Archive: Citizen Kane

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1:49confident investors. These investors may go on vacations where they wear floral shirts unbuttoned generously or pose for pictures that look like they're holding up ancient architecture using only their finger. Though we are not responsible for any of this, we are proud to provide comprehensive financial planning services designed to help clients achieve their goals. So we're sorry, and you're welcome. PNC Wealth Management member Finn Recipic. Results vary by customer and are not guaranteed. Hello, Misha Glennie here. After our episode on Casablanca, I've chosen another episode about a classic film for my archive pick. In my final year at university, I studied the German new wave cinema of the 1960s,

2:33directors such as Fassbinder, Herzog and Schlöndorff. But before we saw any of their work, our professor insisted that we watch just one non-German movie to begin with, Citizen Kane. Filmed in 1941, its director and star was a 25-year-old theatrical wunderkind, Orson Welles. Unbelievably, it was the first film he had ever made. Citizen Kane was the original auteur film, and one that exerted a powerful influence first over French and then German filmmakers in the 1960s. But there was another German connection to this film. Orson Welles and his legendary cinematographer Greg Toland were heavily influenced by the work of German expressionist directors from the 1930s like Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst.

3:26The creative wheel turning full circle. Here, Melvin and his guests expertly explain why this film is still regarded as a masterpiece that brooks no competition. Hello, Citizen Kane, released in 1941, is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, films ever made. Orson Welles plays the lead role of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate, and Welles directed, produced and co-wrote this story of loneliness and megalomania. It was inspired by the life of the mighty William Randolph Hearst, who used the power of his own newspapers to try to suppress the film's release, and it was to take some years before Citizen Kane became the sensation it remains. With me to discuss Citizen Kane,

4:10Estella Bruzzi, Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London, Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck University of London, and John David Rhodes, Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge. J.D. Rhodes, what had Orson Welles done before this that we ought to know about? I suppose it's where do you start or what didn't he do before that? He was the ultimate wonder child. He was very prodigious, very precocious. He had acted as early as age 16 at the Gate Theatre in Dublin and used that performance as a bit of a calling card when he returned to the U.S. and was sent to New York basically to meet Catherine Cornell by Thornton Wilder, who was a family acquaintance.

4:55And from there, he toured with Cornell and in a performance of Romeo and Juliet and some other performances that toured and also returned back to New York. I think very more importantly, he became involved in the Federal Theatre Project in collaboration with John Housman, very famously mounted a production of Macbeth with an all-black cast in Harlem that was set in Haiti. That collaboration during the New Deal also saw The Cradle Will Rock, the Agitprop musical. And he worked in radio as well. And he did, and finally in radio. Most famously, War of the Worlds, which became obviously a very notorious program that eventually sent him to Hollywood under the invitation from RKO. Would it be true to say that War of the Worlds

5:38gave him the tint of a sensational reputation? Well, it certainly made him, he was already a celebrity and was already being celebrated as a celebrity during the radio and theatre years, but then that made him this completely sort of unstoppable force. Also, that's where he honed his sort of reputation as writer, director, producer and performer, and I think that's one of the important things about the radio history. When he was asked by Archer to do what was to be his first film, he asked for the same thing, control of everything. So how did he assemble the crew? He drew on some of the talents that he had assembled at the Mercury Theatre, the repertory theatre he had run in New York, again with Hausman.

6:17So he brought a lot. It was important to him to bring actors who mostly had not appeared before the camera up until this point. It gave the film an element of, given that we move into the film in this very mysterious way, not meeting very recognizable faces, I think lends an aura of mystery to the film. So we're seeing Joseph Cotton for more or less the first time on screen, Agnes Moorhead, Dorothy Commongore, who appeared in bit parts before this film, is also relatively unknown. And George Koulouris, also relatively unknown in Hollywood. So I think that there's something important about not being immediately plunged into the familiarity of the studio star system that makes the film. It was a sensational move.

6:58We gave it a freshness and still does when you see it now. I've seen it 50 years after I saw it for the first time. There's something amazing about when you're seeing that first shot of Agnes Moorhead and realizing that you're seeing Agnes Moorhead's... That's the mother of the boy. Yes, exactly. Of the boy who plays young Kane's mother. Most of the actors are unknown to a cinema-going audience, which would be a very religious cinema-going audience at that time. People turned up at the regular times to see films in numbers. But the crew was quite experienced, wasn't it? I mean, a very experienced photographer. Craig Toland, yes, who would have collaborated with William Wyler and John Ford and Dorothy Arsner

7:32and all the other sort of, a number of other major filmmakers up until that point. And I think their meeting was very productive and generative and was apparently, by biographical accounts, a very kind of congenial collaboration where Toland already had a reputation as an experimenter and had seen Wells's production of Julius Caesar and admired its experimentalism. And so I think that formed right away a basis for a very productive working relationship. The photography itself drew comment because it was so bold and daring and consistently good. Well, I think what we're seeing a lot is an emphasis on deep focus, that we can see sort of every plane of the image equally in focus. The film was often favoured low-angle shots

8:18so that we're seeing a kind of yawning expanse behind the characters in these interiors. Often a kind of false ceiling was used to create that more realistic sense of being inside these cavernous spaces of Kane's mansion, Xanadu. You talk about the place, and the place is Xanadu, which Citizen Kane built for himself. The film starts like that. It's almost like a Gothic horror film. Enormous mansion with the art of Western Europe littering it all over the place, and then goes on a fantastic rampage of a newsreel, a contemporary, seeming contemporary newsreel. Can you tell us about that juxtaposition, Stella? As you say, it's incredibly slow, languid camera, subjective camera, you know, all about style.

