The MoFo Movie Club Discussion: Citizen Kane

The Borges review came across as more-negative to me because it implied that it was the kind of film which will be remembered but not loved (sounds like PW's opinion too). He argued it was basically "too full of itself" although it contained worthy moments of psychological truth which he said weren't presented as concisely as some other works of fiction had in the past. Borges certainly did namedrop throughout the "review".

Although von Stroheim had plenty of problems with Kane's structure and continuity, he finished up with a statement worthy of a film advertisement: "Citizen Kane is a great picture and will go down in screen history. More power to Welles!"

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Von Stroheim was a realist. Welles wasn't. Stroheim's masterpiece, Greed, has some thematic similarities to Citizen Kane. He tells his story about a man's degeneration with conventional storytelling, but the accumulation of detail gives it a dramatic intensity that makes it feel fresh and different even today.

hey mark, you may be right about the borges review being overall more negative, i haven't read it in a while and i only skimmed it again before posting it. after i read von stroheim's i thought that he just didn't get all the novel formal elements of kane. looking at it again he does talk about the appropriateness of the newsreel style for the story but other than that he doesn't "get" the nonlinear sequence. i think borges does get it but it's interesting that the moral aspect of the story seemed to leave both cold.

Having just read both reviews, I thought the von Stroheim one was much better written. Borges is a little too pedantic for my taste. They are both mixed reviews, but Borges' review ends on a negative note while Stroheim ends by praising the film despite the qualifiers, so I would consider his to be the more positive review.

The Strohem review is significantly longer and comments on and praises things not mentioned by Borges such as the uniform strong performances by the cast.

I think the point is that von Stroheim was commenting on his first viewing of Citizen Kane, and when he says that "I may be dumb" or you, lines, say that he "doesn't get it", he's telling you his initial reaction. He believes that Mankiewicz and Welles made a mistake in making the structure and continuity too-unorthodox, and in the context of box office, von Stroheim was correct. It took awhile for Kane to turn a profit. But von Stroheim certainly made a film which just about killed his directorial career, Greed, and nowadays, it's recognized as his greatest no matter if more than half of it is missing. Von Stroheim dared to tell a story quite different from most that came before, but his sin was not that of convolution but of overlength. Von Stroheim basically made the first mini-series and expected people to sit through it because it was so great that they had no choice. Of course, the execs at M-G-M, with their eyes on box office thought otherwise. The incredible thing about Greed is that it was both M-G-M's first feature film and allegedly the first film shot entirely on location, so I would cut von Stroheim some slack because he probably understood Citizen Kane far better than we do, and he was coming at it from a very personal perspective. Maybe I can find a followup commentary on Kane from von Stroheim.

I don't know if this has been brought up, but Welles gave many interviews over the years where he denounced the ending of Citizen Kane regarding Rosebud and blamed it on Herman Mankiewicz who may have based it on a childhood bike. I have my own reservations about parts of Citzen Kane, but I like the ending and without it you couldn't have the movie's structure, which is basically a quest to discover the key to Foster Kane. Maybe if Welles could have remade the movie he would have taken a chronological approach as von Stroheim suggested. Or maybe Welles was just being spiteful toward Mankiewicz because of their feud regarding authorship of the screenplay.

I'm pretty sure that I already posted here that when Pauline Kael saw an alleged copy of the original screenplay that it only had Mankiewicz's name on it, so when Welles later claimed that he was responsible for certain things, Kael actually called him on it. Of course, I used to hang out with Bill Warren, and he claims that he saw an original copy of the Young Frankenstein script, and it only had Gene Wilder's name on it. Even though I know Warren better than most, I still tend to believe him.

Gene Wilder has never denied that Mel Brooks contributed to the script. Wilder started it alone and it is known the early sequence at the train station where Frankenstein is trying to kiss his fiance and she keeps putting him off was written by Wilder. But it's quite obvious a lot of the jokes in the rest of the film are Mel Brooks jokes. As to that Citizen Kane thing, I'm no acolyte of Orson Welles who lied like crazy about how Lady from Shanghai got made, but I really do believe he contributed to the CK screenplay. But HM wrote the first draft then Welles rewrote it. Welles was incapable of shooting a script written by someone else without fooling around with it. He mostly wrote his own dialogue for The Third Man, including the famous cuckoo clock speech. If he had the audacity to rewrite Graham Greene on a movie he was only supposed to act in, there is no way he left untouched a script where he had full creative control.

I agree with will.15 on the basis of that The Third Man factoid. The guy insisted on writing his own scenes with a Graham Greene screenplay in a Sir Carol Reed movie, and he was also known for writing his own dialogue in much of his other work. I just can't believe he would make Citizen Kane, which is obviously a labor of love which he controlled with dictatorial authority, without tinkering with the script.

Plus, the cuckoo clock speech is regarded as one of the best monologues in movie history, so there's no denying his writing chops.

BTW, mark f, You know Bill Warren? As in the Evil Dead book guy? That's pretty cool.

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Also the Writers Guild determined whose names went on the writing credits and to do so they would have read all the drafts. That meant, according to their rules, they determined Welles contributed at least 30% to the screenplay.

