Monthly Archives: December 2018

  • Citizen Kane

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Orson Welles (1941)

    Five times running, between 1962 and 2002 inclusive, Citizen Kane topped Sight & Sound‘s once-a-decade poll of critics’ best films of all time.   (It was just outside the top ten in the first such poll in 1952 and pushed into second place by Vertigo in 2012.)  The film’s storytelling, visuals and use of overlapping dialogue were all, in various ways, innovative and influential.  There are many startling touches (that screeching cockatoo for one) which you simply don’t expect in a Hollywood picture of the era.  Pauline Kael suggested that Kane ‘may be more fun than any other great movie’ and there’s no doubt it’s richly entertaining.  It’s not hard, though, both to admire and enjoy Orson Welles’s unique cinema debut and to suspect it’s been overrated.  According to David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film, the title character’s ‘enterprise is so evidently Welles’s … his surrender to glory is equally the overwhelming of the performer by his own glamour’.  I don’t have a problem with reading films with the benefit of hindsight – it’s often practically impossible to see them for what they originally were.  Even so, Thomson’s mid-1970s yoking of the personality and fate of this one’s protagonist with the personality and fate of its creator makes you wonder how much Welles’s subsequent creative travails have nourished the myth and reputation of Citizen Kane.

    Herman J Mankiewicz and Welles shared the writing credit and their relative contributions to the screenplay have been much debated over the years (notably in Kael’s 1971 essay Raising Kane and reactions to it).   What’s not in dispute are the narrative’s exhilarating combination of clarity and complexity, especially in the early stages, and the flow of unusually witty and aphoristic dialogue.  The film opens on the iron fencing and ‘No Trespassing’ sign at the perimeter of an estate steeped in shadow and desuetude.  Inside a mansion of Gothic aspect, an elderly man lies in bed.  He holds in his hand a snow globe and utters the word ‘Rosebud’ before the globe falls from his hand and smashes on the floor.   A nurse enters to draw the bed covers over the dead man.  Welles then cuts to a cinema newsreel obituary of the newspaper owner and publisher Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), whose vast Florida property the camera roamed in the preceding sequence.  The place’s name was Xanadu and the ‘News on the March’ narrator intones the opening lines from Coleridge’s Kubla Khan to introduce Kane’s potted life story.  The newsreel, as well as being formally distinctive, is a nifty means of instantly conveying Kane’s celebrity and biographical information about him.

    The end of the newsreel reveals that it has been screened not in a cinema but in a projection room, watched there by the team who put it together.  The boss man Rawlston (Philip Van Zandt) tells his journalist Thompson (William Alland, also the voice of the ‘News on the March’ narrative):

    ‘It’s a good short, Thompson, but what it needs is an angle.  All that picture tells us is that Charles Foster Kane is dead.  I know that – I read the papers … You see, Thompson, it isn’t enough to show what a man did.  You’ve got to tell us who he was … What were the last words Kane said on earth?  Maybe he told us all about himself on his deathbed.’

    Thompson and Rawlston both know Kane’s last word was ‘Rosebud’.  Rawlston instructs Thompson to delay releasing the newsreel for a week or two and, in the meantime, to ‘Find out about Rosebud!’ – a mission that supplies the framework of the story that follows, in the course of which Kane’s life is explored and revealed in more detail.  Citizen Kane is rich in narrative invention.  Another famous example is the summary of the decline of Kane’s first marriage, to Emily Norton (Rut Warrick), a niece of the American President, constructed through consecutive short breakfast-table exchanges between the couple, over a period of some years.

    Beside this compressed and imaginative storytelling, the failure of Kane’s second marriage, to the amateur(ish) singer Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), is a protracted business.  And whereas Kane’s rise to power as a yellow press magnate (the chief inspiration for the character is supposedly William Randolph Hearst) is described succinctly, there’s a more extended account of the termination of his short-lived political career.  Susan Alexander is a key figure in this episode too.  The exposure of Kane’s affair with her capsizes his campaign for election as Governor of New York and brings to an end his marriage to Emily.  Each time I’ve watched the film (perhaps four times over as many decades), I’ve been puzzled by how much screen time is then devoted to Kane’s obstinate, increasingly desperate attempts to launch Susan on a career as a big-time opera singer which she, like the critics who savage her performances, knows she’s not up to and resents.  This seems meant to illustrate Kane’s arrogant determination to make things happen through the force of his will.  But since the failure of Susan’s operatic career isn’t typical of his life it’s not easy to see it as reflecting something larger and essential about Kane’s egotism.