9:03Then all of a sudden you hear this bold, brassy music and news on the march starts. It's very reminiscent of another RKO production. It's sort of a pastiche of The March of Time, which was a regular newsreel that ran on the radio from 1931, on film from 1935, told you the big stories of the day. What it's giving you, first off, is the story of Kane in miniature, rooting it in contemporary history, in contemporary politics, which for Wells was important. It starts with telling you about Xanadu, likening Kane to Noah, Kublai Khan, obviously. Then it tells you his whole life in kind of miniature. And it does it through faked archive and through real library footage, which are seamlessly intercut. It gallops through all of Cain's life, telling you the story. So you get

9:59Charles Foster Cain on Hitler's balcony. You get Charles Foster Kane alongside Teddy Roosevelt, you get him getting married on the White House lawn, you get him integrated into a history that the viewers understood. Is it possible to summarise the plot in half a dozen sentences? It's a very simple plot. It is a very simple plot. Charles Foster Kane, born into a kind of humble beginnings, comes unexpectedly into a huge fortune, is signed away to a legal guardian when he comes of age, decides to kind of use that fortune, builds a massive print media and business empire, which in 1929 and through the Depression he loses, builds this amazing mansion with the biggest zoo in the world and dies a recluse.

10:45That's a very simple story, just like Time on the March is a very simple story. But obviously what that sets up is the fact that Citizen Kane isn't going to be that simple story. And so as the newsreel comes to a rather ignominious and inglorious end, as the projector just gets turned off, the producer turns round to all the journalists around him in the screening room and says, this film needs an end. What we've got here is what the man did. We don't know who he was. The fiction film is to do with his saying the word rosebud and that Hunt is on, it's in the MacGuffin, it's the excuse for a plot to find out what Rosebud means, and that trickles through, doesn't pound through the film, but trickles through the film.

11:32Ian Christie, William Randolph Hearst, who was he, and was he the model for Citizen Kane? Well, in a way he was the model, although there was quite a lot of denial going on for good and obvious legal reasons. Hearst was a phenomenon in the tabloid press, the yellow press, and he had built up an empire of newspapers all over America. He saw himself as a man intervening in world events. He was very active during the Spanish-American War, for instance, and that's kind of reflected in Citizen Kane. He was also really engaged in public affairs. During the 1930s, he had signed up all these extraordinary columnists, Trotsky, Hitler, Mussolini. They were all columnists for the... Hitler was a columnist.

12:19For the Saturday supplement of Hearst's newspapers. I didn't get that. Hitler wasn't a very good... he didn't keep up his copies so Goering would step in and do it for him. But he saw himself as a man influencing world affairs and he was very good at picking up ex prime ministers and presidents and signing them up to write for him. Lloyd George wrote for him. Do you think that Wells was conscious of that and modelled Cain on that? I think there's no question about it. He made a very measured statement saying, well, if you're making a film about a newspaper tycoon, you obviously must be aware of, you know, the great newspaper tycoon of our times, William Randolph Hearst. So he kind of implies that he

12:56knew as much as anybody knew about Hearst, but there are a few crucial aspects that do tie it more closely to Hearst, especially the love object in the film. Basically, Hearst had a mistress... On the West Coast. On the West Coast, Marion Davis, who was an important star in Hollywood film. They were a very happy pair, really quite devoted to each other. He had a wife as well. In the film, Charles Foster Kane abandons his wife and takes up with a would-be singer or somebody that he would like to be a singer, and it doesn't end well, which is kind of, I suppose, the striking difference between the truth about Hearst and the truth of the story of the film. Yeah. It turns into anguish, really. It does.

13:41And Wells as Kane is the most moving part of the film for him, in my view, anyway. RKO took him on in the most smallish studio, by studio standards at those times, and they more or less said you can do what you want. What was the result of that for RKO? Well, it wasn't a happy outcome for RKO, really. Wells had insisted on total control, and he was, as J.D. said, he was very much a bunter kint, so he could lay down his terms. I think it has to be said that RKO was the smallest of the studios, of the major studios, and they weren't in a very good financial position. And you also have to understand that studios at this period weren't just production studios. They also owned strings of theatres.

14:23So RKO didn't have many theatres, and that would turn out to be quite important. It wasn't a very expensive film. It was $686,000. It was a relatively cheap film by the standards of Hollywood at the time, even though it looks like a very complex film to us. A lot of it is very clever process photography, brilliant production design, which is never properly acknowledged, and of course, great cinematography. Did they feel they were taking a gamble then? They were doing something which studios had done before. I mean, when you think back to the great turning point in film history, which was The Coming of Sound, it was Warners, which was a pretty impoverished studio that took a gamble on the jazz singer, and it got them out of a bad situation. I think RKO felt something of the

15:11same, that they might as well stake something on Wells, because who knows, he might pull something out of the hat. He did, but a rather later than they'd hoped. Well, he produced a film which absolutely knocked out everybody who saw it, especially filmmakers, film critics. There's a wonderful column that accompanied the early press shows of the film by John O'Hara, the writer, who said, I've just seen the greatest film of all time. J.D., J.D. Rose, it's a tale in part told through objects, in part. In a sense, everything and everybody becomes an object to Citizen Kane. But can we start with this rosebud, which I mentioned earlier? I mean, it's the first word we hear coming out of the mouth of a man who we come to know finally,

