The MoFo Movie Club Discussion: Citizen Kane

And so here we are again one and all. We are here to dissect the greatest movie of all time as some would have you believe. Where does one begin such an undertaking? Well, first off let me remind you (even though I find it a little ridiculous to do so for a 71 year old film) that this is a spoiler free zone. So if you've never seen this classic and plan to do so then; READ NO FURTHER.

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles - 1941)



Is this the greatest film that no one wants to see? I'm not to sure about that. I can say however in truth. This film leaves me cold. It has always left me cold and most likely (if I can ever be bothered to watch it again) will leave me cold once again in the future. That being said, I realize and freely admit that I understand very little about how a film is made and what it takes to make a shot "work" and so on and so forth. And from everything I have ever read about this film, I am constantly told how innovative and how marvelous the editing is and the camera work and etc, etc...

Does that make it a great film though? Seems to me that a lot of us are having the very same discussion about a little movie called Avatar right now. Avatar is pretty much all special effects and low on story and yet the majority of us love it. So, does that mean that Avatar could go on to become one of the greatest movies of all time? Maybe. Maybe not.



See, I just watch movies. I either love them, hate them, sort of like them. What have you. I can see that there were some very cool shots done in this film because I've seen a lot of 40's movies so I know what a lot of those films tended to look like but that still doesn't necessarily make for a great film. What really holds back this film for me is the story. I hated Charles Foster Kane. Yeah, hated him. People like this are the reason the world is the way it is today. Am I painting to broad of a generalization? Maybe, maybe not. I have my own ideas about the world and where its heading and films like this tend to make me worry about that. But I digress... I'll try to set my tangents aside.

I have to wonder aloud if I would have liked this film a lot more if Bogey played the lead role? I mean, I've only caught a handful of Orson Welles movies and I think he may be a fair actor. I thought he was really outstanding in Touch of Evil, but he also had a rather limited part in that film. Could Bogey have warmed up this cold fish of a film for me? I doubt it. I tend to believe that Welles was directly responsible for how dark and depressing the film is and I believe that's how he wanted it. Well, it worked, he got it.



So, what do you all think? Is this film all about the man Welles? Or was he honestly trying to "say" something about the world in general? What was the point of this film? Did Charles Foster Kane have any redeeming qualities? What were they? I missed them. See, I'm a simple guy for the most part. If he would have left his vast fortune to a puppy shelter or something at the end of the film I might have an entirely different outlook on the guy. Instead you see the staff throwing a bunch of his crap into the furnace which to me lends even more credence to the lack of point to it all. I don't know. I have to admit, the film does make you think about things and (obviously) can send a guy like me off on a tangent. But again, does that mean its a great film?



If I can compare this to what I truly think is a great film for a moment. I'm sorry if this bothers you, but it's just how I talk about movies. Casablanca, to me, is a great film. Why? The story is simple, elegant and well acted by some terrific players. Citizen Kane even (almost boastfully) admits at the end of the film that the majority of the actors in the movie have next to no experience. Why? Is this an example of Welles being Welles or is it a brilliant move on his part.? For the record, I really don't know enough about the man to say whether or not if I think he was some kind of egomaniac. The movie, at times, can certainly take one down that road (if you have a similar view of things as I do I expect) but, I may be completely missing the point too.

So what do you think? What was the point? Why is this movie so hard to watch? If it isn't. Why is it so easy for you to watch?

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We are both the source of the problem and the solution, yet we do not see ourselves in this light...

I'll get back to this later, but I have one word for you... plastics. No, I mean three words... William Randolph Hearst.

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Interesting.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to get in on this one too, after I watch it again that is. So hurry up and watch it Plainview so I can get it back from you.

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Benjamin


And Citizen Kane is great and I enjoy it far more than Casablanca.

More later, because now it's late.

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This isn't going to be my big discussion of Citizen Kane because I want to save that for mainly discussing the content of the movie itself, but I also don't want to do one of those enormous posts dissecting every single element of the film to the point that nobody else has anything to share. There are books written about Kane, and I don't want to regurgitate those. There have also been movies about it (The Battle Over Citizen Kane, RKO 281), and I may actually be covering some of the material in them but it's been quite awhile since I've seen either one, so I don't specifically recall.


