 Starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick
Director: Orson Welles
Year Of Release: 1941
Plot: After the death of the fabulously rich newspaper magnate, Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper reporter is assigned to discover the meaning of his final word, “Rosebud”. The reporter interviews various figures from Kane’s life, including his second wife, Susan, and his old friend, Jed Leland, building up a picture of the man’s life and trying to discover who he really was. |
Where to start with Citizen Kane? So much has been written about the movie that it almost seems pointless to add another piece to the throng. In most polls of filmmakers and critics for the last 50 years, it’s been voted the best film ever made. In fact it’s a position it almost has the trademark on.
But exactly why is it considered so good? Most of the people I know who’ve come to Citizen Kane cold have either been underwhelmed by the movie, or else they just thought it was boring. I have to say I was in that camp when I first watched the film. I thought it was good, but couldn’t quite see why so many thought it was so amazing. However over the years I’ve been converted to the cause and each time I watch it I become more and more impressed by the movie.
It is a stunningly well-made flick, where all the different elements, from the script to the direction to the music to the special effects (of which there are far more than you might expect for this type of film), come together to create an amazingly complex and fascinating movie that continually reveals extra layers the more you watch it. However, there really isn’t room here to go into depth about all the reasons it’s considered so good, so instead I thought I’d give you a few things you can say about the film if it ever comes up in conversation, to make you seem all kinds of smart and sophisticated, and as if you know all there is to know about Citizen Kane and why it’s considered the greatest movie ever, whether you know anything about the film or not.
1. Greg Toland’s deep focus photography was revolutionary and ensures Kane looks like no other movie ever made, helping to create framing that has rarely been equalled.
The partnership between top cinematographer Greg Toland and the young wunderkind Orson Welles – who was only 24 when he made Kane – is probably the most important aspect of why Kane is so highly praised. They were an almost unparalleled creative and technical partnership, coming up with numerous innovations for the film that all serve the brilliantly conceived and directed story. For example, coming from the theatre, Kane didn’t like the idea of shots where some people or the background were out of focus, so Toland came up with a way to keep everything in the frame in sharp focus, no matter where you look. This helps to create shots like no other, where everything you see and its position in relation to everything else is used to convey information. Objects placed close-up in the foreground help to tell us about what’s going on with the characters in the mid-ground, while the often deep backgrounds create an incredible sense of space and dimensionality. The distance between characters – sometimes highlighted by one being in the foreground and other in the deep background, but both in sharp focus – is sometimes as important in relaying info about their relationships as the script.
2. One of the reasons many don’t realise how good Citizen Kane is, is how seemingly effortless some of the incredibly complex shots and sequences are, and how much information is packed into less than two hours.
Certain shots and sequences in Citizen Kane seem pretty simple but were actually incredibly complex to put together in order to get them to work the way they do. For example a shot near the beginning where Kane’s parents are discussing sending him off to live somewhere else while Charles plays outside, involves a table that had to break into two pieces so the camera could move forward, and then reassemble moments before Agnes Moorehead sits down at it. Although the scene could have been done with more camera angles and several edits, Welles tried to use as few camera set-ups as possible, instead trying to get as much in the frame as possible in one go. The shot allows us to see Kane’s youthful innocence as he plays outside, juxtaposed with his mother’s seemingly cold decision to send him away, all in the same shot, which adds layers of interest and complexity that it would be difficult to create using more traditional editing and framing techniques.
There’s also the famous breakfast scene, which tells the entire story of a marriage, from youthful happiness to barely disguised hatred. Years of the relationship are covered in what seems to be a single conversation (the seamless edits where dialogue and/or similar framing take us between different scenes, time periods and characters is one of the most impressive aspects of Kane), with the editing and size of the table putting increasing distance between them. The deep focus is also important here, because more and more objects are put in the foreground in between Kane and his wife as the scene goes on, signifying the barriers between them. It’s less than three minutes of absolutely superlative filmmaking that tells you as much info about the marriage as most films can manage in their entire running time.
3. The unique contract Welles had with RKO is one of the most important reasons that Citizen Kane is so unique.
In order to get Welles to come to Hollywood following his success on the stage and in radio, RKO signed an unprecedented contract with the young director, which has rarely been equalled since. While Orson had to agree to write, direct and star in two movies, in return he got complete creative control. The studio got to approve the basic story and budget, but beyond that Welles could do whatever he wanted. It wasn’t only unusual to give anyone that much control over a studio film, but had never happened (and hasn’t since) for someone who’d never made a movie and was only in his mid-20s.