15:56or very soon as Charles Foster Kane, and it sets off, and you've already mentioned the word MacGuffin. It's a kind of conceit or ploy to motivate the plot to figure out what is the meaning of this word that was the last word spoken by this character, Charles Foster Kane. We find out at the very end of the film, spoiler alert, that it's the sled that we've actually already seen in the amazing scene at his Colorado home when he's taken away from his mother by the agent of this bank, Thatcher. And so it symbolizes, the sled symbolizes this lost dream of a childhood. And so that's the sort of motivating prop that leads him on. But it's also, I think, matched in significance by really the first prop that we see, the first object that we see in close

16:43up detail, which is this funny little cheap snow globe with a log cabin covered in snow, that falls from the hands of, or the hand rather, of the dying cane and crashes into pieces on the floor. And that we see at another key point, which is in the apartment of his lover, his mistress, Susan Alexander. And so there's this wonderful way in which we see these objects at various points in time, but the camera doesn't always privilege them. So we actually seen Rosebud in the Colorado scene of his childhood. We don't really see it again until it's thrown into a furnace and burnt with some of his less, what seemed to be his less meaningful possessions. And so the film sort of discloses finally the secret only to us,

17:26to the spectator, which is again one of its interesting conceits. I mean, Wells was in some interviews later, was a little bit withering about the use of rosebud. I think he thought it was a little bit corny. And I think a lot of Citizen Kane is interestingly actually quite corny. And that's what makes it such a compelling film, is I think it flirts with a kind of hamminess around some of its... Can you explain that further? Well, I think the acting is kind of brilliantly over the top. It sounds more like people are playing for radio, and of course we're clearly hearing Wells' history in radio. Who do you think is playing for radio? I think Wells' declamatory style in his performance of Kane.

18:04But what about with the style of Citizen Kane? He shouted because he wanted to be overbearing. Of course, but I think for filmgoers, most of whom I think would have probably heard some of the Mercury broadcast, the productions for CBS, this voice would have been a familiar voice in the American cultural scene. And so I think there's something really wonderfully theatrical and that isn't exactly immediately what we think of as cinematic in the film's handling of actors or in the way in which Wells handles the actors. Seems to have worked, though. Yeah, that's why it works. I mean, I think the closer it draws to theatre, in a way, the more it opens on to a new form of the cinematic. Stella, what drives Cain?

18:48What drives Charles Foster Cain? I don't think you can quite say what drives him or it's never quite clear. Rather like Rosebud is both an object but also a kind of state of being and subliminal sense of loss. So there is a motivation there which seems to be partly wanting to get back to that lost childhood. Charles Foster Kane has been untimely ripped from his childhood. He doesn't kind of complete childhood. And actually, you know, there's a little echo of Orson Welles' own life there, you know, when his mother died young and he had an alcoholic father and he describes having to be being an adult too soon. So there's this hankering for that, which is one of the motivations. And that partly explains his lack of interest in the money. Although there's a fascination with

19:37what he can do with it, for example, when he comes into money. And he says at one point, just imagine I could have been, you just imagine I could have been a very great man if I hadn't been rich but then we wouldn't have had a film. So he's always going round. There's this dislike of wealth but there's never a sense of what he would have done. There's the idealism there. He wants to help the disadvantaged and so his motivation I think is to become someone that he was never allowed to find out whether or not he could ever be. He's driven and he when he gets the money all the only thing he's interested in is setting up newspapers but he's got 60 million dollars so if it's a million dollars a year he loses he can he can go for 60 years he says and it's the greatest toy a boy ever

20:21had when he saw the print room. Is that what's driving him, the newspapers, the power the newspapers will give him? Is it the power side? I think he thinks it is, but I think there is a real sense of complete emptiness. You know, at the end when Susan Alexander says, she too feels really sorry, yeah, his second wife, that she feels sorry for him. He's very much, he's a kind of unformed, he's quite two-dimensional. We've talked about the kind of performance. He's very much, he's a kind of unformed, he's quite two-dimensional. We've talked about the kind of performance. He's quite a two-dimensional character. He's got this tremendous drive to amass this huge empire. But what you feel, if you're going to look at what that means

20:57in terms of psychological motivation, that he amasses this empire because there's a kind of vacuum inside. He doesn't actually... He's never happy. You never see him really happy. You see him exuberant and vibrant and moving through space, wanting to control, but you never get a sense that that's going to bring him satisfaction. There's always that real tension there between what the money can bring him and the vacuum it can never fill. Thank you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task like turning a folder or scattered notes into a report and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you.

