera doyen Ruth Warrick), and we are given a ring-side seat to that marriage. Get ready to duck.

Action!
Thompson: Mr. Leland, what do you know about "Rosebud?"
Jed Leland: "Rosebud?" Oh! Oh, his "dying words." "Rosebud." Yeah, I saw that in the Inquirer.
Leland: Well, I never believed anything I saw in the Inquirer. Anything else?
Leland: I can tell you about Emily. I went to dancin' school with Emily.
Leland: I was very graceful.
Leland: Er, uh, we were talking about the first Mrs. Kane.
Thompson: What was she like?
Leland: She was like all the girls I knew in dancin' school. Very nice girl, very nice. Emily was a little nicer. (clears throat) Well, after the first couple of months, she and Charlie didn't see much of each other except at breakfast.
Leland: It was a marriage just like any other marriage.
Charles: You're beautiful.
Emily: Oh, I can't be...
Charles: Yes, you are you're very, very beautiful.
Emily: I've never been to six parties in my life!
Charles: Extremely beautiful...
Emily: I've never been up this late!
Charles: It's a matter of habit.
Emily: What will the servants think?
Charles: They'll think we enjoyed ourselves...
Emily: Dearest..
Charles: Didn't we?
Emily: I don't see why you have to go straightaway to the newspaper...
Charles: You never should have married a newspaperman. They're worse than sailors.
Charles: I absolutely adore you.
Emily: Oh, Charles...
Emily: Even newspapermen have to sleep.
Charles: I'll call Mr. Bernstein, have him put off my appointments 'til noon.
Charles: What time is it?
Emily: Oh, I don't know it's late.
Charles: It's early.
Emily: Charles?
Emily: Do you know how long you kept me waiting last night when you went to the newspaper...
Emily: ..."for ten minutes?"
Emily: What do you do at a newspaper in the middle of the night?
Charles: Emily? My dear? Your only correspondent is the Inquirer...
Emily: Sometimes, I think...
Emily: ...I'd prefer a rival of flesh-and-blood.
Charles: Oh Emily, I don't spend that much time on the newspaper.
Emily: It isn't just the time. It's what you print - attacking the President...
Charles: You mean Uncle John.
Emily: I mean the President of the United States.
Charles: He's still Uncle John, and he's still a well-meaning fat-head who's letting a pack of high-pressure crooks run his administration. This whole oil scandal...
Emily: He happens to be the President, Charles, not you.
Charles: That's a mistake that will be corrected one of these days.
Emily: You know...
Emily: ...Mr. Bernstein sent Junior the most incredible atrocity yesterday, Charles. I simply can't have it in the nursery.
Charles: Mr. Bernstein is apt to pay a visit to the nursery now and then.
Emily: Does he have to?
Charles: Yes.
Emily: Really, Charles...
Emily: ...people will think...
Charles Foster Kane:...what I tell them to think. (clink)

Citizen Kane

Words by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles

Pictures by Gregg Toland and Orson Welles

Citizen Kane is available on DVD and Blu-Ray on Warner Home Video.

Anytime Movies #2: Citizen Kane

While I catch up on the reviews still in "Draft" phase here, I'll re-run a feature I ran when I first started this blog seven years ago,* when it was suggested I do a "Top Ten" List.

I don't like those: they're rather arbitrary; they pit films against each other, and there's always one or two that should be on the list that aren't because something better shoved it down the trash-bin.

So, I came up with this: "Anytime" Movies.

Anytime Movies are the movies I can watch anytime, anywhere. If I see a second of it, I can identify it. If it shows up on television, my attention is focused on it until the conclusion. Sometimes it’s the direction, sometimes it’s the writing, sometimes it’s the acting, sometimes it’s just the idea behind it, but these are the movies I can watch again and again (and again!) and never tire of them. There are ten (kinda). They're not in any particular order, but the #1 movie IS the #1 movie.

So obvious a choice.

Yet Citizen Kane (or RKO 281) has been fielding off re-appraisals and critical backlash since the day of its premiere. Is it really "the greatest American film ever made?"

Yes.

So far….

Part of the argument against it is that it can’t be since it was the product of a 26 year old who had never made a film before. But Orson Welles was a 26 year old who grew up pampered and precocious—who read Shakespeare at an age when other kids are reading Seuss. As a teen he made his way in the world by his brio and his considerable talents and his nerve to try just about anything. He was an artistic sociopath who staged alternative Shakespeare productions and avant-garde radio plays for years before being given, as Kane puts it, “the candy store”—a carte blanche contract with a film studio to make any film of his choice, any way he wanted with final cut and a stipulation that said no one could alter it in any way in perpetuity (This is the reason why Turner Broadcasting in its rush to colorize movies could never put so much as a pink pixel to Citizen Kane. Some contract!). With it, he gathered his seasoned Mercury Theater actors (some of whom would go on to major Hollywood careers), one of the most innovative and painterly cinematographers, Gregg Toland, young, daring editor Robert Wise, the arrogant and brilliant composer Bernard Herrmann, and the amazing technical crew at RKO who produced such amazing feats as King Kong and the Astaire-Rogers musicals and turned them loose on Herman Mankiewicz’s long-in-the-planning screenplay that he believed could never be produced.

