No. 2: Citizen Kane (Welles)

Remember that this is my personal ballot and not the final compiled ballot that will be published in this space on 2/29/12.  


Gosh, where do I begin?

This little blast from the past seems as good a place to start, I suppose.  (But also, perhaps after I have read this post, just as good a place as I should have finished.  We will see.) And then, I figure, I will attack the subject in multiple sections, each speaking towards a different theme, style, or reason why Citizen Kane is so special.

To wit,

The absolute worst thing Citizen Kane (and Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz) did, and the thing that both of them always regretted the most, was the way they portrayed the delectable, sweet, loyal Marion Davies as a drunken floozy.  It was such awful timing, too.  Citizen Kane was released just as the American public had finally forgotten about Ms Davies, forgotten how during the silent-era William Randolph Hearst had literally shoved Ms Davies and her career down the public's throat in his newspapers.  And how Hearst had blindly sabotaged her career by insisting she only do films that he would approve of, films and characters that were the complete opposite of her charming, naturally mischievous, comic style of performing, or acting.

But if Mankiewicz' famous San Simeon-insider story about the nickname Hearst had for Ms Davies' private parts is true, "rosebud", then that is worser, still.  To hang the entire film on such a rude private joke is beyond small or mean.

Mank and Ms Davies were great friends.  He was a notorious drunk and bon vivant, someone Davies could sneak off and drink with at the legendary Hollywood San Simeon parties.  (Hearst was a teetotaller and hated the idea of Marion drinking.)  In order to relieve himself of his awful guilt towards his friend, in an absolute master-stroke of self-destruction, Mank gave a copy of the Citizen Kane script to his friend and Ms Davies' nephew, Charlie Lederer.  Welles would only express regret in interviews late in his life re their treatment of Ms Davies.  And at one point in his life Welles borrowed a great sum of money from Lederer, which he never returned.

Perhaps I am the only person who thinks like this:  If Citizen Kane had strictly, solely laid to bare the life of William Randolph Hearst and had not included Marion Davies in it, then perhaps Hearst might not have reacted as he did, or with such Biblical vengeance.  I could be completely wrong.

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Welles said there were so many curtain calls that eventually they just raised the curtain and let the audience congratulate the cast and crew on stage.  

One of the best arguments for why I could be wrong in the paragraph above is that Hearst and Welles had already come in to conflict before Citizen Kane was made.  One of the greatest triumphs of Welles' career and of that of the American Theatre was Welles' production of Macbeth in Harlem in 1936.  The production was part of the Federal Theatre Project, which was part of FDR's Works Project Administration (WPA), which was a massive economic stimulus project. (Gosh, where have we heard about projects like these recently?) Of course, some one like Hearst was opposed to the WPA and the Federal Theatre Project, and FDR and the twenty-year old director, Welles, and the fact that the cast was entirely African-American amateurs.  Welles and FDR were routinely savaged in Hearst newspapers as  traitors and Communists.  (Gosh, who likes to bandy that word about these days -- though, now they prefer the, to them, tamer friendlier word, Socialist?)

Welles and Hearst were headed for an absolute comet-like collision course no matter what.  It was inevitable.

Look, I am sure that even back in Roman times there were reactionary right-wing assholes that controlled a portion or all of the media of its' times.  Before Hearst it was someone else in this country and today it is Rupert Murdoch.  But go back to that link above, Jimmy Breslin's quote. Hearst set out to destroy Citizen Kane before it was released, offered $800,000 to the (Jewish) major studio heads to purchase the negative and have it destroyed. Hearst threatened to expose the studio heads as Jewish, Commie-symp Libertines if he did not get his way.  And as for Welles, well, "You always suggest sodomy.  Always."

Even William Alland, the reporter in Citizen Kane and the fantastic voice-over for the famous News on the March sequence, was called before the FBI to discuss if Welles and he were lovers. And if they were Communists.

That is why I forgive them, reluctantly, for their treatment of Ms Davies (sometimes great art has to be small and mean) and absolutely why I have no compunction for the way the film and Welles and Mank exposed Hearst and his media empire for the wretched reactionary creeps that they were.

What is the quote from Greil Marcus' superb book, Lipstick Traces? He is quoting Eisenhower, "Things are more like they are now than they ever were before."

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But when the heck is Michael David Spitler gonna talk about the film, the movie, Citizen Kane?

Well, right now, as a matter of fact.

One of the only directors that I consider even in the same league as Welles (for completely different reasons, mind you), Ernst Lubitsch, was famous for his method of beginning his films. He would always work with his scriptwriter and demand that it had to be fresh, new, and different. That the first few minutes of his films had to be special.

For Citizen Kane, Welles and his crack DP (one of the greatest ever), Gregg Toland, that is how they attacked not just the beginning of the picture, but every single shot.

Every single shot in Citizen Kane is fresh and different.  Every single shot adds depth to the story or the characters.  Every single shot has the power to move or astonish or infuriate the viewer. And Welles and Toland used every trick in their respective bags.  Toland finally got to perfect the deep focus that Jean Renoir had come to love, directing La Règle du jeu.  Toland and Welles dug out the studio floors to create the dramatic low-angle shots that Hitchcock would exploit again and again.  Welles brought every theatre trick he could, including insane false perspective sets, featuring giant fireplaces or over-sized window frames that reinforced story or character.  Welles included cut-outs of people at the political rally (reinforcing the inherent fascistic nature of all politics or political movements).  Welles (and his production design team) told the whole story of the life and death of a marriage through simple editing and by enlarging the dinner table in increments, scene by scene.

What an amazing joy that must have been to arrive on the set each day.  All the geniuses were finally allowed to do whatever they pleased, try anything they had always secretly wanted to try, but were never allowed to before.

Just the News on the March sequence is decades ahead of its' time, blending stock footage, real footage, double and triple exposures, etc, ...

The camera went anywhere and everywhere.  Audiences had not seen anything like this since Murnau's Sunrise, fourteen years earlier, and pretty much forgotten by 1941, Citizen Kane's release.

But it is not just the technical side that makes Citizen Kane so special.  It is also its thrilling larger than life acting and characters.  The fact that the finest acting performance comes from Agnes Moorehead and she is in only one scene.  The amazing Bernard Herrmann score which magically and surreptitiously obeys no rules for scene changes, yet, numerous times comments wittily on the action at hand.  The elegant way that the script and the performers and the production so slyly satirise American Pop Culture and the media.  And on, and on, and on, ...

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Honestly, Citizen Kane is the greatest motion picture in history.  But for idiosyncratic, special romantic, personal reasons, here it will have to reside as No. 2.

Believe me, Citizen Kane (like the Beatles) is not over-rated as many would suggest.  It is still under-rated.  It is an absolute diamond mine of riches, seemingly infinite, with still, yet more treasures to unearth the more we explore.

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Favorite two moments from Citizen Kane:

1.  The ferry girl speech because I have had the exact same experience.  I was on a flight home from Germany in 1994.  The flight was delayed due to mechanical problems.  They ushered us back to the terminal and plied us with free cocktails and crappy German snacks.  It was there I spied one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life, waiting with me.  I never spoke to her.  I doubt we could have, anyway.  I remember her beautiful auburn hair and her Romanian passport.  At the oddest of times, every now and then, I remember the way she stood, clutching that passport.  I am quite sure she never thinks of me, at all, ever.

2.  The whole "in sixty years I'll have to close this newspaper" sequence.

All my love,

Ardent Henry