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24:25YOLO! and buy a digital racehorse named Silicon Steve. Ha ha! YOLO! Stay vigilant, he's very persistent. YOLO! Guard Against Wild Money Moves with PNC Bank. Brilliantly boring since 1865. Ian Christie, we've talked a little bit about the techniques of film. Can you develop it a little? Well, it's interesting that really Wells was developing things which were already present in Hollywood production very shrewdly. I mean, when you consider, we keep coming back to that, he was only 25, he'd never made a film before. His apparent ability to incorporate so many advances that Hollywood films had been making at this time is extraordinary. I mean, he was a fast learner. The story goes that he sat down and watched John Ford's Stagecoach a lot beforehand. So he kind of self-taught himself

25:19by looking at recent films, it's a 1939 film, to bring himself up to speed. So what he's doing is using very contrastive photography, with Greg Toland shooting it. JD's already mentioned tremendous depth of field, so we're seeing things in the foreground, we're seeing things halfway, and then we're seeing things in the far, far distance, all with startling clarity. And I think you really get a sense of that right at the beginning when we're in the Xanadu, the palace, stuffed full of all the treasures that he's accumulated from all over the world. I mean, this is a real bit of William Randolph Hearst, who did indeed ship castles and antiques of all kinds from Europe to America. But it gives Wells and Toland a chance to actually show this extraordinary

26:06panoply of accumulation of stuff, just stuff on a monster scale. And as you rightly said at the beginning, it's a rather creepy beginning because it's a Gothic castle. It begins in a kind of modern Californian Gothic setting before we go back into the brashness of Kane's rise to power. J.D., you put your hand up, but before you say what you want to say, can I ask you a question? Yes, of course. Then it moves to a zapping style of the newsreel. You say this mimics the newsreels of the time, the fast voices. Is it Cain's way, is it Wells' way? It makes up sometimes. Wells' way of wanting to move the story on very, very quickly and make it exciting. I think of it as a film that first begins twice

26:52and then keeps on beginning. And so the first beginning is shrouded in secrecy, darkness, and the mystery of Rosebud. Then the second one is so explanatory. And so there's a kind of tension between two storytelling methods that continues to play out across across the film there's always this this aura or this feeling this ambience of the gothic particularly when we return to Xanadu throughout but then there's this this kind of the thing is driven by a new investigative news journalism so it constantly is kind of playing off I think there's kind kind of two tensions in the narrative style. Because you have somebody in the film whose task is to find out what Rosebud stood for. That just then brings us to

27:34these encounters with these characters. And so it's, you know, we never hear from Kane himself. We only hear from the people who loved him or whom he loved. So he does, I think, as Stella says, remains this kind of omnipresent but still sort of distant or flat, quote-unquote, character. I mean, picking up on that, we also, as the audience, have a very privileged position. We see a lot more than Thompson gets from any of his... Who's doing the investigation. Yeah, and I think that's really crucial. So that's where, having set up the kind of newsreel,'s doing the investigation. Yeah, and I think that's really crucial. So that's where, having set up the newsreel, this is the story, we instantly know that that's

28:10not the full extent of the story from that very first subjective camera at the beginning, that we get much more access into it than that. I was going to say that radio is an important component of this new technique. And Wells' experience with radio had given him a sense of how the speed of radio, that you can move very rapidly without having to waste time on setups and so forth, is something that he transfers into the film. So it moves like one of his radio dramas. And that's new for Hollywood. But it's also, of course, the beginning of the period that we now think of as film noir in Hollywood. And it's a film which anticipates many of the films that have become classics, the detective films,

28:57the private eye films, which it's got a sort of film noir-ish feel to it almost ahead of its time. That's a very big point, I think. It hadn't occurred to me. Because it's radio, it can move much faster. One of the things he did on radio was he was hired by CBS to adapt classic works of literature. So, for instance, one of the programs was Les Miserables, which is brilliantly condensed. So he was excellent at condensing these great works of literature, which he does kind of brilliantlyiantly and often as the narrator himself. So we're hearing him do these kind of brilliantly elliptical, but nonetheless very full tellings of these classic works of literature. Yeah, and thinking about radio and what you can do on radio,

29:41having described the plot of Citizen Kane within like 15 seconds tells you what Wells announced really with Kane was, on radio, having described the plot of Citizen Kane within like 15 seconds, tells you what Wells announced really with Kane was, this is what film can do. That's where I think the cinematography especially comes into its own. It would be nothing without probably the most expressive camera. He has opened a kind of box of tricks really with that. There's a wonderful production still of him and Toland literally in the floor, you know, so that the camera is just peeking up. And when Kane has lost the election, the camera is literally at the level of dust. These are things that words cannot convey.

30:19And so there's a real split in the film. There's the rise of Kane and then there's his demise. And after that election defeat and after the night when he refuses to be blackmailed, the same uses of the low angle, for example, that had denoted a certain power, a certain potency, become something much more precarious. The use of the low angle camera starts to signal insecurity, not being able to hold on to things, just about, you know, teetering on the edge. What Wells was really expressing, I think, with his use of the camera was, this is what film can do. This is his first acting role in film. What do you make of him as an actor? I mean, I think he's absolutely brilliant. But it's, there's just this incredible charisma,

31:06which, of course, was what had made his career in the theatre. An amazing voice. He was completely unembarrassed about making himself look unattractive in the period of the film in which he plays the older Charles Foster Kane. At the same time, I would stand by the characterisation of this as being not necessarily the kind of nuanced, psychologically realist performance that one might have expected from a certain type of Hollywood actor in a production that he mounts across his life. So I think the performance is incredibly interesting in the way it kind of merges or forces together the radio, the theatre, and this new medium that he's working in, the cinema. Do you go along with that, Ian?

