Rosebud

What better way to begin a classic movie blog then to discuss the movie that is considered to be the best of all time. I don’t happen to be one of those who believes that Citizen Kane (1941) is the best movie ever. I don’t even think it was the best movie of 1941. If the Academy Awards are any measure, and they shouldn’t be, then John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley was the best picture of that year. I disagree with the Academy as well. For me, John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon was the best of 1941, mainly because it took German Expressionism and Americanized it as film noir.

I enjoy watching movies with great stories. Citizen Kane doesn’t have a great story. It is technically brilliant thanks to Gregg Toland’s cinematography. This is where Kane stands out. We are introduced to deep focus, where both the players in the foreground and the background are in focus. There are also elements of noir in the shadows and lighting applied throughout the movie. These are the reasons why Kane is remembered. It is also remembered because of who made it and who it was based on and the story about how it almost wasn’t released.

Orson Welles was the boy genius, having been famous already for terrifying New York during the famous War of the Worlds broadcast. He came to Hollywood with the most control any director ever had. His first picture at RKO didn’t work out though. So he moved on to something different. Being the arrogant man that he was, and really all filmmakers are, he decided to attack the king of the American media at the time, William Randolph Hearst.

Teaming with Herman J. Mankiewicz, a frequent guest of Hearst’s San Simeon Estate, the two wrote Citizen Kane. The story is about a man who was larger than life, but dies alone, uttering the words Rosebud seconds before he dies. A newsreel man is sent to investigate the meaning of George Foster Kane’s final words. Taking an interesting approach to storytelling, we learn of Kane’s rise and fall through the words of his second wife, his guardian, his business advisor, his best friend, his second wife again and his business advisor. This is an interesting way to tell a story, cutting it up and having the audience reassemble it, but it doesn’t work for me. Much like Pulp Fiction (1994), I believe the story was so weak that a gimmick had to be employed in order to make the movie work.

As gimmicky as the story may be, it is highly inaccurate in regards to William Randolph Hearst. Although everyone in the Hearst empire demeaned Welles for making the movie, and very nearly got the prints of it destroyed, Hearst himself never said anything about it. He was used to be portrayed in a poor light, so this was no different. It was the portrayal of the women in Hearst’s life that probably got him angry. Hearst’s mother, Phoebe, is dipected in the movie as uncaring for her only child. This is untrue as Phoebe loved and pampered her son. To paraphrase a quote in another classic movie, Hearst’s best friend was his mother.

The first wife of Kane’s is the niece of the president, Emily. Hearst’s wife Millicent was a chorus girl. This doesn’t seem so bad as Millicent is made into an upperclass woman, but in the movie she is killed off. Millicent actually outlived Hearst.

The worst female portrayal in the movie has to be of Marion Davies. Hearst’s mistress is portrayed as a drunk opera singer with no talent named Susan. The drinking part is true, but the talentless part isn’t. Davies happened to be a tremendous talent in Hollywood silent films. Her career ended basically when the talkies arrived. She stuttered and was unable to effectively make the transition to sound, like a lot of other actors and actresses. This is why Hollywood went East to recruit the best of Broadway.

Citizen Kane should be applauded for its groundbreaking cinematography, although Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) used the same opening and closing shots. Other than this special distinction, Kane isn’t that great of a movie. Orson Welles was a better actor in The Third Man (1949) and Joseph Cotton was better in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). To end on a positive, the movie not only marked the debut of legends Welles and Cotton, but also composer Bernard Herrmann, who would become famous for his scores with Alfred Hitchcock and his final one for Taxi Driver (1976).