CITIZEN KANE

CITIZEN KANE

Saturday July 8 - Union Square in San Francisco

Showtime: 8:00 pm

Presented by The San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation

1941 119 min

By the time he was in his mid-twenties, Orson Welles had already managed to become both the bad boy of the radio airwaves and the bad boy of the Federal Theatre Project. On Halloween night, 1938, he had scared the eastern seaboard half to death with his and Howard Koch's radio drama, an adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds, and had immediately scored both a slap on the wrist by CBS and a Hollywood contract with unprecedented free reign. Prior to that, he and John Houseman had set the government tearing their hair out over a production of Marc Blitzstein's agitprop opera The Cradle Will Rock by ignoring an injunction and performing the piece anyway, marching an entire production up the streets of Manhattan to an alternate theater.

The man, in short, was a danger to the status quo. Everyone was waiting to see how, exactly, he was going to tear up (or redefine) the movie industry. They wouldn't have to wait long.

The project Welles had initially pitched to RKO was, in fact, a film version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, to be filmed entirely with a subjective camera that is, where the camera would actually walk through the action of the film and take the place of the main character, whom you would never see. This would be explained to the audience by Welles, on camera, in a prologue. Needless to say, the studio didn't go for the idea, and Welles came up with Plan B. His collaborator, Herman J. Mankiewicz, a talented writer who was a notorious drunk and quite accident prone to boot, wrote the first draft of the Kane script, originally entitled simply "American," while kept by friends and family in a secluded place outside of LA, away from his liquor and with his broken leg in a cast. Also in attendance was John Houseman, whom, it has always been assumed, had an uncredited role in writing the script, and (also uncredited) was also Welles' right hand man on-set.

So what's so special about Citizen Kane? Why is it on everyone's "best films ever" list? Well, besides the incredible sense of atmosphere, the terrific performances by Welles himself, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Paul Stewart, and the other Mercury Players, there's the landmark photography by Gregg Toland (whom Welles insisted share a credit card with him). Toland, who was one of the greatest cinematographers who ever lived, was largely responsible for Kane's look, and particular the deep focus scenes, which far from being just a parlor trick, actually relate characters in space to create emotional tension and speak volumes about relationships. (Look at the scene where young Kane as a boy is seen playing out in the snow while the adults inside his mother's cabin discuss his fate, or the scene where Kane fires Leland for getting drunk while writing a bad review of Susan's opera debut.) Toland was also able to light and shoot scenes in such a way that several sets could have ceilings, adding to the claustrophobic feeling in, for example, the confrontation scene between Kane and Leland after Kane has blown the gubernatorial election, where Welles shot from the floor looking up. (While some think this film was the first to use ceilings on sets, it's not at all true ceilings appeared in sets on several of the French films of the 1930s, and in a remarkable scene in John Ford's Stagecoach, just to name a few examples, but note how Welles uses them, again, for emotional effect.) Another thing Welles did in the film, which was quite dramatic (and somewhat controversial at the time) was to, in essence, "crash" the camera through the skylight of the Atlantic City club where Susan Alexander is interviewed by William Alland ("the reporter"). This physically impossible camera move (achieved by a combination of miniatures and a dissolve) was debated by critics and film scholars, but clearly it is a metaphor for the intrusion of the press and the voyeurism by both the press and the public into the lives of the rich and famous.

The other remarkable thing about Kane are the transitions, something Welles learned from radio. Sound is used, in some cases, to make lightning-fast transitions, sometimes over space, and sometimes over time. Two examples: Leland giving a speech to a small crowd about Kane's candidacy, which in mid-sentence cuts to Kane, in a huge convention hall, speaking to thousands of people, finishing the sentence, obviously some time later in the campaign, after it's gained momentum; and a transition that spans many years: Thatcher gives the young boy Kane a sled, and says, "Merry Christmas, Charles," and the scene cuts to a much older Thatcher, in his office, saying, "And a happy new year! And in closing, may I remind you that your twenty first birthday, which is now approaching . . ."

Finally, Kane uses a technique that now is more familiar to us as viewers in the post-modern era, but at the time was not as common; that of multiple point of view witnesses telling us the story, each with their own spin. A decade before Kurosawa made Rashomon, Kane posited that one man's life was complicated enough that several prismatic viewpoints might still not get at the truth. Thus we get to see the same events, partially overlapping, repeated from different angles. This increases the fun of repeated viewings, and no matter how many times we see the film, we see something new.

Some things to watch and listen for this time around: the beautifully wrought miniatures that make up the opening prologue sequence of Kane's death, as we move closer and closer to his bed chamber and take a mini-tour of the Xanadu grounds. This is largely the (alas, uncredited) work of Chesley Bonestell, a wonderful artist who worked on most of George Pal's films (When Worlds Collide, War of the Worlds, Destination Moon), as well as Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, and one of RKO's other most gorgeous looking films, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He also did some of the matte paintings for How Green Was My Valley, the film that beat out Citizen Kane for the Best Picture Oscar in 1941. Of course, listen also for the incredible musical score by Bernard Herrmann, his first in a long, illustrious career that would include other Welles films, as well as a long collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s and 1960s.

One of the "Rosebuds" from the original production is owned by director Steven Spielberg. Another was recently sold at auction for $233,500. If you don't know what "Rosebud" is, come see the movie. If you do, come see the movie. There's always something new to discover in this multi-layered masterpiece.

By Kenn Rabin