31:58Yes, I mean, it's a film which does indeed merge these aspects of his own experience, and it seems to mark a new moment, I think, in kind of film structure and film grammar. And I think what's interesting is to look at the response to the film. The response is really interesting. I think there's an early response from filmmakers. One of the most dramatic examples that I came across is from the life of David Lean, actually. David Lean was wrestling with Noel Coward, Oprah, in which we serve, and it wasn't coming out right. That was Lean's first film in directed, wasn't it? Yes, indeed. And he knew that Coward didn't really know how to write a film script properly, and Citizen Kane comes out,

32:40and he sends Coward off to see it, and the result is magic. Coward comes back and says, Right, now I understand. This is how to structure the it. And the result is magic. Coward comes back and says, right, now I understand. This is how to structure the film. And we have that well documented. Which isn't going to interest you. Precisely. Fragment the narrative. Distribute the narration around a number of characters. Mix up the chronology, etc. Paul and Pressburger were certainly impressed by it. And you can see it in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. There's almost a direct reference to it. We mentioned at the beginning, it was mentioned at the beginning, that he brought in actors from the radio,

33:15and there's been suggestion, therefore, they were rather wooden and sagely compared with the fluid actors and the un-stagy persons who came from Hollywood. Is that the case? They didn't seem all that staged to me. So you're shaking your head, J.D. Well, I wouldn't have described them as wooden. I don't mean that. I just mean, well, I think there's two things. I think there's one, there's the sort of revelation of these people who have not been seen on screen. I think sometimes the vocal performance style is what, that's where you hear some of the residue of the theatre, which I think is an important part of the way that the film blends these different media Is that a bad thing? Not at all I'm trying

33:54to insist that it's a good thing also I think why do we insist on this film being so cinematically pure when it's made by this brilliant producer of theatre and radio and also cinema, the whole point of cinema is an impure medium that is able to cannibalise its sister media. And I think that's what makes it so exciting as you're kind of seeing these electric sparks as these different media are rubbed up against each other. And yet, when the film had, you know, part of its major rediscovery from the end of the 50s, really, was in France. And the film was celebrated, became a sort of icon of this new kind of ultra cinematic cinema hailed by French critics because of its use of deep focus, long takes, etc.

34:38And so it became a sort of icon of pure cinema. And yet, as J.D. says, it is precisely a mix of these elements, which is what makes it so exciting and makes it so alive for us still today I think and yet it became sort of accidentally canonised as something else. There was a real sense in how Wells performs that he is classically, I mean his sort of you know his kind of diction is amazing but then there's, and I don't know what other people feel there's that incredible scene when he trashes Susan's bedroom. Yeah. When it's a single take, it's unpremeditated. At one point, you can sort of tell when it happens, hurts his hand really badly because he's throwing everything around the place. And that is so completely spontaneous

35:23when almost nothing else in the film is and then you suddenly see that's a complete, that's a totally different register of performance and of being than you've seen anywhere else and then it goes back to the, what you're familiar with by then, the kind of extraordinary sets, the doorways, but there's this little interlude which is almost from a different register, from a different movie. I mean, that's the moment when he's losing Susan. Susan is his second wife. She's a woman who has a voice, but she's no opera singer. He tries to force her to become a famous opera singer, builds an opera house for her, tries to bribe the critics, fails in one particular way, disastrously, and so on. And then she leaves,

36:08which is the language part of the film. He suffered the loss of his mother. He voluntarily gave up his first wife, and now there's this unbearable loss that he's experiencing in that moment. So there's that moment, he's at his most psychologically three-dimensional, in a sense, although there seems to only be one emotion that is being registered. But there is a really powerful realism in that moment, in that particular scene. Also in this, like the destruction of the set that we're watching happen right in front of our eyes. Sean, do you want to say something? But I think the moment when he and Susan first meet is also a really interesting kind of still point in the film. And I think it's full of these Susan first meet is also a really interesting kind of still point in the film.

36:45And I think it's full of these moments that depart from its kind of through line of very operatic setups. When he meets Susan in the street and she invites him upstairs and there's a kind of naturalism about it. It's a very interesting moment. He's not performing. He's not acting, he's reacting. And it's one of the very few moments in the film, I think, where there is a kind of sense of real rapport, because most of the time he's not listening to anybody. Here he is really connecting with Susan and you feel that there's something real between them at that moment. And going back to the things we were saying earlier, one of the reasons that he falls in love with Susan, I'm sure, is that she doesn't know who he is. You know, he's surprised by this,

37:30but kind of her ignorance and the fact that then you notice, as JD was saying retrospectively, that the snow globes on her dressing table, you realise that actually it's part of that that really attracts him to her, and that he can be himself. Sorry, that's a bit corny. Well, it is corny, because it's something that could have come out of, I don't know, a 19th century story. A rich man, unnoticed, picks up street girl. Do you think that's only a 19th century story? No, it's a much older story. And a much older story. And much younger story. It's a corny element which he manages to suffuse with a new kind of magic. That moment is also much later in the film in what is the breakup scene that precedes the scene in which Susan departs.

38:20The scene where they go on this bizarre camping trip and they're in this tent and Susan, I guess performs the the final psychoanalysis of kane she says you know you've you want people to love you and so you try to buy them you try to possess them in some way but it's at that moment where in this earlier meeting where it feels like there's a genuine connection and that's what's so um touching also just about the naturalism of that set unlike xanadu which is a got set, this is 19th century realism. He says emphatically now and then that he's an American, proud to be an American. Does that signify much? I mean, it means what he says, obviously, but does it matter much? I mean, that was the original title of the screenplay as it was being developed by himself and Mankiewicz.