...................William Randolph Hearst and actress Marion Davies..................Charles Foster Kane and "singer" Susan Alexander


Citizen Kane was well-known in and outside of Hollywood before it was ever released in spite of all the effort Orson Welles took to keep the subject matter hush hush. But Louella Parsons (who basically worked in Hollywood as a spy for William Randolph Hearst and his newspapers) and Hedda Hopper told Hearst that Charles Foster Kane was indeed Hearst and only a thinly-veiled version of him at that. The more that Hearst learned, the more he decided to use his extreme wealth to try to buy the master negative (and failing that, all prints made from it) and have them all burned before they could ever be shown to the public. So, PW, if you hate Kane the character, what do you think that Welles thought of Hearst the man? And what do you think that Hearst thought of himself since it's amazing how completely Welles represents Hearst here, no matter how much Welles denied all the connections.

Kane and Hearst both were born in 1863.
They both got rich from mines, although Hearst's parents were wealthy.
They were both expelled from Harvard.
They both had a publishing/media empire.
They both wanted a war in Cuba and voila, the Spanish-American War.
They both unsuccessfully ran for Governor of New York.
They both had affairs with women in show business while being married.
They both were avaricious collectors of art and historical objects.
They both built a humongous "castle" to house said objects and live much of their lives there.


...................................Hearst Castle.......................................................................................Xanadu

So sure, feel free to hate Charles Foster Kane without knowing anything about William Randolph Hearst. I mean, Welles was so damn successful by the age of 25 that there were plenty of people back then who would have wanted to see him fail after "The War of the Worlds" and his successful Broadway directorial efforts, so every one has a right to hate Kane if that's the overwhelming emotion you get from the film. Most of the characters interviewed during the course of Citizen Kane don't think much of him either, so if you hate Kane, then you are probably seeing him clearly.

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Orson Welles doing The War of the Worlds on radio, Halloween, 1938...Orson Welles in Julius Caesar, Broadway, 1937

On the other hand, since Hearst was successful at having all of his papers and radio stations never advertise Citizen Kane, the film wasn't seen by many people and failed to earn a profit at the box office. Citizen Kane and the happenings earlier were actually Welles' last hurrah in the Hollywood spotlight because afterwards, Welles had a difficult time ever creating a film which a studio either didn't tamper with or which didn't take him extreme lengths of time to shoot due to constantly running out of funds. It's only after WWII, when the film played in Europe for the first time that French critics began to look at the film as being highly-influential and incredibly-complex in multiple ways.


............................................................................"Rosebud"............... ........................................................

The film begins with the death of the main character and then segues into a long newsreel about his life story. The beginning is so audacious that it throws a lot of first-time viewers for a loop. Not only that, but as you begin to get your bearings, the film introduces a number of elderly characters who all reminisce about Kane, so now we see him from many different perspectives, but they aren't always in chronological order and some of them are contradictory. So, once again, the narrative is completely unusual, and Welles and his fellow artists continue to catch you off guard by using overlapping dialogue, deep focus photography, special effects to make things seem larger than they are, extensive makeup work on almost every actor seen in the film during various times in their lives, an intense and haunting Bernard Herrmann score, which coupled with bizarre sound effects and strange editing (the scene where the bird cackles, the scene where the photograph comes to life, the photographic journey up to the opera house rafters during a particular "aria", and hundreds more). All these directorial choices just make the film more enjoyable and dense for the watcher, but once again, some people do not like films where they do not like the characters. I don't know. It seems to me that several modern directors have become famous for highlighting some of the most unlikable characters ever, and among those I would include Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan.


............................................................Special F/X, anyone?.................................................

OK, that's probably enough background material which might help people to get into the movie and the character. But if that doesn't totally work, you can think of Citizen Kane as the Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam) of its day. Brazil wasn't going to get a formal release in the U.S. at all because Universal and Sid Sheinberg wanted a shorter film with a happy ending. Gilliam took out an ad in the L.A. Times and snuck copies of his original cut around Hollywood until a group of critics (The Los Angeles Film Critics Association) lionized the film and awarded it their Best Picture Prize. Universal subsequently released the film in its full cut. Is that a stretch or does that make sense if you go back about 65 years ago to see what the French did for the "revival" of Citizen Kane?

I'll hopefully get a chance to watch Kane fresh again tonight. It's been a few years.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Ditto. I'm still kinda stuck where I am at the moment so it might be a few more until I can get my hands on a copy of this and drop by, but hopefully this week.

