Orson Welles, Vol I (100 page)

This emptiness at the centre – the undefined nature of Kane,
despite his being, in Atkinson’s phrase, ‘a theatrical character presented with consummate theatricality’ – was felt by a number of critics. Rosamond Gilder wrote that ‘it is … when all has been told, the picture of a man who is not really worth depicting, and here is the film’s weakness.
Citizen Kane
depends for its importance on
implications which are external to the movie itself … in the picture his sway over the multitude is hinted at but never demonstrated; and yet it is only this power that lends the man stature enough.’
⁹
The English critic, James Agate, expressed the same feeling with characteristic directness: ‘Miss Powell talked of Charles Foster Kane as a “colossus.” I could see nothing of Miss Powell’s colossus
… my colleagues will agree that to be the owner of a chain of drug stores ten thousand links long, with each link represented by a city and the whole stretching from Hollywood to San Francisco, does not make a man a colossus. I see no difference when the drug stores are newspapers having the greatest circulation in the solar system. It depends what he does with them, and Kane did nothing with his
newspapers except increase the vulgarity of an already vulgar world.’
¹⁰
From the other end of the political spectrum, the same complaint was lodged. ‘Not one glimpse of the actual content of his newspapers is afforded us,’
¹¹
wrote Joy Davidson in
New Masses
. ‘One or two advertised scenes of political relevance, indeed, appear to have been cut out of the picture. As a result the audience is left
with a vast confusion as to what Kane stands for. This grotesque inadequacy in the midst of plenty keeps
Citizen Kane
from fulfilling its promises … the picture resorts to the trick of giving Kane a mysterious dying speech, supposed to be the “real clue to Kane,” the sentimental explanation of which is coyly delayed until the fade-out.’ Davidson, a feminist avant la lettre, interestingly criticises
the film from another political standpoint: ‘Welles has not escaped one Hollywood convention, the smirking thesis that the important thing about a Hollywood figure is not how he treats his country but how he treats his women.’ Now, in the mid-nineties, it might be argued on the contrary that we see clearly from the way Kane treats his women, how he treats his country.

It is interesting to
note how early (this is the first week of its release) critics detected this hollowness in the film, the void at its centre. Twenty years later Welles made a revealing admission to Richard Meryman: ‘
Citizen Kane
was made in the most wildly fun-and-games kind of way. But from the very beginning I felt it had a curious iciness at its heart. It has moments when the whole picture seems to me to echo
a bit. I was always conscious of the
sound of footsteps echoing in some funny way – a certain effect made by the proportions of certain chemicals.’
¹²
The question, of course, is whether the coldness is thematic. ‘He couldn’t give love,’ says Leland. ‘He hadn’t got any to give.’ Or is it simply that such feeling as there might have been is submerged in technical rodomontade? Welles evidently felt
so: ‘There are more conscious shots – for the sake of shots – in
Kane
than anything I’ve done since,’
¹³
he told Bogdanovich. ‘I’ve tried to avoid that sort of thing since then.’ Joy Davidson (an enthusiastic supporter of the film, on the whole, for its essential progressiveness) was of the contemporary too-clever-by-half school: ‘far too many trick-camera angles, too many fantastic combinations
of light and shadows indicating an incomplete translation of Welles’s famous stage technique into screen terms. Frequently he lets his showmanship run away with him, preferring to astound than to convince.’

Public resistance to so much innovation was widely predicted: ‘Orson Welles never once makes concessions to ordinary film-goers. His film is so intelligently adult that half its audience
will miss its point. This very subtlety may be Welles’s downfall (from a box office, not an artistic, point of view),’
¹⁴
wrote Philip Hartung in
Commonweal
. ‘The excellent acting … will confuse fans looking for romance, glamor and heroes. Although these fans might overlook Gregg Toland’s photography, even they cannot miss its beauty. To Toland’s expert work
Citizen Kane
owes much of its success.
Already Hollywood is abuzz over the technique. But just how much of it will be copied depends on box office. And who should get credit for what is hard to say,’ Hartung adds, anticipating the debates that have haunted the film’s subsequent fifty years of existence. ‘Welles deserves applause for hiring Toland, for giving him time and money to experiment. In any case, the finished result is yours.’
Belfrage in
The Clipper
was alone in identifying the exceptional use of sound in the film: ‘It is as profoundly moving an experience as only this extraordinary and hitherto unexplored medium of sound-cinema can afford in 2 hours … perhaps of all the delectable flavors that linger on the palate after seeing
Citizen Kane
, the use of sound is the strongest.’ Kenneth Tynan’s observation that if you
close your eyes during
Kane
the experience is almost as rich remains one of the most acute remarks made about the film. Belfrage is equally enthusiastic about the multiple flashbacks, the same action described from different angles: ‘Here we are really in the cinema medium, in that and nothing else.’