39:02So why did he drop it? I think just calling it The American, it put too much emphasis on the allegorical, probably, although Citizen Kane has a kind of opacity as a potential kind of allegorical title. But I think there would have been maybe something too heavy handed about that, that would have forced a reading in a particular way. And I think what the film does so brilliantly is it constantly is balancing our interest in this fictional character and wanting to know him in our sense that we're also following an interesting analysis of capitalist American values in the 1930s and 1940s. We know that his film did okay in America. Randall Hearst tried to stop it in its tracks by not letting him be shown in the cinemas he owned, which were

39:45numerous. His writers writing against it and so on and so forth. But it took off later. You say the end of the 50s in Europe. What was it that actually made it take off in the way it did? Because it really took off. Can I scroll back a little bit? By all means. There's a lot of mythology about the film, you know, that Hearst tried to stop it. Well, yes, he did. He used his newspapers. What happened was that MGM, Lowe's, who owned the theatres for MGM, tried to buy the film off RKO. They offered them a lot of money, but RKO stuck to their guns. The cinema owners wouldn't show the film because they were worried about Hearst retaliating through his newspapers. So there's a kind of very complicated power struggle going on.

40:31It doesn't seem very complicated, and if you do that, we aren't showing in my films. That isn't very complicated. It's more that they were anticipating that Hearst would have it in for them. It's a very strange kind of process. Anyway, the film did get seen, obviously. Of course, it's being made during the war. America's in the war. There are certain places the film doesn't go. And so when, for instance, American films from this period suddenly arrive in Europe after the war, it's like a revelation. Well, Britain has seen the films, but especially in France, where suddenly this great blog jam of American films arrives and it blows away French critics who are very attuned to what's happening in Hollywood.

41:09So the film's reputation begins to build in the late 40s and through the 50s. And what's really interesting is that by the end of the 50s, it has become everyone's greatest American film, if not the greatest film of all time. Is that an accretion, Estella, or do you think that's something that was waiting to be revealed? There were critics getting behind it. I think there was a sense in which, as Ian said, there was a kind of European quality to it, i.e. style conveying narrative meaning, which I think made it seem like a kind of much more intellectual work of art, let's say, as opposed to just entertainment. And I think that that sense of it built as more and more people saw it and as they saw, not just as Ian said, you know,

41:56that it kind of led to film noir, perhaps, so it has those terms, but also it definitely captures German expressionist cinema from the 1920s. There's a sense in which there's a richness to it, which by narrowing the focus down to was it or was it not a portrait of William Randolph Hearst, suddenly people saw that there was much more to it, and those were the critics, they were the French critics from the 50s who basically made that case. The thing that I think is so important about what both Stella and Ian are saying is that it has this kind of delayed appearance on the European scene and interestingly it appears alongside neorealism. And it's the French critics that are responding to Kane at the same time that

42:44they're seeing Rossellini's Paella or Germany Year Zero at the same time. So it has this, its reception, its delayed reception allows it to be received at the same time as what was felt to be the newest of new cinemas coming out of Europe, and interestingly coming out of Italy, given its emerging out of 20 years of fascism. So this reception, and I guess, I don't know if this is too specific, but the main critic who I think really creates the fortunes for this is a man named Andre Bazin, who goes on to write a small book on Wells, which is full of all kinds of interesting factual errors, actually. But it's really Bazin who, in a a sense I think bestows more than any other critic gives the film and draws

43:27attention, gives it its world historical significance and draws attention in particular to its cinematography and in particular this depth of focus and these low angle shots that we've been talking about So what do you think the film did for cinema as an art form in Europe and so on? It actually suggested, it actually made the case for cinema as an art form in Europe and so on? It actually suggested, it actually made the case for cinema as art, which... And other films not done there? Hollywood films, much less, you know what I mean? I do think that there was a sense in which commercial cinema was that it's a false dichotomy between commercial cinema and art cinema, but I think what Kane did was to say you can be both.

44:08I mean, obviously, commercially it wasn't that successful, but it was a studio movie. And with that came a real European sensibility, which was that film was there to be intellectually engaging, psychologically engaging, complex. When you finish watching Citizen Kane, you can't but want to go back and to see whether you've missed things. And so there's that sense of it as something rather like a great painting, rather like a great sonata, that every time you go back to it, you pick out and you learn something new. We're coming to the end now, Ian. I think there's another component of the enormous reputation that the film has by the beginning of the 60s, certainly, and that's the fact that Wells himself had become an outcast,

44:58and Wells was seen as a sort of sacrificial goat. He's a man who had risked everything, made the film he wanted to make, and after that he never had control of a film again. So the fact that it was a downwards slope from this point onwards... He made some good films, though. He made some great films, but they were made with compromises. They were edited against his wishes. His next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, was butchered while he was away on a promotional tour. But was Touch of Evil, for example, Butchered or Third Man? No. Third Man he acts in, of course, rather wonderfully and wrote his own scenes and so forth. Yes, exactly. No, but I think it's important, this sort of sense, and it plays up what Cello was saying.

