The Big Screen (25 page)

But the picture was well reviewed in newspapers and magazines that did get into print.
The Hollywood Reporter
said it was “a great motion picture.”
Variety
even thought it was “a film possessing the sure dollar mark.” Those were the trade papers for a business supposedly disapproving. In the
New York Times
, Bosley Crowther said, “It comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood.” Howard Barnes in the
Herald Tribune
wrote, “not only a great picture; it is something of a revolutionary screen achievement.” In the
New York Post
, Archer Winsten believed it would win “the majority of 1941's movie prizes.” And in
PM
, Cecilia Ager said, “It's as if you never really saw a movie before.”

These are some of the reviews as Pauline Kael listed them in “Raising Kane” in showing that the film was not reviled, or missed, even if it didn't leave Welles a rich man. He made that point to Peter Bogdanovich years later, but by then the ways in which Welles had resisted becoming a rich man were legion. The film was nominated for nine Oscars, and it won for its screenplay. When Welles died, in 1985, aged seventy, he was living alone in a small house in the Hollywood hills. But he was not quite alone, for he existed in acclaim and fondness, and his authority and position have only grown in the years since.

At its opening,
Citizen Kane
was not a sweeping commercial success—in company with so many of our best films. The antagonism of the Hearst media had something to do with that, though that legend has grown fat on not much. There were other reasons for what happened in the very delicate year of 1941. The film was difficult; it still is. It did not offer an easy, fluent arc such as audiences were trained to follow. It did not give you a figure to identify with or admire, because its mood and method are set on dismantling him, not building him. While the work of a young man full of vitality it seemed, the film comes out of the depth of despair and solitude, when very little in the American movie had suggested that that was where America wanted to be.
Kane
had gone awhile under the working title
American
, but no one then anticipated that that word could be a synonym for personal disaster.

What happened next to
Citizen Kane
was what happened to more or less every “old” film. For it was an age in which just about every movie had to be “new.” Other pictures, the used ones, went away. RKO was a company that suffered several ownership changes, from Floyd Odlum to Howard Hughes to General Tire and Rubber to Desilu (Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, the actress who had once been an RKO contract player). It was only in 1957 that a despairing film company sold off a package of its old pictures, seven hundred in all, to television for $15 million. In those days, with the weekly attendance at theaters down to forty-one million (it had dropped nine million in just the previous year) and television penetration at 79 percent of households (it had gone up 7 percent in the previous year), movie companies were still uncertain about the value of old films for TV. That RKO trade-away was for just over $20,000 a picture.

So in the 1940s and the early 1950s,
Citizen Kane
floated, against a background in which Orson Welles himself was peripatetic, fascinating, restless, but hardly a tidy genius. His second picture,
The Magnificent Ambersons
, had been butchered. A documentary project in South America,
It's All True
, came to nothing. He tried to do
Around the World in 80 Days
onstage. He did a cheap version of
Macbeth
. He married Rita Hayworth (his second wife) and put her in a fanciful, nasty noir,
The Lady from Shanghai
. He was working on a version of
Othello
in Europe. His most noticed thing was his acting turn as Harry Lime in
The Third Man
.

No one step in that crazy-paving progress was dull, but how did it add up? Or look like anything other than a fat man staggering around? Not everyone recollected
Kane
with warmth or in a way that urged newcomers to see it. James Agee, one of the better critics in America, said that Welles was “fatuously overrated as a genius.” In 1952, Manny Farber wrote an essay for
Commentary
called “The Gimp,” which focused on
Kane
's malign influence. He called it “an exciting, but hammy picture.” He gave a lot of credit for arrangements of space and light to Toland, but he found the film “marred by obvious items of shopworn inspiration: camera angles that had been thoroughly exploited by experimental films, and the platitudinous characterization of Kane as a lonely man who wanted love from the world but didn't get it because he had no love of his own to give.”

As so often, Farber gave as he took away. He didn't like
Kane
, or Welles for that matter, but he had an intuition that “
Citizen Kane
seems to have festered in Hollywood's unconscious,” and he made this brief but very compacted observation:

Festering or ripening? It's a matter of taste, maybe. But the observation—that a younger generation of filmmakers had seen
Kane
and been changed by it—is persuasive. In that sense,
Kane
is the link between German expressionism and American film noir, even if Welles would say that Toland taught him all he needed to know about moviemaking in a couple of days. Not that the mood of
Kane
is one that Toland had been developing. In fact, he loved sunlight and terrain—just look at
The Westerner
(1940) or
Wuthering Heights
(1939). He was Sam Goldwyn's chief photographer, so he shot what he was assigned to: Eddie Cantor in
Roman Scandals
(1933) and Peter Lorre in
Mad Love
(1935);
The Long Voyage Home
(1940) and
Ball of Fire
(1941);
Kane
,
The Grapes of Wrath
(1940), and
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946). You can trace Toland's interest in deep focus, though the emotional tone of
Kane
and
Best Years of Our Lives
is the difference between fatalism and hope. There's only one film before
Kane
, John Ford's
The Long Voyage Home
, that looks anything like
Kane
—so long as you forget the look of the Mercury stage shows (
Caesar
, for instance), which we know Toland had seen and admired.

