Warners put out a handsome Blu-ray of Citizen Kane 4K ten years ago, at which time they lined a number of fun extras, including an entire movie dramatizing the production of Orson Welles’ masterpiece. The added value commentaries, documentaries and prime-source film and video that appear as extras for this lavish edition will satisfy every fan and student of Kane, and I give them a close look below. I received positive feedback on my very basic 2011 review, which I happily repeat here, slightly rewritten.
Picture a man forever scrambling and hustling for completion funds. Orson Welles became the original Hollywood outsider, his legacy littered with half-completed and broken projects. Yet he defied the odds by bouncing back several times with superb movies. At the beginning of his career, starting at the top at RKO, Welles’ problem was indecision; some observers doubted that he would get a movie off the ground at all. He was dissuaded from making Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and dropped a thriller called Smilier with a Knife as well.
Welles’ monumental Citizen Kane instead tackles the enormous puzzle of American identity that Orson Welles seemed to personify: genius, ambition, folly. Emerging from a spoiled childhood to make his mark assaulting the status quo, Kane resembles the nation even more closely than he resembles Orson Welles, the boy genius that overwhelmed New York. With his brash manner, fresh ideas and willingness to risk everything Welles was convinced that his force of personality, sheer bluff and raw talent would pull him through.
The boy wonder’s vaunted reputation prompted an unthinkably generous contract offer from Hollywood. Welles took RKO at its word when he was handed the keys to the studio, with the promise to make something brilliant. Daring innovation had worked on Broadway and in the radio, and now the movies were his next horizon to conquer. Welles dodged the naysayers in Hollywood — who had been making talking pictures with one factory model for over ten years — by approaching his movie as art and assembling a dream team of technicians. Knowing the value of personal control, Welles imported cinematographer Gregg Toland and his entire camera crew to RKO. The key actors were his own from New York. The front office was something to be kept in the dark and fed misinformation.
Denied an official start date on what would become Citizen Kane, Welles filmed elaborate ‘tests’ that turned out to be usable scenes for the film. This of course sounds exactly like a brash stunt Charles Foster Kane might pull. Welles knew that winning over the front office was at best a hollow goal because only the final result would determine his future in Hollywood: “People will know who is responsible.” Meet young Orson, the most daring tightrope walker ever to perform at Gower and Melrose.
The first thing film students heard about Orson Welles is that he made the greatest film in history when he was 25 years old. For ambitious would-be filmmakers that benchmark is like a biological clock: I’m 22 and I haven’t got my first studio contract yet!” The shocking thing about Welles is that his masterpiece shows few of the usual signs of immaturity. Welles had lived largely among sophisticated adults since early childhood and could dominate most any adult discussion. Herman J. Mankiewicz has an equal or greater claim on the script for Kane, but as Welles reshaped the material to his liking it is his presence that we feel in every frame of film.
The famous Welles quote about the ‘biggest set of trains’ mischaracterizes the director’s creative approach. Welles and Toland took pains to make every sequence its own mini-movie of filmic innovation — reinvigorating every school of film theory established to date. Some Hollywood detractors surely reacted to things they didn’t understand, which they called meaningless film tricks. Take the screaming parrot added as a jarring scene punctuation. There are now as many analyses of that parrot as there are books on Citizen Kane. But the parrot isn’t an extraneous gag, it’s an effective expression that communicates the delirium of the sequence. Kane sees Susan’s exit through a dislocated set of doors, another psychological image. A forest of reflections expresses Kane’s ‘shattered’ mental state, the last time we see him.
Critics are just as apt to misinterpret the film’s technical claims. I’ve read and heard in commentaries the howler that Kane was the first Hollywood film that showed interior ceilings (!). We’re still not sure if any of Welles’ idea of performing to audio playback remains in the film; some sources say that radio-inspired experiment was scrapped in earlier Heart of Darkness tests and others say it lingered on. We read that Gregg Toland hated opticals, but Kane employs every trick that Linwood Dunn could manage on his optical printer. We see not only precise dissolve transitions (many with unusual, expressionist hold-out mattes) but entire scenes that are nearly undetectable matte paintings, with only part of the frame consisting of a live-action segment.
