Surprising success story of a box-office bomb
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, now 75 years old, was a critically acclaimed flop
The ultimate irony about Citizen Kane — Orson Welles’ landmark 1941 film widely proclaimed the most influential of all time — is that if it were made today, 75 years later, it would still be a stiff at the box office.
In today’s high-tech multiplexes, superheroes are what sell: special effects blockbusters about conflicted men in tights bashing each other as they grapple with internal demons and the threat of an atomic wedgie.
A thought-provoking film like Kane — about a Donald Trump-like power broker whose grand ambitions are crippled by ego — would be more at home on Netflix, or during Oscar season, where it would rake in a few million while the critics heaped praise, then quietly disappear.
Like Spotlight, Bridge of Spies or The Danish Girl.
1941, granted, was a much different time: radio was king, Nazis rampant, Ernest Hemingway still writing novels, teenagers doing the Lindy Hop and songs like “Chattanooga Choo Choo” ruled the pop charts.
But the film’s trajectory was pretty much identical.
“Surprisingly, the initial reviews were very good,” notes Paul Heyer, a Wilfrid Laurier University communications prof who wrote a book about Welles.
“But the audience wouldn’t take to it and it fizzled at the box office.”
It didn’t help that publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst, unhappy with the film’s fictionalization of him as a heartless, striving megalomaniac — by most accounts pretty close to the truth — launched a crusade against the film and banned ads from all Hearst-owned newspapers.
Or that Kane was out of step with a war-weary age where escapist entertainment like Babes on Broadway and Road to Zanzibar were box office gold.
Nominated for an impressive nine Oscars, Kane won only one — Best Original Screenplay for Welles and co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz — then sank like a stone for a decade and a half.
But like some rogue nanobot that weasels its way into a living organism and, when no one is paying attention, takes over the Earth, Kane’s influence was massive.
Suddenly, everyone was using deep focus photography, overlapping dialogue, temporal jump-cuts, non-linear storytelling and mimicking the film’s innovative use of sound, lighting and cinematography.
“There were a lot of firsts going on,” notes Heyer.
“Welles put together so many elements.”
So Kanepercolated, invisible, under the radar, biding its time.
Until the mid-1950s, when two things happened:
1. It became a fixture on late-night TV, accessible for rediscovery.
2. Highfalutin’ European critics spearheaded the rise of art-house cinema and proclaimed Kane their cinematic muse de jour.
Suddenly, just like that, this musty old thing in mothballs was topping the prestigious Sight & Sound critics poll as the “Greatest Film of All Time,” starting in 1962, for five decades straight. There was much hemming and hawing in 2012 when, after the British film magazine opted for a more diverse, less elitist voting pool, Kane was finally toppled while Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo — a film no one seems that excited about — ascended the podium.
Even with the odds stacked against it, Kane still ranked No. 2, hardly the insult purists make it out to be.
“I think it’s the single greatest work of art of the 20th century,” insists Heyer, who feels it should have retained the top spot. “What are you going to put up against it?”
It’s more remarkable when you consider that Welles — after his Martians-are-attacking-Earth radio broadcast The War of the Worlds sparked panic in 1938 — was only 25 when he directed, starred in, cowrote and produced it. And it was his first film. Still, there are challenges in trying to appreciate a film that broke new ground 75 years ago and influenced filmmakers for generations afterward. It’s like listening to the Beatles for the first time in 2016, after being exposed to every band that used them as a musical blueprint.
The revolutionary advances seem less revolutionary, the paradigmshifting wallop more muted, less eyeopening.
“When I show 2001: A Space Odyssey in class to students who haven’t seen it, they fail to appreciate it because they’ve seen all those tricks before,” notes Heyer by way of example.
“So they need to be instructed in how to look at it: (Director Stanley) Kubrick did not ripoff the Honda Odyssey ad, Star Wars or get the idea from Planet of the Apes.
“I also think Welles’ ‘tricks’ blend more seamlessly in a contemporary viewing than they did at the time, where some critics thought they were attention-grabbing and showy.”
Fortunately for Kane, it’s still an arresting, if challenging movie, presenting its title character as an enigmatic failure, a tortured soul whose wealth and connections can’t buy the things he covets most: love, admiration, respect.
“If I hadn’t been very rich,” he notes with characteristic bluntness, “I might have been a really great man.”
If there’s one surprising thing, it’s how contemporary Kane’s inscrutability seems today.
Is he good? Bad? Somewhere in between?
Like Trump, Rupert Murdoch and House of Cards’ Frank Underwood, Kane is a man of the people, for the people, as long as the people do exactly what he tells them.
In a bit of cinematic irony, Trump told director Errol Morris — for an aborted doc about the rich and famous — that Kane is his favourite flick, though it’s unclear if he understood its thematic thrust or simply admired the title character’s wealth and chutzpah.
Unspoken, but just as evident, Kane is in some ways the story of Welles himself, a former boy wonder who achieved greatness with his first film then — shunned by the studios when it didn’t strike gold — and watched it yanked from his grasp.
Dogged in defeat, he spent the rest of his career tilting at Hollywood windmills, critically lauded, unable to reclaim his former glory.
By the time he died in 1985 at 70, he was reduced to hawking Paul Masson wine, Vivitar cameras and frozen peas while toasting fellow has-beens on The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast.
Not as dramatic a fall as his artistic creation who, forgotten and alone, trashes his opulent mansion in a fit of Herculean despair.
But as a humbling takedown, the irony must have hit hard. Joel Rubinoff writes for the Waterloo Region Record. Email him at jrubinoff@therecord.com