Here is another famous director expressing his view of Citizen Kane, rather harsh, but this was after Welles had panned his pictures.

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=432

If you met him, you might not think it was that cool.

Anyway, my points about Citizen Kane and Young Frankenstein aren't that the directors stole credit, it was that the scripts were basically complete and not all that different from the shooting scripts which ended up with shared credits. Obviously the directors added their own personal goodies, but if you want to claim the so-called 30% rule, I have sources who say that was not the case. I don't personally vouch for the sources; I just pass on their claims. I also have internet info but who can trust the internet?

It's interesting where this conversation has gone. I'll try to get to your questions at some point Yoder, I promise.

I can't help but continue to have a lot of the same opinions that I have had from the very beginning about this film. And Welles in particular. I just think the guy meddled... and meddled. He was a meddler. Some meddlers meddle in a good way, but I think that most meddle in a bad way and maybe even meddle just for meddlings sake.

Citizen Kane. Great technical achievement. No doubt. Bizarre story telling that completely ruins it for an ignoramus such as myself.

It is what is is.

I do still plan to watch this movie again with the wife someday soon I hope.

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In the case of Young Frankenstein, I can't find it on the internet, but I read Wilder had only started the screenplay and most of it was written with Wilder and Mel Brooks together, which is definitely not what happened with Citizen Kane.

In the case of Kane, a lot of the scenes are written cinematically: The scene with Kane at the breakfast table with quick scenes as he gets older, the debut of the opera singer and the stagehands' thumbs down reaction, and so forth. None of this is anything like Mankiewicz's other screenplays, which are cinematically inert and heavy on dialogue. It is consistent with Welles' other screenplays, so I really have no doubt he transformed a more conventional first draft into what is up there on the screen.

I totally agree with you. This movie's plot moves forward very visually, with montage, editing, etc... As Welles was the director, I imagine he would be setting up the logistics of every scene, and every scene moves the story along. And that's the beef I have with von Stroheim's beef with the movie. The way the story was told was almost more important than the story being told. I can't see Mankiewicz writing out these scenes.

Well, that's the difference between a script and the direction. The script may say that she sings and the reaction is poor. What you see can be what is in the finished movie. That doesn't mean it was ever actually in the "screenplay".

That had to be written out because it was an elaborate pan/tracking shot. It would have been story boarded as part of the art direction.

Here is the Citizen Kane script. It may well be in there but I couldn't find it. Ignore the pop-up; the script will show soon enough.

Pop-up never showed up. It was blocked and kept making noise with notification to unblock it which I ignored. Very persistent. That scene isn't in that screenplay. Instead is a much longer, lees interesting scene I don't recall being in the movie that focuses on the audience and Kane's reactions to the tepid applause. That doesn't mean the scene in the movie wasn't written out, just it was probably added after shooting started.

Reading the early part of the early screenplay, it is very cinematic.

Reading vaeious sources about who wrote Citizen Kane is like that movie, Rashomon, what is truth? Every source tells it differently. Below is an excerpt from the Writers Guild West:



• Welles drew from his personal life for the script, and Mankiewicz drew from publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst's life, to flesh out the character of Charles Foster Kane. It was long rumored that what enraged Hearst most was the use of the word “Rosebud,” which some have claimed was Hearst's nickname for his mistress Marion Davies' private parts. –multiple sources

• Mankiewicz wrote the first draft of the screenplay in about six weeks, and wrote much of his work from a hospital bed. –IMDB

• Budd Schulberg on Mankiewicz: “Mankiewicz claimed credit for the concept, and in truth had talked to my father, the producer B. P. Schulberg, about doing a film on William Randolph Hearst before Welles's dramatic arrival in Hollywood.” –The New York Times, “The Kane Mutiny,” 5/1/2005

• Schulberg: “Welles rewrote scenes to define Kane as less a monster than a many-faceted public relations genius, as creative as he is finally self-destructive.” –The New York Times, “The Kane Mutiny,” 5/1/2005

• Welles claimed that William Randolph Hearst was not the only inspiration for Kane. Among others, Chicago financier Harold Fowler McCormick was also a model for the character, in particular his promotion of his mistress and second wife, Polish opera singer Ganna Walska, who was considered a dreadful singer, despite the thousands of dollars McCormick paid out for her musical training. Another model was Samuel Insull, a Chicago utilities magnate and one of the founders of General Electric, who built what is now the Lyric Opera of Chicago for his singer/mistress. Howard Hughes was reported to be yet another model for the character, as was Time magazine founder Henry Luce. –multiple sources

Me again:
It is well known that the scene of Kane's childhood resembles Welles' childhood, not Hearst's, as Welles lost both parents in his youth as happens to Kane.

Yeah, I've heard that ol' tale and always wondered who exactly aside from Hearst and Davies would know what he called her private parts? Could just as easily been how she referred to him, but who would know unless they were in the habit of making such references in public? Hearst was so full of himself and such thin-skinned that he could have resented Welles' film for less reason than that.

At any rate, Welles always denied it was based on Hearst.

Welles may have denied it, but I don't think Mankiewciz did. He apparently had a real interest in Hearst. But it is true the stuff about a millionaire subsidizing his mistress as an opera singer had factual roots with someone else.