It is notable how anxious all the reviewers are to assert the
distinctive nature of film,
versus any other medium: the glut of new media in such a tiny timespan had led to fierce arguments on the essential elements of each. ‘What other medium,’ cried Belfrage, ‘could show so forcefully that truth is not merely objective, but subjective also and at the same time?’ Tangye Lean advanced another version of the same conviction: one of the few who accepted ‘Rosebud’ as entirely successful, he
notes ‘If you accept the discovery of “Rosebud” as something more significant than an O. Henry ending, a vast pattern of interrelated human themes becomes clear – as a different one does in the last volume of
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
.’ Technically, he rates the precise focus and the overlapping dialogue as crucial innovations. ‘We are forced by these devices to lay our own emphasis on the
data, to make our own selection’ – an anticipation of André Bazin’s claim for
Citizen Kane
, nearly ten years later. ‘Orson Welles likes this confusion. He extends it beyond the technical management of light and sound. He will give us, partly because he is a first-class showman, five or ten superb minutes of chorus girls dancing as a background to a serious conversation, five minutes of a political
speech by Kane, but only thirty seconds of a vital conversation in which his mother sends him into exile. But Welles would certainly answer that life itself treats the important things in this arbitrary fashion.’ Quoting Mr Bernstein’s undeniably Proustian speech about the girl on the ferry, (Welles’s favourite writing in the film, he always claimed, and pure Mankiewicz, as he freely acknowledged)
Lean continues: ‘Orson Welles believes that the significant things that happen to us are the ones that get condensed, overlooked, forgotten. He does something to point the significance of the muddle, more than is done for us by life itself, but less than by a medical case history or a political novel.’

This is decidedly highbrow criticism. A magisterial rebuke from the populist but highly
informed Otis Ferguson came in
The New Republic
. Offering the most sustained and perhaps most perceptive contemporary analysis, it is worth looking at in some detail. ‘It is the boldest freehand stroke in major screen production since Griffith and Bitzer were running wild to unshackle the camera; it has the excitement of all surprises without stirring emotions much more enduring; and in the line
of narrative film, as developed in all countries but most highly on the West Coast of America, it holds no great place.’ Ferguson’s aesthetic was predicated on what might be called humanist realism. ‘The picture,’ he muses, sarcastically. ‘The new art. The camera unbound. The picture is very exciting to anyone
who gets excited about how things can be done in the movies; and the many places where
it takes off like the Wright Brothers should be credited to Mr Welles and his cameraman second … the whole idea of a man in these attitudes must be credited to Welles himself. And in these things there is no doubt the picture is dramatic. But what goes on between the dramatic high points, the story? No. What goes on is talk and more talk. And while the stage may stand for this, the movies don’t.
And where a cameraman like Gregg Toland can be every sort of a help to a director, in showing him what he will pick up, in getting this effect or that, in achieving some lifting trick the guy has thought up, the cameraman can’t teach him how to shoot and cut a picture, even if he knows himself. It is a thing that takes years and practice to learn. And its main problem always is story, story, story
– or, How can we do it to them so they don’t know beforehand that it’s being done? Low key-photography won’t help, except in the case of critics … the real art of movies concentrates on getting the right story and the right actors, the right kind of production and then smoothing everything out. And after that, in figuring how each idea can be made true, how each action can be made to happen, how
you cut and reverse-camera and remake each minute of action, and run it into a line afterwards, like the motion in the ocean.’