Welles’ youth and inexperience could have been a major problem, but with technical geniuses like Greg Toland signing on to actually create his vision and Welles having the freedom to allow his imagination and astonishing talent go to town, he created a movie that couldn’t have been made under a normal studio contract. If studio execs had been able to step in, they’d have probable balked at just how risky and complex many of the deep focus set-ups were (which is one of the reasons it’s still not used all that much). Even the way the story works – with the narrative jumping backwards and forwards through Kane’s life, and the same events covered from different perspectives – would probably have been vetoed, simply because on paper it’s an incredibly dicey thing to do. After all, this is a movie that tells you the entire story of Kane’s life in a newsreel in the first 10 minutes, and then spends most of the rest of the running time elaborating on things we already know, in order to compare and contrast how different people can see the same person and build up an idea of who Kane was.
4. Whether you agree Citizen Kane is the greatest film or not, it is probably the most influential movie ever, and has had an impact on most major filmmakers from the 1950s onward. So even if not the best film, its influence can be felt throughout modern film.
One of the main arguments against Citizen Kane being the best film ever is that because it’s been seen to hold that position for so long, it’s become so influential that it appears to be the greatest simply because you can see it echoed in so many places. The close-ups of words being written on a typewriter in All The President’s Men came from the same thing happening in Kane. The beginning of Young Frankenstein apes the famous opening montage of Welles’ film. When Barbossa snuff it in the first Pirates Of The Caribbean, it mimics Kane dropping a snowglobe when he dies (even the framing is the same). The newsreel intro at the beginning ofThe Incredibles is similar to the first 10 minutes of Citizen Kane. Even a sled seen in Richard Zemeckis’ recent A Christmas Carol had Rosebud written on it. And those are just a few of the direct references. On a more indirect level, the film’s attitude to framing and direction has been even more influential, to the point where if you watch early Spielberg, you can almost feel him trying to channel Welles in the way he set up shots (he’s one of the few who’s almost as good at framing and shot composition as Orson was on Citizen Kane).
5. If nothing else, Citizen Kane helped kick-start an awful lot of great careers.
Of course, Kane marked Orson Welles film debut, and while he had a very problematic relationship with the big studios forever afterwards – he only directed three more studio films – the likes of The Magnificent Ambersons (even if it was butchered) and Touch Of Evil are still great films, and he acted in many more good movies. Welles also brought many of his Mercury Theatre Company actors to Hollywood for Kane and in doing so launched some distinguished screen careers.
It was only Joseph Cotten’s second movie, but thanks to Citizen Kane he went on to become a popular leading man in the likes of The Third Man. It was also four-time Oscar nominee Agnes Moorehead’s debut (despite her impressive screen career in the likes of Dark Passage, Raintree Country and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, she is probably best known nowadays for playing Endora in Bewitched). The likes of Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane and George Coulouris also went onto great film careers after making their debuts in Citizen Kane.
Behind the camera there was Robert Wise, who acted as editor on the film and went on to become the multi-Oscar winning director of The Day The Earth Stood Still, West Side Story and The Sound Of Music. The film also brought composer Bernard Herrmann to Hollywood for the first time, who’d worked with Welles on some of his earlier stage and radio productions. Herrmann went on to become perhaps the greatest composer cinema has ever seen, writing the music for over 60 movies, including Vertigo (in my opinion the best film score ever written), Psycho, Cape Fear and Taxi Driver.
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As I said, it almost seems pointless starting to write about Citizen Kane, because there’s so much to talk about. I haven’t even got round to the roman a clef storyline, which is partially based on William Randolph Hearst and which resulted in a massive campaign against the film by the newspaper baron (the film wasn’t reviewed in any of Hearst’s titles until the 1970s).
Or there’s the oft-talked about fact that many of the sets had ceilings (which is far more unusual than you might think). This was influenced by John Ford’s work on Stagecoach and came into Kane because it gave a greater sense of depth and also because Welles wanted to use low camera angles to look up at powerful figures and make them seem more isolated (while weaker character are normally shot from above). In fact they were so dedicated to the low camera angles – which ensured the need for ceilings on the sets – that they even went as far as to dig a trench in the stage floor so they could get the camera even lower. Incidentally, if you’ve ever watched the film and wondered why the ceilings seem so low (often only a few inches above the actor’s head), it’s wasn’t an artistic decision, it was because having a roof on the set made it more difficult to place and hide the microphones, so to get the recording equipment close enough to the actors, the ceilings had to be very lowdown.
I know many of you will still wonder what all the fuss is about, and I’m still not convinced it’s genuinely the best movie ever made, but in my mind there’s little doubt that it is a truly great one. Citizen Kane is a film that is a technical marvel, tells a fascinating and complex story in an immensely clever way, features great performance and has some of the best shot composition – and to get poncey for a minute, mise en scene – ever seen in cinema history.
You may not agree, but if you don’t know much about the movie, at least you’ve now got a few things you can say at a dinner party to make you sound like an expert, and suggest you know exactly why people think it’s the best movie ever.
TIM ISAAC
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