Hey, my copy is coming in the mail tomorrow.

Oh, Lordy. I'm trying to figure out if I want in on this or not - wouldn't be averse to another viewing, though, it's just a question of finding anything to say. It's like what Mark said already, there's already so much that's been said about Kane so far that trying to do a discussion about it would be - hmm. Although I suppose that's what the extra questions at the end of the OP were about.

I might come back to this one.

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I like it when the Movie Club forces me to get off my butt and a) revisit a classic I haven't seen in awhile, and b) forces me to buy a copy of a movie I should have owned already. Two thumbs up.

Was forced it watch this for Film Theory 4 years ago. I knew I wasn't head over heels for it, but admire and respected it for everything it did.

Revisit it? If I have the time I will and I'll post my thoughts.

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Suspect's Reviews

It's odd. This is one of the few classics that I completely understand the kudos it recieves. An absolute cornerstone of cinema, (and I mean world over, not just American or the English speaking world) a film that has been loved by and inspired generations of filmmakers since the late 40's/early 50's and the great and the good have been wondering whether or not they can be bothered to watch it/saying they don't like it.

I don't want to start anything outside of discussing the film (as that's the point of this thread) but I get the feeling that if the film had been Casablanca, (which was one of the choices) The Bridge On The River Kwai, Bladerunner or something like that, anyone who seemed to be less than 100% behind it or 'into' it would be looked at as a bit strange or a troll or something. But Citizen Kane seems to be fair game. Maybe it's a trend.

It's a flamboyant film, and Welles's exuberance sometimes overlaps with a tendency to show off, in my opinion. On the other hand, it takes risks and has an energy. Citizen Kane is several movies, and I've always thought the movie about unriddling rosebud was overshadowed by the movie that was the cinematography.

I've always thought that the 'Rosebud' mystery was a bit of a red herring.

I think I'll have to go and look those up, thanks Mark.

That's really interesting Mark. Fascinating almost. I'm glad Welles was able to still get the film out.

Well, I can't claim that I really have any idea of what Welles thought of Hearst. I can turn my cynical, magic, magnifying mind on it though and I reckon he may very well have felt a lot of the same things about Hearst that I did about Kane.

So, I'll throw it back into your corner since you know a lot more about this than I do. Do you have any reason to believe that Welles harbored some kind of personal vendetta against Hearst? Has Welles ever stated publicly that he felt his portrayal of the man was justified? Has Welles ever given any reason whatsoever as to why he apparently decided to dissect this man's life and try to lay him bare? If the one and only point was to make a film about how evil a powerful man with money can be, then obviously he succeeded.

Thanks, I think.


OK, fair enough, but now I'm going to play Devil's advocate here with you. Do you have any direct knowledge that Hearst had anything to do with this? A man like Hearst could muster up one hell of a propaganda machine I'm sure. But like you said. Welles was already quite successful and probably had a little bit of his own money to boot. How am I to know for sure that the reason Welles had such a hard time finishing another film afterwords wasn't due in large part to his own tinkering around with his other projects. The guy obviously liked to fool around with everything. I know he had an unbelievable attention to detail. I've read the bulk of his notes on Touch of Evil. I couldn't help but think albeit, however briefly it was; perhaps he just has too much to do with his films. Maybe he's just one of those guys that can never stop tinkering no matter how long it takes him to do it. I think that picture you posted below may be a good example of what I'm talking about. How long do you think it took Welles and Co. to get that shot from the balcony?

Maybe I'm completely off base, but if I am then why is this film so hard for me to watch? I haven't seen as many movies as you have, but I've seen plenty and there's tons of movies that I would recommend to someone before this one.

I appreciate what you're trying to do here; and I'm trying to be open minded. But all throughout this constant barrage of all of the things you mentioned above. I just kept losing interest. All the unusual narrative completely turns me off. And once I get turned off you can have all the fancy camerawork in the world, but I'm still just not into it. Movies are supposed to be about stories. The better the story the more I like the movie. The story in this film is completely all over the map. If Welles really had something to say about how evil (or whatever) he thought Hearst was. Why the smeg couldn't he just come out and say it at some point?


That's a great comparison but for me, Brazil had likable characters and maybe that's all it really boils down to. I couldn't stand Charles Foster Kane and if in fact that's all Welles was trying to get across then he succeeded.

