And the make-up—I swear I’m trying to keep this all short—in a film that requires not just Charlie Kane, but all his stooges to age for decades, “Citizen Kane” does a solid and pretty successful job. No movie aging has ever been completely convincing—“A Beautiful Mind” does it very well—but “Kane” comes pretty close. Make-up artists Maurice Seiderman and Layne Britton shine the most with Kane’s guardian, played by George Coulouris, who we see mostly as old man in “Kane,” except in one scene as a young man in which we realize the actor was probably only twenty-five or thirty.
As Charlie Kane, Welles not only looks and moves differently for every stage of a man’s existence, but also reflects the ideological inconsistency that springs from a long life. For a man that never believed in anything, Kane has different opinions almost every time we see him. Besides Welles, about the only character that is not at least a partial caricature is his college buddy and one-time newspaper associate. As played by Joseph Cotton, he is one of the few members of Kane’s inner circle to see through the great man’s veneer of purposefulness and morality. That the rest of characters are somewhat archetypical—that his rich guardian is snooty and nasal-voiced, that his first wife (Ruth Warrick) is a delicate and indirect socialite, that his general manager is a small-voiced beta male—is not to “Kane’s” discredit. Without the typecasting and archetypes “Kane” would almost certainly bog down and lose some of the directness and vivacity that make it so enjoyable.
The entire movie is a little bit like a caricature. Xanadu isn’t a specific pleasure palace, but THE pleasure palace, with a desert on the Florida coast, even though there are no deserts in Florida, and a forest where gigantic, dimly-seen birds that look like pterodactyls are on the loose. Kane doesn’t espouse any specific reforms as a politician, he is simply THE reformer. “Citizen Kane” is not quite “8 ½” in its willingness to turn reality into a projection for the mind, but the basement of Xanadu, packed with hundreds of unopened crates and unexamined statues, is as much the hidden and cluttered storehouse of a man’s memory as it is a real location.
I watched “Kane” again recently, probably for the eighth or ninth time, this time with the Keeper of Tickets from the Chronicles of George website. K-of-T had never seen the movie before and, while he enjoyed it, he had a little bit of difficulty getting past the older style of acting. I’ve always felt that the history of acting is not a progression from extravagant falsehood to an absolute imitation of reality, but merely a circle in which different interpretations of reality come in and out of vogue. Director Stanley Kubrick once told an actor “What you’re doing is real, but it’s not interesting.” The 1970s brought us Method acting that was almost hyper-real, in which Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffmann looked inarticulate, mumbled into their chests, and were hailed as great performers. The acting style of the 1940s doesn’t need to have excuses made for it or be defended, but it does require the viewer to translate different mannerisms and expressions, just as we might have to when meeting a new person.
But “Citizen Kane” is more than technique and good performances. It’s also great storytelling. Most movies centered around flashbacks involve an old man at the beginning remembering what it was like to be a young man, and then moving forward from there. “Kane” is more playful and much more exciting. The reporter Thompson interviews five or six different members of Kane’s inner circle, and while each of them starts from the beginning, the next interviewee also starts from the beginning, so that “Citizen Kane” is always backing up and starting over, fitting its pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. Christopher Nolan, director of the very nonlinear “Memento” and “Following,” once remarked that, in real life, we don’t hear stories in a linear fashion. We hear them three-dimensionally, in which we begin with one fact and expand in all directions from there. Newspaper stories tend to follow this pattern, and it’s only fitting that “Citizen Kane,” which is seen mostly through the eyes of a reporter, is told this way. The opening newsreel, in which Kane’s life is summarized, is invaluable in keeping our bearings.
Like most artsy types, Welles and co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz (brother of Joseph Mankiewicz, director of “All About Eve”) were probably intrigued by the discrepancy between subjective and objective realities. It’s important to note that, like Jesus in the Gospels, we never hear Kane’s version of Kane’s story. This is especially important in scenes in which the storyteller is not actually present. One of the film’s best sequences involves Charlie’s first marriage, summarized entirely at the breakfast table—but by the time these events are told to Thompson both Kane and his first wife are dead, and there is no one else present at the breakfast. Are these events what the storyteller imagines, or are they the images that Thompson is projecting? (Or is Welles simply playing a trick?) In a film about a media mogul telling “the people what to think,” this discrepancy adds another layer of meaning.
In an age of ever-growing democracy, it is not those with weapons that are powerful, but those who control our flow of information. “Citizen Kane’s” portrait of a despotic media mogul not only encapsulates the twentieth century that went before it, but predicts what comes afterwards with chilling accuracy. In Charlie’s quest to control the world and make everyone love him, we glimpse the two World Wars, the Spanish-American War and the Panama land-grab, the development of unions, and get a good dose of American history, albeit at a machine gun pace. But we also see a young Charlie Kane at work on his newspaper, flagrantly inventing late-breaking news just to sell more papers.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that an art form driven by spectacle—the movies—would produce its brightest gem with the story of a great warrior, with battles and explosions. But instead the story of a man telling us what is and isn’t spectacle has claimed that honor.
P.S. Warner Bros.—a gigantic, amoral media conglomerate—released a spectacular two-DVD set for “Kane’s” sixtieth anniversary. Bells and whistles include a full-length commentary track by film critic Roger Ebert, in which “Kane’s” numerous special effects are revealed and discussed, and why the opening newsreel uses so many backwards sentences. There’s also another full-length commentary by critic-cum-director-cum-Welles biographer Peter Bogdanovich, whose recent film “The Cat’s Meow” explores a murder on the yacht of media mogul William Randolph Hearst, upon whom Charlie Kane is partially based. And there’s the 1995 documentary “The Battle Over Citizen Kane,” in which Welles and Hearst duke it out. More important than all that is “Citizen Kane” itself, which has been richly and deliciously restored, in both picture and sound. So you can hear Orson Welles’ voice boom like nobody’s business. It’s terrific.
P.P.S. Writer-actor John Houseman, who won the supporting actor Oscar for “The Paper Chase” (1973), is sometimes referred to as the third screenwriter for “Citizen Kane.” He is uncredited because he left in the middle of the production after a falling-out with Welles.
P.P.P.S. You know, Microsoft Word really ought to have “Welles” in its dictionary.
Finished November 29, 2002
Copyright © 2002 Friday & Saturday Night
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