Citizen Kane
Reviewed by Christy Campbell, formerly war correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph. His latest book Phylloxera: How wine was saved for the world (HarperCollins, 2004) has been shortlisted for the André Simon food and drink book of the year award.
RATING: 5
US, 1941
Director Orson Welles
Screenwriters Herman J Mankiewicz and Orson Welles
Cinematography Gregg Toland
Music Bernard Herrmann
Cast Orson Welles (Charles Foster Kane), Joseph Cotten (Jedediah Leland), Dorothy Comingore (Susan Alexander Kane), Everett Sloane (Mr Bernstein)
Everyone knows Citizen Kane. It’s the greatest film ever made (that’s what movie magazine polls say year after year anyway). And you don’t have to be an ardent cineaste to know that it starred and was directed, co-produced and co-written by the Wisconsin-born actor Orson Welles when he was only 24 years old.
Even if you somehow missed it, you will recognise the story about a messianic American newspaper proprietor who dies alone in a gloomy, antique-stuffed mansion with a riddle from a lost childhood on his lips. But is it a true story?
Overwhelming illusion
You might be forgiven for thinking that it is entirely true. The fact that an ‘investigative reporter’ acts as narrator and the use of (entirely fabricated) newsreels, talking-head interviews and flashbacks add overwhelmingly to the illusion that you are watching not a fictional drama but a documentary about a real person. Makers of biopics and drama-docs ever since have been in the thrall of Kane.
The film itself made its own chunk of history. Released in January 1941 in isolationist America amid a flurry of lawsuits and press uproar, its cinematic and narrative techniques were as revolutionary as its left-of-centre message was controversial. There is still controversy as to whether this iconic movie (the screenplay of which spans events from the 1870s to the 1930s) is a ‘history film’ depicting real people and real events, or a parable of human frailty that happens to use ‘yellow press’ journalism as a metaphor for the wider ills of capitalism.
Decisive fact
It depends on whether you think the life and times of the fictional Charles Foster Kane parallel those of the very real William Randolph Hearst, the only child of a San Franciscan multi-millionaire, who built a national newspaper empire in the late 19th/early 20th century. Welles himself, perhaps remembering the time when the magnate turned the power of his newspapers against him, (see footnote) later insisted that it was all just coincidence.
‘Hearst was born rich,’ the director wrote in 1975. ’He was the pampered son of an adoring mother. That is the decisive fact about him. Charles Foster Kane was born poor and was raised by a bank.’
Welles had to admit, however, that some Hearst mythology was too good not to plunder:
When [the painter] Frederick Remington was dispatched to the Cuban front to provide the Hearst newspapers with sketches of our first small step into American imperialism, [he] complained by telegram that there wasn't really enough shooting to keep him busy. ‘You make the pictures,’ Hearst wired back, ‘I'll make the war.’ This can be recognized not only as the true voice of power but also as a line of dialogue from a movie. In fact, it is the only purely Hearstian element in Citizen Kane.
Freebooting and stodgy
Actually not quite. As well as the famous quote concerning the outbreak of the Spanish-American war in 1895 (fanned relentlessly by the Hearst press), there are several other very clear parallels.
The real-life press-baron’s rise began in 1887 with the gift from his father (who had acquired it as payment for a gambling debt) of the San Francisco Examiner. Shameless stunts and a ruthless circulation war built sales and profits. Hearst went on to purchase the New York Journal and wooed away much of press baron Joseph Pulitzer’s staff – much as Kane in the film ‘bought’ the staff of the Chronicle, the rival to his paper.
The transition of the fictional anti-hero (played by Welles himself) from champion of the downtrodden to corrupt tyrant was not a journey Hearst made, however. He was hardly a ‘liberal’ at any stage of his career: asked later in life why he had not himself moved into motion pictures, Hearst replied: ‘Because you can more easily crush a man by journalism.’ From freebooting beginnings to stodgy ultra-conservative end, he wooed the public with sensation, but while Hearst did run for high political offices, he was never successful. When Kane does the same, he is destroyed when his ‘love-nest with “singer”’ is exposed by his rival Boss Jim Gettys, the creature of a political machine.
Love affair
It is Kane’s tangled love affair that provides so much of the film’s emotional power – and is where fiction and fact become as confused. Around 1918, the real William Randolph Hearst, then aged 55, met the silent-movie actress Marion Davies and began what would become a life-long obsession. At the time, Hearst was married and had five sons. He and his wife Millicent Veronica Willson, showgirl-turned-society matron, separated in 1926, but they never divorced. Hearst built the outlandish California pleasure dome ‘San Simeon’ for Davies, filling it with questionable objets d’art and fashionable society. It was a Hearst party attended by Herman J Mankiewicz, the film’s co-writer, that was the germ of the film.
By contrast, ‘Charlie Kane’ picks up shop-girl ‘Susan Alexander’ on a street corner, gets divorced and marries her. As Welles himself noted:
Susan was forced into a singing career because Kane had been forced out of politics. She was pushed from one public disaster to another by the bitter frustration of the man who believed that because he had married her and raised her up out of obscurity she was his to use as he might will.
Kane’s fantasy castle ‘Xanadu’ becomes a loveless prison from which Mrs Susan Kane must and eventually does escape. San Simeon, in spite of Hearst’s later financial travails, always glittered with Davies as its chatelaine.
Hubristic proprietors
It is the detail, however, that makes Citizen Kane a history film rather than a period drama. For this writer, who has worked for several hubristic proprietors, the eternal verities of newspaper politics and personalities are superbly observed.
It’s hard to make comparisons. Celluloid dramas about media moguls are rare. There are no film biopics of, say, the Muscovite editor Mikhail Katkov (1818-87), who sought a Russian war with Britain; the right-wing German press baron Alfred Hugenberg (1865–151), who backed Hitler; the British re-invigorator of The Times Lord Northcliffe (1865-1922); or Canadian-born political insider and editor of the Daily Express Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964). Bizarrely, perhaps, the owners of the James Bond franchise chose, in the guise of supervillain ‘Elliot Carver’ (played by Jonathan Pryce), to mimic a highly recognisable press and satellite TV tycoon in the 1997 Tomorrow Never Dies. (Unlike William Randolph Hearst, this individual did not complain.) David Hare’s 1985 stage play Pravda comes closer to the truth.
Welles himself insisted that Kane was fictional drama rather than history. But for anyone who has toiled in a newsroom, this stunning movie remains deliciously real.
Note: Just prior to the release of Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst forbade any advertisement of the film – or of any other RKO movie – in any of his newspapers and offered to buy the negative from studio head George Schaefer with a view to destroying it. The film was not reviewed in any Hearst newspaper until the mid-1970s, when the film critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner finally evaluated it.