It is extraordinary how widespread the unease was, once the initial rush had passed. In this, criticism of
Kane
mirrored the criticism of his work in the theatre. The gap between form and content seemed unbridgeable for him, in any medium.
Citizen Kane
was by far the
greatest of all Welles’s firework displays, simply dazzling. And then? Even at the time, many people saw this, and felt it. Ferguson returned remorselessly to his theme, the following week. ‘Orson Welles was naturally entranced by all the things the moving camera could do for him; and while much has resulted from this preoccupation, I think his neglect of what the camera could do
to
him is the
main reason why the picture leaves you cold even while your mouth is still open to its excitements. There may have been the heart and belief to put into it, but there wasn’t the time to learn how this might be done, or much regard for any such humdrum skill.’ Ferguson sternly insists on his gospel of true cinema. ‘This stuff is fine theatre, technically or any other way, and along with them the film
is exciting for the recklessness of its independence, even if it seems to have little to be free
for
. There is surely nothing against it as a dramatic venture that it is no advance in screen technique at all, but a retrogression. The movies could use Orson Welles. But so could Orson Welles use the
movies, that is, if he wants to make pictures. Hollywood is a great field for fanfare, but it is
also a field in which every Genius has to do it the hard way; and
Citizen Kane
makes me rather doubt whether Orson Welles wants to make pictures.’ In this, Ferguson strangely echoes Mankiewicz’s anxiety in the cutting room: is it really film? Or simply celluloid put to theatrical uses? – an extension of the filmed sections of
Too Much Johnson
. Truffaut makes the telling observation that Welles
favoured low angles so much because they create the equivalent of the spectator’s position in the theatre.

Perhaps the deepest of all Ferguson’s points is his crucial observation that you need time to acquire simplicity. Thrown in at the deep end, under gala conditions, Welles could never simply learn how to swim: he had to compete in all the most demanding categories, and win all the prizes.
This he had certainly done, whatever the reservations. It was a curious grounding in his art, however. Welles was, of course, given time and his concept of movie-making matured. ‘I am so bored with the aesthetics of the cinema.’
¹⁵
he told Huw Wheldon in 1960, oddly echoing Ferguson (‘story, story, story’) with every word of whose aesthetic he could eventually find himself in whole-hearted agreement.
‘The story teller’s first duty is always to the story.’ But nothing he made subsequently was given anything like the exposure or the attention of
Citizen Kane
. His reputation as a stylistic virtuoso was established for all time, and he was forever judged as such – either a brilliant stylistic virtuoso or a failed stylistic virtuoso. His artistic personality, at least as far as the average critic
was concerned, was fixed. Just as he felt himself to be in perpetual competition with the fifteen-year-old prodigy he had been, so his films were forever in competition with this first freakish triumph. Kane’s line: ‘If I hadn’t been born rich, I might have been a really great man’ was another personal resonance for Welles: not financially rich, of course: rich in talent, rich in opportunity. So
much for his directing. As for his acting performance, that, too, was a source of controversy and confusion. For the most part, he and the Mercury Players were wildly applauded (which may have come as a surprise to the cast themselves who, as Augusta Weissberger reports, left the first screening dejected, convinced, like all actors from the dawn of film, that their best work had been maliciously
excised). Bosley Crowther’s review in
The New York Times
is typical: ‘Mr Welles has directed with the sureness and distinction of a seasoned master and the entire cast … perform it in a manner which puts to shame the surface posturings of some of our more popular stars.’ There were, inevitably, rumbles of dissension even in this area. ‘Of the
actors you can say that there are good jobs done and
also still better ones to be done,’ wrote Ferguson. ‘Dorothy Comingore … is too ham as the opera singer (subtlety never hurt anyone, and those of us who aren’t gaping yokels are not alone, Mr Citizen Orson). Joseph Cotten had a part that was possibly short on savor because when he was with the great man he had to be something of a chump and when he was talking to him afterwards he had to be something
of a Mr Chips, with a twinkle and lip-smacking … the man to remember was Everett Sloane, who seemed to understand and seemed to represent it, the little man with the big mind, the projection without the face motion and flapping of arms. You may be surprised, when you take the film apart, that his relations to any analysis of Kane were as much as anything the things that made him real.’