I didn't realise when, a year before my twentieth anniversary of being alive that I was about to watch the reputed greatest film ever made on something like its fortieth anniversary. The most I knew was that my Nanna had called it controversial. I was at Uni and saw the movie as part of my course on a crisp Brisbane winter morning with a cup of common room urn coffee. And was wowed by it from start to finish. The camera floats through a neon sign and down through a broken window. A scene of an argument on a stairwell is not accompanied by a bombastic orchestral accompaniment and feels as uncomfortable as it should. And that's before you get to the performances which vary from showy period-correct bluster to surprising naturalism. And that's before you get to the heart rending epic of grand American wasted life that is the tale of Citizen Kane.
The story goes like this: Charles Foster Kane is born to a poor rural couple in the frozen midwest but comes into a fortune when a deed to a mine put in his name turns into a ... gold mine. Removed from his parents by the family lawyer he grows up in loveless privilege in the big city, goes wild at university, getting expelled from each and then notices a newspaper business is part of his assets and on the hunch the it might be "fun to run a newspaper" takes it over and builds a massive media empire over the next decades, making fortune upon fortune. He marries once for a mix of love and connection (the president's niece) and then again for a mix of love and abusive control and finally breathes his last word, "rosebud" as a lonely man in a desolate palace.
That's not quite it. You get a few versions of this story from different sources and the timelines overlap and details in one can contradict others. From the snakelike camera tour of the faded grandeur giving an expressionistic idea of the man to the brash newsreel with its flat account of a life delivered in a vocal boom to the aged friends, colleagues and spouse still alive to tell their tales to Thompson the reporter. While they are all aged and slower and creakier than their youthful selves in their flashbacks, Thompson, standing in for us, is seldom more than a silhouette, shot from behind or in deep shadow, faceless and common, receiving just like us but asking the questions we would, empty until we pour our own personalities into him. This series of interviews takes up most of the film's screen time and through them we are given a great deal of information. Finally, we stand with Thompson (or he as us) on the floor of Xanadu piled with objects that might be a priceless classical statue or a two dollar snowglobe and we still know little more of Kane than we did after the intentionally superficial news story at the start. Thompson says what we think, that a word won't cut it to explain a life any more than a piece of one of the heaps of jigsaw puzzles on the floor. Finally, we do see what rosebud means and know that it was a moment of pure uncluttered joy, something that cost little but offered much including a brief escape from a hard moment into a brief sigh of peace. Credits.
Citizen Kane was not the first to do a lot of the things that people have claimed for it. If you want to see a ceiling in an interior (very unusual at the time) you can see The Wolfman beat Kane by almost a year. The architect of the still-impressive deep focus that characterises much of the look of the film made others before and did the same thing in them. The late thirties and early forties were a time of great innovation in cinema even at this mainstream level and any one of Kane's moments of virtuosity can be debunked as "Simpsons did it". If that were the point then Citizen Kane is an overrated impostor. But, that should never be the point. The point is the tale of a human whose fortunes and power grew faster than he did. It's a story of the America that Oscar Wilde spoke of when he said it had gone from barbarism to decadance without ever going through civilisation. That it was fashioned from the life of contemporary mogul William Randolph Hearst is worth knowing but it's better understood to be an act of modelling rather than portraiture; it's the type that's important, not the name (though there's one from our day we could put in here). Celebrations of the technique on screen in this film are less about firsts than how many. Welles, in setting out to scare the living daylights out of his country's radio listeners had already used everything he could find to bring War of the Worlds to the air as a kind of Ur found footage piece. Citizen Kane? Just add cinema.
But the flashy virtuosity is only part of the package. The fable of power's gouging force was in the screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles (and not just the former as propounded in the recent Netflix original Mank) that told a story that Welles drove with his real virtuosity: strong performances. Citizen Kane is a cinematic acting bonanza. Yes, Welles dominates this, that was Orson, but he fills the screen with a wealth of skill from his experience in New York theatre where his cast of colour McBeth (no, he didn't star in blackface, he just directed) and Julius Caesar set in contemporary fascist Italy delighted, engaged and outraged. He had a big loyal and energetic gang and you can see them on the screen.
Ok, you might gag at the pantomime bluster of the Thatcher montage but that is treated as a kind of music hall sequence that leads to Welles's entrance in the film as the exact opposite (and you don't get the panto after that). Great scenes like the barnstorming campaign speech, the drunken sparring between Jed and Charlie after the election, Bernstein as an old man recalling the power of a glimpsed beauty from his youth (which is both writing and performance in equal measure), Susan Alexander's every scene as she develops through Kane's abuses from an artless but kind young woman into the shrieking trauma victim she is at the end. On that, there is a moment toward the end where, she is about to leave Kane who has started apologising and entreating. She's at the door. A smile forms on her face as though ihe might mean it this time. Then he destroys it with a pugilistic phrase and every harmonic of affection she had kept till then is silenced as she finds her resolve and tells him what he needs to hear. Afterwards, but soon, he goes back to the bedroom that he decorated with childlike illustrations and his old man's idea of what young women like, and tears at every piece of furniture, every drape, and does as much damage as he can. And there is not a note of musical score as this plays out in real time. The effect is brutal, its violence shouts out through time.
The more you see Citizen Kane the less you notice the whiz bang technological feats and the more you notice things like this, the acting, the telling of the tale. You might, assuming you were looking for it, notice the quite deliberate disposal of the three act scheme. We are looking at how the mess on the floor of the palace at the end came to be and however well meant the placing of each component it was only ever going to be a mess with Charlie Kane at the wheel. Is Charlie the loneliest emperor in that history? Is he what an American emperor might be? If we make it to the end we might wonder if we have just seen a message from history about the importance of remembering things.
So, is it genius? Well, like Eraserhead, Mozart's 40th, Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Guernica, Hamlet, I don't care if it is or isn't. Citizen Kane works, it says (a few times) what its job is and does it. Is it perfect? Is anything and why should you want perfection? When Welles keeps nodding in one scene into the lap dissolve and it always feels too long does that really spoil a two hour film? What about the cartoon bats in the picnic scene? It was 1941, who was wrangling bats? Did you ever think of just sitting down and forgetting how long the title got shoved at the top of the pile of the "greatest ever made"? Still doesn't work for you? Fine, move on, just don't tell me that something I feel when I watch it isn't happening. Don't pretend you being iconoclastic by taking the easiest shot there is at something revered because you aren't the first and you are highly unlikely to be the best. Now that Citizen Kane has been toppled in recent polls by Hitchcock's Vertigo it might get a well earned breather but then that just means Vertigo is going to get it in the neck.
Another thing that occurs to me is that Welles's youth seems to be beneath more than a few of the attacks on his most famous film. He was twenty-six when the film was released. He was younger still when he caused such stirs in New York theatre and radio. If you've ever heard someone go on about the simplicity of early Mozart composition or Rimbaud stopped writing poetry at nineteen "for a reason" then you have heard the saddening attempted first strike of a person guilty about their own lack of achievement in youth. Sad but true. Envy's gonna envy. Welles was twenty-six then and is long gone from us but Citizen Kane has turned eighty. So I've invited it into my living room tonight with reverance due its age and my own admiration and we're going to have a fine old chat.
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