OK, PW, here's the thing. You cannot tell me that you hated Kane just from watching the beginning of the film or the fractured narrative. It had to have kicked in somewhere later on, especially when he was older and probably involved the scenes with Susan Alexander. Now, the point obviously is that Kane is something of a self-made man, but I've always found him quite charming and likable, especially when he was a young man. It's only near the end when he actually comes to understand what a loathsome person he is. Kane does realize himself all the bad things he did and which are testified to by all the witnesses the newsreel investigator interviews. But here's where you and I disagree; the ending is tragic. Nobody ever knew Kane because he always let his money, power and media do the talking for him. For all of that, he has not one friend in the world who even knew what the one thing he loved the most from his childhood was. His Mother probably knew but she was dead before he died. "Rosebud" is Kane's way of trying to relive his life and maybe actually changing it to something much more innocent. Think of it as Kane's life flashing before his eyes at the moment of his death. Whatever else you think of Kane, he has to be one of the loneliest men in the world. Now, could that be true also of Welles? I bet that it could, but if Welles already knew that by the time he was 25, then he must have had a much-tougher time than Kane ever did.

As far as those notes about Touch of Evil, you have to remember that Universal had already butchered Welles' original version of that flick and that he just made some thorough notes about how he would like to see it actually saved for posterity. All those changes were made after Welles died.

I'm not really sure what the deal is with Hearst. Pauline Kael claims that she read a first draft copy of the script to Citizen Kane and that the only name on it was Herman J. Mankiewicz. She claims that it's 99% of what the shooting script was. It was only later that Welles' name was added to the credit. Maybe somebody else knows about this, but since I've been to Hearst Castle five times, I do know a lot about the man, and he's obviously a fascinating subject.

That's true, I really enjoyed the first 30 minutes or so. As I'd assume you probably already guessed.

And actually, I agree with you. I too, think the ending is tragic. The whole movie is really. I think that's what bugs me about it. I will never understand why people that have so much, choose to live their lives this way. This guy collected... well, pretty much anything and everything and all of it meant nothing to him. It was just something to do.

While we're talking about the ending a bit. What did you think of his Mother? I found her to be a completely cold fish. And I wish it was fleshed out a bit more as to why it was that she just decided that young Charles was to go away from the family home. It almost seemed like she was hinting that there was something untoward happening between the Father and Charles, but again the story never really gives us a real explanation and I found that to be pretty infuriating.

Yeah, I think the thing with his Mom (Agnes Moorehead) was that she knew first-hand that his father was an abusive drunk. It's not that he was sexually-abusive to Charlie, but he was abusive and she wanted to get her son as far away from him as possible so that the Dad wouldn't be able to get ahold of any of Charlie's wealth.

Also, to answer your first post about the "alleged amateurishness" of the cast of Citizen Kane. It's got one of what would turn out to be the greatest casts of any film, at least based on how most of their careers panned out and the way they performed in the flick. Remember, the Mercury Theatre was basically a group which Welles and John Houseman formed and they were already veterans at stage and radio before Citizen Kane introduced most of them to the cinema world.

Well, I did watch the first 20 minutes of Citizen Kane for the first time in a decade. I loved the way the silent title of the movie segued into the fence outside Xanadu and focused on the "No Trespassing" sign; it basically tells you right up front that Kane does not want you meddling in his personal affairs but then the film attempts to do so. The camera climbs the fence and proceeds to get closer to the main building, passing the remnants of a zoo (Hearst Castle had a zoo) and a golf course. Eventually we get close to the one light on in the main building which goes off and then comes back on. Cut to the snow globe, Kane's lips, "Rosebud", globe gets dropped and broken as the nurse walks in and finds that Kane is dead.



After that we get the News on the March newsreel which delineates Kane's life and shows many views of the man. I especially like the scene on the balcony where Kane is with Hitler and the implication that Kane supported him before he knew any better. After the newsreel ends, the director seems to want to find a hook into Kane's life and focuses on the great man's final word Rosebud to try to find out what made him tick. However, the first few people seem to have no idea of what Rosebud is. However, Gregg Toland's photography highlights the use of saturated rear lighting and the way it causes people's extremities to darken and extend that light. [Brenda said, "It reminds me of (the scene where Sally sings "Maybe This Time" in) Cabaret."]


Check at about 3:15 for the "Citizen Kane Effect".