45:41He is seen as somebody who Hollywood has spat out. Hollywood can't cope with Wells and therefore that makes him a potential hero figure to some extent in Europe because he's somebody who has shown what it can achieve, what Hollywood can achieve, but has then been rejected. That helps the reputation of Citizen Kane as the film, the one film that was his shining achievement. You want to comment? Just the other place that we could think about the film is it's very much a narrative film that is about shining achievement. You want to come in? Just the other place that we could think about the film is, you know, it's very much a narrative film that is about narrative. And I think it is the Hollywood film that more than any other assumes its place alongside

46:14Faulkner, Dos Passos and the other experimenters with narrative and narration in this period. So suddenly we have a Hollywood film that has the same aesthetic significance as the modernist novel. So I think that's also the other context that we haven't really discussed is the context of the literary, because Wells is obviously just absolutely saturated, immersed in both the European and the American literary tradition and has collaborated with some of the major literary figures of his day. So I think that's one of its, I think, and I think particularly on the experiment with narration is where that affinity comes most into view. It's such a shame that Kane had the troubled history it did. I mean,

46:54Orson Welles himself didn't like really talking about the effect it had on his career. He basically sort of said it was sort of downhill from that point that he spent, I think he describes at one point, that throughout his career, 98% hustler, 2% filmmaker, that he couldn't actually do what he wanted to do. He was begging for money. Yes, people did. I mean, you know, Touch of Evil was a fantastic film, though it was edited by someone else, and then we get the Director's Cut much later. This real genius who did these amazing Shakespeare productions, for example, was effectively silent so much at the time. Finally, yeah. It's an astonishing survivor as a film, isn't it? Because although it had this troubled start,

47:44and it was canonised as the greatest film in the world in a poll in 1962, and it stayed there for 40 years, and it's still a reference point. There was another poll just recently when it's still number three. This is an extraordinary survival, and I think it is an astonishing film. It's a very modern film, and I think J.D. is. It's a very modern film. And I think J.D. is absolutely right when he compares it with modernist American literature. At last, it was a film coming out of America which seemed to be the equal of the great American modernist writers. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thank you, Stella Muzzi, John David Rhodes, and Ian Christie, and our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram.

48:24Next week, Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, her last and some argue her best. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Would you mind talking more about it? Extra. Extra time. I actually read all about it. The representation of women is... I mean, Susan, the opera scenes, she's made to look like a grotesque gargoyle with everyone laughing at her, and it's painful to watch. But isn't it supposed to be painful? It is supposed to be painful, but there's little redemption. I feel that it's a very masculine, it's a very gendered film, it's very male, and I just feel that there is a sense... Let's go back to Susan.

49:14She can't sing, she's got a voice, but she can't sing grand opera. Yeah, she's not Florence Foster Jenkins, she's not as bad as... Anyway. It does allow us, I think it gives an opportunity for her to stage her resistance and she does leave, which is something a lot of women don't do and didn't do. I mean, in that sense, we clearly see his sadism as sadism. It doesn't mean it's pleasant to watch when he's basically putting her in this abusive situation. But you feel like, I think, we don't identify with him in that position we identify with her I think. If the core of the film psychologically is that the young Charles Kane has been taken from his mother he's got two very troubled relationships

49:59with his first wife who is a social success as it were and is not in tune with his thrusting ambition. his first wife, who is a social success, as it were, and is not in tune with his thrusting ambition. I think one of the great sequences in the film is the disintegration of their marriage. They whip pans that show us their breakfast meetings getting shorter and shorter and shorter, and it's a brilliant passage. And it's echoed, in a way, filmically, by the great scene of Susan's humiliation when we see her on stage in this opera that's been concocted for her. And the camera just goes up and up and up and up and up into the flies. And we see the stagehands looking down and shaking their heads.

50:40And holding their noses. These are two of the greatest cinematic moments, I think, in the film. And they're actually about his inability to form constructive, proper relationships with women. I mean, you could say, and Laura Mulvey has argued this in her book on the film, you could say that that's the whole issue. The issue is that he, having been taken from his mother, he can never form a proper relationship with a woman again. And we see two very improper relationships, two unsatisfactory, botched relationships. Despite the fact that when he starts with Susan, you do have hope there because there is the link back to the mother. It's interesting, when you do have hope, it begins again as realism.

51:23You know, it doesn't begin... You know, so it establishes, like, this very kind of familiar texture. interesting when you do have hope it begins again as realism you know it doesn't begin you know so it establishes like this very kind of familiar texture the the decoration and the set design of her apartment is so perfectly naturalistic and so it seems like you know aha like it's going to be the everydayness of um this life that might give rise to a better version of the story that's been told so far. And then, of course, it collapses back into the Gothic again. You mentioned the art direction. I think the one thing that never gets the credit that it deserves, and this came out only very, very late

51:55in the history of people writing about the film, trying to find out what really happened. We now know that the art director was Perry Ferguson. His name has never been much discussed. Why not? There's a tradition in Hollywood that the head of the art department got their name on every film, so that the formal name on the film is the name of someone who didn't play any part in the making of the film at all. It's an old tradition in Hollywood. It's really difficult to find out who actually designed the set, who did the drawings, and even more difficult to find out who was the set decorator because the set decoration, you picked out the scene in Susan's room, the set decoration throughout is spectacular, unbelievable.

52:35It's a film of objects, it's a film of decor, many, many decors, and that has never been properly celebrated. It's all seen as down to Wells. Wells didn't put those things there. He had a fabulous art department ready and willing to answer his wishes. Yes, because there's that. I mean, one of the things that the, you know, Susan's bedroom in Xanadu, it's so different from the monumental Xanadu elsewhere. It's so feminine in the sense that it's very small. You feel, you know, the ceiling seems artificially low. It's crammed full of objects. And then for that all to be trashed, it's a really interesting moment. So you think, no, this is actually a room that's breathing, you know, that's got life in it.