Toland died in 1948, without ever shooting an official film noir. But if you track the work of Stanley Cortez, the links are more suggestive. Cortez (brother of the actor Ricardo Cortez) had made very few films when Welles hired him to do his second film,
The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942). That picture is ostensibly a family drama, but its feeling for noir is undeniable. Welles didn't like Cortez as much as he had Toland (he said he was too slow), but Cortez would carry on a vision that is hardly equaled—he did
Since You Went Away
(1944),
Smash-Up
(1947),
Secret Beyond the Door
(1947),
The Night of the Hunter
(1955),
Shock Corridor
(1963), and
The Naked Kiss
(1964). This is a history of adventurous noir projects, even if few of the films seem to qualify thematically.

Noir
meant an existential agony; not just the underworld as a metaphor for human fate, but a means of working very economically. It was spurred by the disillusion and anxiety that came with the end of the war. The next generation of young filmmakers was excited by
Kane
's prescient mood and look, and intrigued by the personal melodrama of Orson himself. Was he a rejected genius, or a flash in the pan? Could Hollywood be reformed? Could directors command their films? People from Nicholas Ray to Elia Kazan lived on that hope. But what about Welles? Had he really, as it seemed by 1950, given up on America? Who did he think he was? God?

When
Sight & Sound
took its first poll, in 1952,
Citizen Kane
did not figure in the top ten. Then, in the 1950s, Welles came back with two films,
Mr. Arkadin
and
Touch of Evil
. Somehow he was still only in his early forties!
Arkadin
looked like a victim of money troubles. It was a surreal sketch on the edge of farce. But it was so plainly a remake of
Citizen Kane
, as if done in a rushed, partygoing weekend, tongue in cheek, and with a bravado mix of charm and cynicism. By contrast,
Touch of Evil
was far more finished and more respectful of reality. (Its Mexican-American border was a new place in American movies, rancid and risky—as time has proved.) It was lit up by virtuoso passages that no one could ignore or dismiss. It was funny, sexual, frightening, and rife with betrayals—if anyone cared for the idea of a ruined great man betrayed by a subordinate, it was there on-screen. Lo and behold, there was Welles using Marlene Dietrich (she had done a magic show with him in 1943 in Los Angeles) to warn him, and the world, that he was all washed up.

Something happened with Welles in that period.
Kane
began to be shown on television. It was not the same film there, of course; it was a report of itself. But people sat entranced by the film, amazed to think that the small box could deliver beauty! There were theatrical revivals. And his new films suggested that Welles had not given up, or turned into a sleeping boy wonder. At the Brussels World's Fair in 1958,
Touch of Evil
won the Grand Prix in the film contest, and then a panel of filmmakers voted on the best films of all time. The panel included young directors: Satyajit Ray, Robert Aldrich, and Alexander Mackendrick.
Battleship Potemkin
was voted number one, but
Citizen Kane
was in ninth place.

Though hardly anyone quite appreciated it at that moment, we were at the start of a great wave of enthusiasm for film that would sweep though colleges and universities. In part, this was prompted by the French New Wave, by the freedoms in their best films and the shift in film knowledge that came with the vindication of publications such as
Cahiers du Cinéma
and
Positif
. That French generation loved
Citizen Kane
. When François Truffaut made his movie about movie,
Day for Night
, in 1973, the director (played by Truffaut himself) had a recurring dream in which he is a boy out in the city at night. He comes to a cinema that is playing
Citizen Kane
and he uses his own cane to steal a still from it.

As film courses proliferated,
Citizen Kane
became a new standard in curricula. Books began to appear. Charles Higham's
The Films of Orson Welles
was published by the University of California Press in 1970 and it started a line of interpretation that said Welles was forever abandoning his own projects (just as Kane never finished Xanadu). In the same year, Pauline Kael's “Raising Kane” was published in
The New Yorker
and then in book form, with
Kane
's first script and the cutting continuity. The ensuing controversy fueled film classes examining Welles. And not to be forgotten, Welles had meanwhile delivered
The Trial
(1962),
Chimes at Midnight
(1965),
The Immortal Story
(1968), and
F for Fake
(1973). Here was a new age of Orson: a comic version of Kafka shot in the abandoned Gare d'Orsay; his finest piece of Shakespeare; an Isak Dinesen short story about the perils of trying to bring a story to life; and an essay on fraud, conjuring, and the myth of being Orson calculated to enrage enemies and delight admirers.