The visual style of Kane is Welles’ attempt to create a ‘super theatre’ dramatic experience. The movie isn’t expressionist in the orthodox sense yet every angle is stylized; he acknowledges that his visual ideal is John Ford. Welles loved deep focus shots, so Toland used wide-angle lenses and poured in light from arcs normally used for Technicolor work. Thus we get a film where every shot is composed in depth. If the drama aimed for a less dynamic pitch many of the angles and camera moves would come off as forced. But the heightened elements are in balance. Welles demands that each shot express the meaning of a scene, not simply record actors and motion. Kane’s so-called baroque style is really Welles’ ‘Declaration of Principles’: everything on the screen is both important and personal.
Welles’ corps of actors includes colleagues from his radio days in New York. Among them only Joseph Cotten has the looks of standard star material. Welles seems to have been a huge fan of old-age makeup, and several of the actors underwent complicated work to represent different ages. We note that Welles’ cast roundup at the finale shows the actors in old-age makeup where possible. Cotten and Welles wear glassy oversized contact lenses to make their aged eyes look rheumy, an effect that works extremely well. The most stunning age illusion is provided by Everett Sloane, whose Mr. Bernstein outlives everybody else even though he doesn’t look all that young when we first meet him. The actor was only 30 or 31 during filming. I marveled at Sloane’s undetectable bald cap makeup in his later scenes. Then I was told that he had simply shaved his head. A good magician can make us imagine more movie magic than is really there.
Citizen Kane’s multiple flashback structure can be confusing for first-time viewers. I always become a little disoriented when Kane loses The Enquirer in the ’29 stock market crash — why didn’t he retain his beloved newspaper by selling his ocean liners or something? Even viewers accustomed to stories told out of sequence can lose their way when the narrator relating the flashback recounts events that seemingly took place when he was absent, Joseph Cotten’s character especially. But what storyteller restricts himself to events he personally saw? Kane uttered his final word ‘Rosebud’ when the appeared to be alone, without a witness to hear him say it. But Paul Stewart’s Raymond relates the event in the first person: he was at Kane’s side when he died. We are also surprised at how many writers claimed that we never see the face of Mr. Thompson (William Alland), the reporter chasing down the secret of Rosebud. Alland doesn’t get a high-key close-up but we see his facial features clearly in many shots.
What is consistent throughout the film is the focus on Kane’s psychology, the mindset of a ‘great American’ who finds wealth and power and thinks he can stake a claim on the public’s love as well. Kane drives away his loved ones by demanding their love on his terms. Woefully blind and naïve in his personal dealings, the cocky entrepreneur betrays his first wife and turns on his best friend. He drives his second wife to the brink of insanity with his grandiose, unrealistic demands. Kane appreciates art by acquiring it and withholding it from the rest of the world; his awful selfishness in all things is matched by an infantile innocence. Orson Welles was also deprived of his parents at an early age. He paints Kane as a man given the world but unequipped to understand his own feelings.
It’s too easy — auteurish-easy — to say that Orson Welles’ later films merely revisit the themes of Citizen Kane. This first movie is so packed with ideas that parallels would pop out if Welles had become a director of Republic serials. But one persistent Kane idea is that an individual’s life is not a puzzle that can be solved with a few observations and clever conclusions, the kind proffered by magazine biographers on a deadline. Whenever Welles plays a character of power or authority, the same question of ‘knowability’ arises. Who was this man, really? How can we assume we know anything about another person, based on what we hear or read second-hand?
The leading character of Welles’ quirky suspense thriller Mr. Arkadin is a man of mystery that Interpol cannot pin down. Arkadin thinks he can erase his criminal past by methodically eliminating his former cronies. When this scheme to rewrite his own biography backfires, Arkadin is forced to erase himself. The gross, corrupt cop Hank Quinlan of Touch of Evil seems capable of unlimited villainy, yet his long-time associates insist that he was the most important person in their lives. “He was some kind of a man… What does it matter what you say about people?”… Marlene Dietrich tosses off that line in much the same way that Kane’s Raymond shrugs off Mr. Thompson’s probing questions about Rosebud. Speeding through what was until 1941 a charmed life, Welles already seems aware that he is as incapable as anyone of figuring himself out.