53:21The others are so artificial. And yes, you're right, Ian, there is such precision. I can't think of a moment in Kane when something seems to jar or something you think, they should have done that a bit more carefully. They should have, especially when it comes to decor sets, there is such thought has gone into every single moment. One of the ways it kept to budget, because as Ian's pointed out, it's mythical that it overran its budget and that Wells was undisciplined in pecuniary matters because actually it was fairly well kept to it. And one of the ways it did that was through set design and through the very clever reuse of all kinds of sets from other productions at RKO. So when you're seeing Xanadu,

54:04and often if you look closely, you'll see that sort of towards the back of the scene, there'll suddenly be a bunch of drapes, or the image kind of goes into a kind of unreadable obscurity. And that's where there's just this kind of clever use of cinematography and a reuse of props and sets that allows for it to mount this image of scale that didn't actually exist. So that's another way. It's not only kind of sort of exquisite, it was also financially very clever and was crucial to its, you know, kind of... And that was the one thing that Wells hadn't had experience of doing because if you look at the pictures of his famous productions, they're really quite sort of monumental. They're spectacular theatre in the 30 of monumental. They're not...

54:45They're spectacular theatre in the 30s style. They're not full of detail. And this was new. He had to fill the frame with detail, and my goodness, he does fill the frame with detail. This is what makes the film so fascinating. To see it on a big screen is to really appreciate that fantastic sort of fetishistic preoccupation with decor. The decor is telling us what is happening to Kay at every stage in the film. Yeah, there's an incredible shot, isn't there? Well, there's an image of him in that fireplace, the biggest fireplace. Yes, the fireplace. You know, dwarfed by this. Up until that point, he's been big. Yeah, you know. But there's the extraordinary cockatoo. I think you want to talk...

55:26You suddenly think, this is a completely different film. That whole sequence is so wild, actually. Like, literally. And not only do you have this close-up of the cockatoo, and that's where I feel like... I was thinking about the film as being... It must be so important to Lynch. I mean, it's a kind of Mulholland Drive with this strange, over-large presence of creatures, objects. And then you have a real cockatoo screeching in incredible close-up that begins that sequence. But then as the sequence goes on, there are these wonderful, absolutely clearly artificial birds flying that are produced through optical printing, flying in the background of the jazz band. And so it wants you to feel so powerfully its own artifice at key moments.

56:14I think that's also a way in which Wells is allowing everyone in a way to get their due, even if the credits don't completely testify to that. He wants you to see the work that goes into producing a Hollywood film. And he wants us to, the people watching. That's what's so amazing, is that it's the dialogue between the film and Wells and us. You know, it's not just about the plot, but it's saying, I want you to be in dialogue with me, to be picking up on these things, not quite knowing what they mean. Did he lose your affection? Did you have any affection for him at the beginning? No, I think Cain, actually, because he feels so lost, I mean, in the scene when Susan's left him and he trashes the bedroom, he doesn't just lose it,

56:57he's also completely lost, he's stumbling around. And actually, just when you want to hate him most, you actually feel the most pity for him and the most sympathy for him. Absolutely. It's a real demonstration of anguish, isn't it? Yeah. It's terrible. He realises what he's lost and what he has lost. When it's too late. You know, a great melodrama moment. It is a melodrama too. It's a deconstructed melodrama. Yeah. I mean, it's spoken to, the thing that I think is funny is that if anyone heard Rosebud, it would be that nurse, but it seems like the nurse is coming in. I mean, unless, you know, it's sort of like who, that word is spoken to us more than it's spoken to anyone. And actually part of the whole conceit of the film

57:47is that someone would have overheard this. But if you actually, what the film offers us evidence of is actually the nurse coming in after that word's already been uttered. So if it doesn't really quite explain how we even know that this was his last word, so the whole thing hinges on a kind of impossibility. Yes, and there's the close-up of the male, so it's just to us. So we want to know, and then we do, funnily enough, we get to know, but by knowing what Rosebud is, we kind of don't know anything. I mean, that's the other thing I think is just, the film ends and begins in the same way. So it's, I think we have to see it as a chiasmus and i was trying to think of other films that do like that that that that come full circle or

58:31reflections of themselves yeah i think our producers longing to burst through the door fine just making sure anyone to your coffee i know one piece got to go i'm a tea please i've got an opera to go to and then I'll have to screw it up. Three teas. Would you like a tea? No, I won't. No? Okay. Thank you for listening to this archive episode of In Our Time. Every Monday I revisit one of more than a thousand episodes in our archive and on Thursdays you'll still find brand new episodes of In Our Time. Listen first on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This cultural life from BBC Radio 4. I will never go into anything so deep like that again. The world's leading artistic figures reveal their creative influences.

59:18Disobey, disagree, disavow. I'm John Wilson and my recent guests have included the sculptor Anish Kapoor, photographer Annie Leibovitz, the actor Kristen Scott Thomas. It has made me good at telling stories about people who have a secret suffering. And former children's laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce. If art's got one function it's to point to what's wonderful and say look this is your world it's insane. Listen to This Cultural Life on BBC Sounds. Sometimes we all need an extra help in hand, especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is an AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions.

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