Film number twelve in my 100 Essential Films series (if you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here) is considered by many to be the best film ever made.
No pressure.
Dozens (if not hundreds) of books have been written about every aspect of Citizen Kane. I now humbly submit my own wrestle with a movie I’ve seen probably a dozen times, and that I enjoy more and more each time I watch it.
The first time I ever saw Kane, I think I was eleven or twelve. I watched it with my dad. The local PBS station (shout out to KERA-Dallas!) was showing it, probably, now that I think about it, as part of the film’s 50th anniversary. I didn’t really know what I was seeing at that age, but I’d like to think it planted the seed for my later cinephilia.
For this review, I screened Citizen Kane via my HBO Max subscription. The transfer looks absolutely stunning.
A note: beware, below there be spoilers aplenty. But, come on, it’s Citizen Kane!
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before scratch-off
Citizen Kane (1941)
dir. Orson Welles
Rated: N/A
image: Pop Chart Lab
It would be facile to draw some kind of straight line directly from Charles Foster Kane to Donald John Trump. It’s probably been done in countless other essays after Trump ascended to the presidency as 2017 was getting under way. Beyond being facile, it’s almost certainly not true. That’s because the lesson at the heart of Citizen Kane, the kernel which blossoms into a mighty oak as the film unfolds, is that, as a character says of Kane during the movie, “No one word can describe a man’s life.” You can extrapolate that out into the idea that no person, famous or not, scoundrel or not, is one single thing.
(If anything, the comparison between Kane and Trump falls apart because Trump might be the one person schlepping around this world who actually is only one thing. His narcissistic, all-consuming need to shine brighter than any other human seems, at least to my eye, to be his only defining attribute.)
The word that defines only a small part of the complex psyche that Orson Welles scrutinizes, in what has been considered one of – if not the – best films ever made, is, of course, Rosebud. Famously, that’s the brand name emblazoned on the beloved sled that Kane lost in his youth. Welles’s film posits that it might be the thing he was, perhaps subconsciously, trying to find with every action he took after losing it.
While that’s a tempting final take-away, Welles, and the person who forged most of the screenplay, Herman J. Mankiewicz, built a character in Kane that defies a simple explanation. As Welles himself said in a promotional trailer for the film in anticipation of its 1941 release, “I don’t know how to tell you about [Kane]. There are so many things to say.”
The film that Welles made is as complex and densely packed as any real life. It’s also as seemingly contradictory as the views on the legendary protagonist offered up by the other characters in the movie about him. Welles and Mank delight in the delicious irony of having one character describe Kane as a communist and another describe him as a socialist, juxtaposed mere seconds apart within the movie’s screen-time.
Citizen Kane is the story of a very rich, very powerful man and the reflections about him, in the wake of this death, from those closest to him. In an audacious technique, especially for 1941, Welles and Mank jumble the chronology of Kane’s life, depending on who we’re hearing from. This same technique was employed by director David Fincher in Mank, his 2020 biopic about Mankiewicz’s circuitous route to crafting the Kane screenplay. The result befuddled some critics, in the same way that Kane must have done 80 years ago.
The bravura opening newsreel sequence of Citizen Kane is a marvel of storytelling. Welles introduces us to the importance and mystique of the character he’s most famous for embodying, and we barely hear from the character himself throughout it. A similar technique was used to build up the mystery of Harry Lime, another of Welles’s iconic characters, in director Carol Reed’s The Third Man, from a screenplay by Graham Greene. There’s no newsreel in that film, but hearing others talk about the character for an extended time before we ever meet him creates a powerful presence.
We’re drawn to the lives of the rich, famous, and powerful. We want to know what makes them tick. That was clearly no different for Welles and Mank, the latter even going so far as to draw inspiration from a social connection he had to a very powerful contemporary, red-baiting newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Jeff Bezos has also undoubtedly gotten the Kane treatment in think pieces, especially after he purchased The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million.
Kane was named as the best film ever made in five of the seven Sight and Sound film polls, a decennial survey of international film professionals’ top ten films of all time, conducted by the British Film Institute. (Kane didn’t even appear on the list in the poll’s inaugural version, released in 1952, and it fell to second, behind Vertigo, in 2012, the latest version of the survey to be released.)