    David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary piece notes that ‘Anyone can see how much Welles’s eye had learned from German Expressionism and its influence on stage production in the 1930s’.   In this respect too, however, Citizen Kane looks different from any other product of contemporary Hollywood and a film noir almost before its time.  (Although The Maltese Falcon was released later in the same year, it was well into the decade before noir became anything approaching a genre.)  Kane may be noir in terms of visual style and mood rather than characters and storyline but the chiaroscuro of Gregg Toland’s black-and-white photography is so expressive that it seems integral to the piece and makes appearance and content virtually inseparable.  (Besides, the definition of a film noir has retrospectively become broad enough to accommodate all manner of ‘dark’ matter[1].)   Citizen Kane is also the exemplary evidence of Toland’s pioneering development of deep-focus cinematography.   The dramatisation of physical scale, especially in the vast interiors of Xanadu, is still impressive.

    Orson Welles isn’t a favourite actor of mine but the rhodomontade and shallowness that are sometimes limitations work for him here:  they give Kane’s spiritual deracination an extra level of reality.  Thanks to his dynamic plausibility and surface charm, Welles is well equipped for the scenes describing Kane’s meteoric rise but he’s remarkable as the older man too – especially when Susan has walked out on Kane and he trashes her room at Xanadu.   The ‘boy wonder’ Welles was still only in his mid-twenties at the time; as the elderly Kane, he may be helped by padding but one area in which Citizen Kane does now show its age is the ageing make-up.  It’s excellent in the smaller adjustments needed in the appearance of Welles and Ruth Warrick in the scenes-from-a-marriage montage but Welles’s old man look is Gothic to a nearly comical degree. The geriatric appearance of Joseph Cotten, as Kane’s friend and colleague Jedediah Leland, whom Thompson interviews in a retirement home, isn’t convincing either – and Cotten, excellent as the younger Leland, is too physically perky in these scenes.  On the other hand, Everett Sloane, though actually several years younger than Cotten, is perfectly credible as the older Bernstein, another friend and employee of Kane.  Sloane’s not having matinee idol looks may have helped the make-up designer Maurice Seiderman. The casting of Buddy Swan as the eight-year-old Kane in the crucial flashbacks to his childhood in Colorado was inspired:  there’s a mysteriously strong connection between him and Welles’s older man.

    At the end of his search for the truth and nearly at the end of the film, Thompson still hasn’t discovered the meaning of ‘Rosebud’ (and the viewer still hasn’t discovered how he and Rawlston knew this was Kane’s last word before his lonely death).  The journalist concludes that:

    ‘Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost, but it wouldn’t have explained anything.  I don’t think any word explains a man’s life.  No – I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle – a missing piece.’

    To underline the point, Thompson drops some jigsaw pieces into a box.  (We’ve seen Susan repeatedly working on, though never completing, jigsaws in the slow death of her marriage to Kane.)  As he prepares to leave Xanadu for the last time, Thompson picks up his overcoat from where it’s been resting, atop a heap of junk.  The coat’s removal reveals a small sled – the same sled with which the boy Kane was playing in the Colorado snow the day that Walter Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris), the banker who became Charles’s legal guardian, arrived to take him away from his mother (Agnes Moorehead) and father (Harry Shannon).  The camera then moves to a furnace.  Things are shovelled into it, including, still at the top of the pile, the sled.  As the camera comes closer, it shows a faded image of a rosebud, then the word ‘ROSEBUD’, on the sled – presumably a brand name but, with its implications of love and pristine potential, a decidedly evocative one.

    Is the final Rosebud revelation meant to explain the life of Charles Foster Kane?  The verging-on-apocalyptic quality of the furnace flames devouring the sled, reinforced by Bernard Herrmann’s score, might suggest so but Pauline Kael was probably nearer the mark when she wrote in Raising Kane that:

    ‘The mystery in Kane is largely fake, and the Gothic-thriller atmosphere and the Rosebud gimmickry (though fun) are such obvious penny-dreadful popular theatrics that they’re not so very different from the fake mysteries that Hearst’s American Weekly used to whip up – the haunted castles and the curses fulfilled.’

    A suspicion that Kane might be, in essence, an extraordinary conjuring trick on Welles’s part persists as you reflect on the two life stories told in the film.   After the screening of the ‘News on the March’ memorial to Kane, two of the other men watching it remark, ‘Seventy years of a man’s life …’ and ‘That’s a lot to try to get into a newsreel’.  Yet Thompson has packed plenty of facts into the short; in a sense he’s told the story of Kane before Welles has chance to do so and it’s debatable how much more penetrating the ‘deeper’ biography really is.  Charles Foster Kane remains somehow a mystery at the end of the film as a whole.  This tantalising aspect also links with the film-making biography of Orson Welles – of a piece with the question of what The Magnificent Ambersons might have been if RKO hadn’t butchered it.   It’s one of the many things that ensure the enduring fascination of Citizen Kane.

    19 December 2018

    [1] See note on A Woman’s Face, released in the same month as Citizen Kane.