Out of all that talent at the top of its game, Welles produced the best American movie ever made, and as a reward he was never allowed that freedom again. Ever. No good movie goes unpunished.

His next film, The Magnificent Ambersons was a more mature and accomplished–looking film, but RKO chopped it up, re-shot the ending giving its albeit happy finale a certain incomprehensibility and threw it on the bottom of a cheesy double bill. Welles always thought it would have been his best film and the evidence certainly indicates it might have been.  He then barely worked in Hollywood again, except as an actor, and used the funds to make films dear to his heart or sensibility (which veered from Shakespeare to pulp) on a catch-as-catch-can basis. Welles’ Falstaff movie The Chimes at Midnight was the project closest to his heart, and might be better if not for the logistical and technical hurdles Welles had to jump in order to make it.

But Kane is the grail—the stuff of legend, and has been looked on ever since with avarice by would-be auteurs with more guts than talent, and therein lies the danger. That reputation could make Kane as cold and lifeless as one of the statues in Xanadu’s basement. It’s actually more like one of Susan Alexander Kane’s puzzles—intricate and maybe unsolvable without a lot of effort. There’s one shot where Welles shows his hand. It occurs after Susan has left him, accompanied by the screeching cockatiel superimposed on the screen (“I wanted to wake the audience up at that point,” Welles joked. Really, Orson? Right there?) and right after he trashes her room—destroying the acquisitions of her life and his—Kane picks up the snow-globe that will fall from his hand at his death. “Rosebud,” he murmurs (both times) and then walks as in a daze out of her room, into the hall, and past his servants. He then crosses through a mirrored hallway that reflects an endless line of Kanes that recede and disappear. After Kane (and his many reflections) has passed, the camera then pushes into the mirror and out, back to the sequence's surrounding reverie of the butler (“Sentimental fella, aren’t you?” “Mmm. Yes and no.”)

That shot is the exit from the worlds of memory through which we have seen many reflections of Kane—the house of mirrors that makes up the bulk of Citizen Kane, the movie. It is also our last image of Kane, himself, in the film. He’s talked about through to the end, of course, but that splintered mirror-shot is our final impression of him (Kane—and Welles—are not even seen in the End Credits review of actors). At that point it becomes clear (as crystal) that the entire film is like that hall of mirrors that reflected back the aspects of Kane important to each narrator—a process that began with the newsreel that quickly jumped through the highlights of Kane’s life as a public figure and set up the film’s surface mystery—what is the meaning of Kane’s last word (and so serves as a stand-in for “who was Kane, really?”).

In the course of the various reflections there are all sorts of legerdemain—little tricks and in-jokes—that Welles, who was an amateur magician, clearly loved pulling off even if an audience didn’t immediately “get” them. One of my favorites is the craning shot through the model of the “El Rancho” nightclub where ex-wife Susan Alexander performs and drinks herself into a stupor every night. The night of the first attempt at an interview by newsreel reporter Thompson, it’s storming outside and flashes of lightning hide the camera’s passage through the roof sign and through the glass transom into the nightclub inside. When, half the movie later, we again travel through that transom it’s broken—presumably by our first trip through it. In the film’s original framing (unfortunately not in the DVD presentation) there is the slightest nudge of the camera to the right in the rather severe shot of Mrs. Kane signing little Charles away to the banker, and we see, just on the edge of the frame, that significant snow-globe that keeps popping up in dramatic moments. In the newsreel there is a shot of a newspaper of the entire Kane family. Later in the film, we actually see that shot being taken. Another is the way Kane’s hectoring “Sing-Siiiiing!” to “Boss” Jim Gettys is cut off by a shutting door, but it is continued by a braying car-horn out on the street. These are little filigrees to the grand architecture of lighting, framing and editing tricks that Welles and his crew pull off.** 

But that central question “who was Kane?” is purposely never answered, not by a word, not by an object, and not by a person. In the end, the film says that it can’t solve the problem, that it can only present it, and leave us with the acknowledgement of its complexity.

So what are we left with as the remnants of Kane and his life fly up from the furnace of Xanadu? An answer to the mystery of "Rosebud," but not an answer to the man. For Kane was many things to many people, but as Kane himself passed judgment on himself, he was never great. Given gifts that many of us will never ever have, he ultimately squandered them. Insular, wasteful, in his house of mirrors, he is left alone to contemplate himself.

We all have our gifts. What do we do with them? Citizen Kane is like that glass globe that we can peer inside and see the illusion of life…and consider our own lives. And in the end we are left with its final image to contemplate, and one may consider in that contemplation that Kane was a master illusionist himself, pretending greatness where there was none, and utilizing the very same tools used by those other illusionists—magicians and very young film directors—to create those illusions.

Those tools being smoke…and mirrors.

Anytime Movies:

Citizen Kane

Once Upon a Time in the West

-Only Angels Have Wings
The Searchers

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Chinatown
American Graffiti
To Kill a Mockingbird
Goldfinger
Bonus: Edge of Darkness

* And, on Sunday, we'll put up a "Don't Make a Scene" feature from each week's film.

** Orson Welles is unique in the group of directors of movies that I’ve seen in that every time I exit from a new film of his, I come out looking at the world with new eyes…or with a new perception of the old world--one that seems filled with possibilities.