Film: Citizen Kane
CITIZEN KANE
Available on BBC iplayer
Citizen Kane was first shown 80 years ago at the Palace Theatre, Broadway, on 1st May 1941.
Some critics adored it but, amazingly, it was a flop. Only in the late ’50s, largely thanks to European fans, did it become the Greatest Movie Ever Made. Is it really the greatest? Some films never date – the immortal Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), starring Joan Greenwood (see page 30), is as fresh and funny as ever. And Citizen Kane? It has its longueurs. The actual film is only 119 minutes long – 12 minutes shorter than Mank, the Oscar-nominated film, starring Gary Oldman as Herman J Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who battled with Orson Welles for the Citizen Kane writing credit.
But some of the scenes – particularly in the newspaper world – do go on a bit. That was a product of Orson Welles’s unprecedented contract with RKO, allowing him complete artistic control.
That contract also meant Welles’s vision wasn’t blurred by committee – unlike modern Hollywood films, TV dramas and adverts that have to jump through a hundred hoops before production, losing originality with each hoop.
Because Welles was the film’s maestro – as producer, director and co-writer – it’s easy to forget what an understated, natural actor he was.
His deep, patrician voice is loaded with irony. The script – whoever wrote the bulk of it, Welles or Mankiewicz – is whip-smart and funny. Welles never gives his pay-offs any fanfare or change of tone. He just leaves a long pause before delivering them and lets the superlative writing do the talking. ‘Rosebud’ is of course the best pay-off in cinema history (I couldn’t possibly give it away here). What’s more, Welles was only 25. His supporting cast of non-stars, taken from Welles’s Mercury Theatre, also largely underplay the drama and the laughs. But they’re still in his shadow – including the best of them, Joseph Cotten. None of them benefits, either, from the OTT ageing make-up, which has to be pretty drastic, given the film shifts back and forth between 1871 and 1941.
Those legendary flashbacks are so brilliantly stage-managed by Welles that you’re never confused about when the action is taking place.
He and his crew pioneered multiple techniques in the film: the extensive use of newspaper front pages; deep focus; audio tricks learnt in his radio days. But they seem natural. There’s no feeling of clunky, early experimentation.
Because Citizen Kane was such a witty take on the truth about tycoons and the media, it’s also eerily prescient. Like Rupert Murdoch, young Charles Foster Kane inherits a small fortune with a small newspaper interest and turns it into a media empire.
The parallels with Donald Trump, too, are spooky. Kane trumpets his patriotism: ‘I am, have been and will only be one thing – an American.’ When he stands for Governor of New York, he threatens to lock up his opponent. When he loses, he prints the headline, ‘Fraud at polls!’
Citizen Kane has a few flaws. But it came out only 14 years after The Jazz Singer (1927), the first talkie.
To make one of the greatest films – if not the greatest – so early is really saying something.