  • The Great Dictator

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charles Chaplin (1940)

    The World War I prologue to The Great Dictator includes a confrontation between a quartet of soldiers and an unexploded shell.  Each soldier is a different rank.  The instruction to inspect the shell’s fuse passes down the line until it reaches the lowliest of the four, a private played by Charlie Chaplin.  As he trepidatiously approaches the object, it develops a malignant mind of its own and starts revolving at speed.  The bewildered soldier runs round and round in circles to elude the shell, which keeps pointing menacingly in his direction.  This – the shell’s movement, rather than Chaplin’s – made me smile.  Getting on for two hours later, I smiled again, when a bowl of cream was confused with one of English mustard:  the film’s Hitler-inspired title character, also played by the writer-director, puts a great dollop of mustard on his strawberries and tucks in.  This time, it was Chaplin’s frantic, agonised physical reaction, in combination with the prolonged build-up to delivery of the gag, which I found humorous.  Between and after these two bits my face didn’t crack.

    In order to get through The Great Dictator, you have to keep reminding yourself that in 1940 this political satire was impassioned and daring propaganda, released at a time when America’s World War II position was still neutral, more than a year before Pearl Harbor.  There’s no doubt the film, in this sense, was important – and making fun of Hitler, Mussolini et al one of the few options available for dealing with a sense of powerlessness in the face of their power.  The names of Chaplin’s bigwig Nazi equivalents – Hitler is Adenoid Hynkel, Göring is Herring, Goebbels is Garbitsch (pronounced Garbage, of course, though it reads unfortunately like a conflation of Garbo and Lubitsch) – may have been considered silly by the film’s first audiences but that silliness would have had a charge.  Perhaps the same goes for the cod German that Hynkel, dictator of the fictional country of Tomainia (the name inspired presumably by ptomaine), rattles off whenever he gets worked up.  At this distance in time, though, The Great Dictator is hard to take either as comedy or when it tries to be seriously moving – and it’s the ‘classic’ physical comedy sequences, rather than verbal jokes that now seem daft and tame, which illustrate this.

    The humble Great War soldier is, twenty years later, a barber in a Jewish ghetto.  (Might Chaplin have made a stronger point by leaving it unclear whether the anonymous private became the unassuming Jewish barber or the physically identical fascist dictator?)   He falls in love with his neighbour Hannah (Paulette Goddard), a laundry worker, who features in one of two perfectly unfunny sequences in the barber’s shop, as she sits in the chair and nearly gets a shave.  The other is when the barber shaves a male customer to the rhythm of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance Number 5.  In what, for many, is the highlight of the film, Hynkel smilingly imagines world domination as he contemplates a globe in his office.  The globe is then revealed to be a balloon with which Chaplin juggles.  The sequence makes its political point wittily but outstays its welcome.  The Great Dictator improves somewhat once the Mussolini figure, Benzino Napaloni, dictator of Bacteria, appears on the scene.  Jack Oakie’s interpretation of Napaloni as a New York Italian-American blowhard is entertaining; the squabbling between him and Hynkel over which of them should invade the country of Osterlich enlivens Chaplin’s illustrations of the arbitrary and childishly egotistical sides to dictatorship, as well as giving the star someone to play off productively.   There are good performances too from Henry Daniell as Garbitsch and the sad-faced Grace Hayle as Napaloni’s wife.

    The globe-balloon scene introduces one of The Great Dictator’s most startling aspects:  Chaplin’s use of Wagner’s Lohengrin prelude.  As accompanying music in this scene, it seems an expression of fascist megalomania.  In the climax to the film, the barber, forced into impersonating Hynkel, addresses a vast crowd in the capital of newly-invaded Osterlich and makes a speech, tentative at first but building to an ardent plea for brotherhood among all men.  This rousing contradiction of Hynkel’s creed is also scored by Lohengrin, which makes Chaplin’s peroration all the more awkward to listen to.  Hannah who, with her family, had fled to Osterlich only to be trapped there by the Tomainian invasion, hears the barber’s voice on the radio and his final words, addressed directly to her:

    ‘Look up, Hannah. The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly.  He is flying into the rainbow – into the light of hope, into the future, the glorious future that belongs to you, to me, and to all of us.’

    The closing shot of Hannah, as she turns her face to the sun, is lit to suggest this ‘glorious future’.  She may be Jewish but the image, in conjunction with the swelling music, weirdly marries the iconography of Nazi visions of apotheosis to hyperbolic Hollywood happy ending[1].

    18 December 2018

    [1] In his 2002 book The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood, Lutz Koepnick noted that:  ‘Chaplin’s dual use of Lohengrin points towards unsettling conjunctions of Nazi culture and Hollywood entertainment. Like [Theodor] Adorno, Chaplin understands Wagner as a signifier of both: the birth of fascism out of the spirit of the total work of art, and the origin of mass culture out of the spirit of the most arduous aesthetic program of the 19th century.  Unlike Adorno [who identifies American mass culture and fascist spectacle], Chaplin wants his audience to make crucial distinctions between competing Wagnerianisms’ (Wikipedia).

     

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