As with its complicated protagonist, the reasons for the movie’s staying power are myriad.
For one thing, Citizen Kane will remain relevant as long as we have billionaires like Jeff Bezos and megalomaniacs like Donald Trump (Bezos fits into that category, too). The desire to parse the inner workings of people of consequence is evergreen. See Fincher’s The Social Network, Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (and its film adaptations). Kane is probably closest to Gatsby in terms of examining an inscrutable protagonist’s darkest secrets and desires.
When his boarding house-proprietor mother discovers a massive oil strike on her land, she sets little Charlie up for life, shipping him off to boarding school, where, as she says, abusive hands like Charlie’s father’s “can’t get at him anymore.” Young Charles doesn’t want to go, and he grips his Rosebud sled tightly. It will be the last possession he ever has that isn’t saddled with the expectations and scheming of other people.
Considering the important argument against making female characters simply objects or plot devices, it feels a little unseemly to make the connection that the woman Kane becomes infatuated with, the guileless Susan Alexander, is essentially, for Kane, a stand-in for that lost sled. Their meet-cute, with Kane standing drenched on the sidewalk, impresses on him how alive he feels after meeting someone who doesn’t want anything from him. She simply enjoys his company, and he hers.
Of course, any person with as thin a skin as Kane will inevitably drag someone like Alexander down with him when the relationship is cast into the light. Hence his insatiable need to turn Susan into a revered opera star, despite her indifference to the goal. Indeed, the idea burrows into Kane’s head because of an off-hand comment Susan makes early in their relationship about her mother insisting that Susan should sing. No matter, once the pubic starts to pick at the sore spot, Kane is determined to “take the quotes off the ‘singer’,” in the headlines attacking his extramarital affair.
Jed Leland, Kane’s closest acquaintance – even Jed hesitates when using the word “friend” – gets at the heart of his drinking buddy’s psyche when he relates the story of Kane finishing Jed’s negative review of Susan’s premiere, when drama critic Jed becomes too drunk to finish it himself. Charles Foster Kane has something to prove to the world, always something to prove.
Early in the film, it does seem as if Kane stands for something outside of himself. His progressive stance in his fledgling newspaper empire, and his sworn dedication to provide a voice for the common man, doesn’t seem like only a convenience.
The movie casts that glow upon Kane, as a man of principle.
Then, as he successfully hires away the entire staff of his biggest newspaper rival, Jed begins to wonder if he’ll change them, or if they’ll end up changing him. Anything can change when, at the core, love is all someone really wants.
“[H]e never believed in anything except Charlie Kane,” as Jed Leland says.
All this would be interesting enough on its own even if Charles Foster Kane had been a strictly fictitious creation. The fact that Mank took inspiration from William Randolph Hearst adds another layer to a film that unfurls more and more the deeper you study it. Hearst had his own long-term love affair with Marion Davies, an actress 34 years his junior. Further sticking the knife into the broken relationship between Hearst and Mankiewicz, the screenwriter included Hearst’s rumored nickname for Davies’s genitalia, Rosebud, as the central plot point of his movie.
I could go on. Citizen Kane is a masterwork, from conception to execution. Volumes have been written about cinematographer Gregg Toland’s cutting-edge camera work. Bernard Herrmann’s first motion picture score is haunting. The cast, mostly from Welles’s stock of Mercury Theatre players – later known to radio audiences through The Mercury Theatre on the Air program – each give their character subtle shadings, especially Welles as Kane, Joseph Cotton as Jed Leland, and Dorothy Comingore as Susan Alexander.
This intense study of one man’s loves, losses, obsessions, and rage is endlessly fascinating. I will concede one point in the Trump as Kane comparison. In his reminiscences about Kane, Jed Leland says, “Not that Charlie was ever brutal. He just did brutal things.” Like with Trump, Bezos, and every other morbidly rich overlord – the likes of whom artists will continue to make cautionary tales about, only to have those same overlords misinterpret the message (see also: Oliver Stone’s Wall Street) – Jed’s observation is ultimately a distinction without a difference.
after scratch-off
image: Pop Chart Lab
image: Pop Chart Lab