Great art isn’t always about betrayal, but the two go together more than you might expect. In the case of one of the world’s most admired films, the stab in the back went deep, and if you accept the backstory given here, reaped its karmic reward with interest.
The shooting script for 1941’s Citizen Kane is combined with a groundbreaking essay on the film and its creation by Pauline Kael, longtime movie critic for The New Yorker. While no substitute for watching the film, the book makes fascinating supplemental material.
Kael’s essay, originally published in consecutive issues of her magazine, got most of the attention when the book was published in 1971. While praising the film on the whole, Kael made clear its greatness in written form was the work of Herman J. Mankiewicz rather than the film’s director and star, Orson Welles.
The screen credit lists both men as writers; don’t believe it, says Kael:
Orson Welles wasn’t around when Citizen Kane was written, early in 1940….Welles was so deeply entangled in the radio shows and other activities and a romance with Dolores Del Rio at the time the script was being prepared that even when he came to dinner at Victorville [where Mankiewicz was being kept by Welles’s associates in sober seclusion], it was mainly a social visit; the secretary didn’t meet him until after Mankiewicz had finished dictating the long first draft.
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| Orson Welles and Joseph Mankiewicz share screenwriting credit for Citizen Kane, something Pauline Kael claims Welles did not deserve. She writes: "Very early in his life as a prodigy, Welles seems to have fallen in the trap that has caught so many lesser men – believing his own publicity." Image from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/herman-mankiewicz-pauline-kael-and-the-battle-over-citizen-kane |
She goes on to claim the seed of Mankiewicz’s creation was planted in the 1930s, back when he was a hot new writer and the toast of Hollywood’s smart set. He frequently attended parties, including several thrown by the publisher William Randolph Hearst. While Hearst disdained boozing in his presence, the often self-destructive Mankiewicz counted on Hearst’s kind mistress, Marion Davies, for a drink on the sly.
Years later, when Mankiewicz seized on the idea of a movie script about Hearst, he used Davies as a key plot point. She became the under-talented singer Susan Alexander, a publisher’s plaything drinking away her sorrows. Not only did this betray a friend, it misrepresented both her career and her deeper role in her lover Hearst’s life.
“One can sometimes hurt one’s enemies,” Kael observes, “but that’s nothing compared to what one can do to one’s friends.”
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| Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst attend a social function in 1942, the year after Citizen Kane. According to Kael, Marion was sent a copy of the movie script before its release, which in turn prompted Hearst to try to squelch the film. Unlike her film counterpart, Davies stayed with her man until his death. Image from https://allthatsinteresting.com/marion-davies |
Hearst himself is not mentioned in the finished film, but his name appears several times in the shooting script, beginning at the start:
NARRATOR: Among publishers, second only to James Gordon Bennett the First; his dashing expatriate son; England’s Northcliffe and Beaverbrook; Chicago’s Patterson and McCormick; Denver’s Bonfils and Sommes; New York’s late great Joseph Pulitzer; America’s emperor of the news syndicate, another editorialist and landlord, the still mighty and once mightier Hearst…
Later, the script touches on Hearst’s legacy as a yellow journalist whose meddling helped touch off the Spanish-American War:
KANE: Jed, how would the Inquirer look with no news about this nonexistent war with Pulitzer and Hearst devoting twenty columns a day to it.
LELAND: They only do it because you do.
KANE: And I only do it because they do it – and they only do it – it’s a vicious circle, isn’t it?
All this got scrubbed before the movie was released to the public, along with a bordello scene that Kael suggests was put in just to give the censorious Hays Office something to do.
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| What survives of the bordello scene in the finished film. Kane dances with chorus girls in the background at the Inquirer newspaper office while Joseph Cotton as Leland and Everett Sloane as Bernstein talk in the foreground. Image from https://www.ptsnob.com/2013/07/ill-provide-war-journalism-in-citizen.html |
Kael’s contention that Welles did not contribute significantly to the Kane shooting script is, well, contentious. One can see working in her essay the bias of subjective memory, not unlike how characters we meet in the movie describe in different ways the Kane they knew.
Much of Kael’s argument is invoking Welles’s subsequent career:
Welles has never been able to write this kind of vehicle for himself. Kane may be a study of egotism and a movie about money and love, but it isn’t just another movie about a rich man who isn’t loved; it’s a scandalously unauthorized, muckraking biography of a man who was still alive and – though past his peak influence – still powerful, so it conveyed shock and danger, and it drew its strength from its reverberations in the life of the period.
Another contention Kael makes is nearly as bold, yet much harder for her detractors to argue: that Citizen Kane, for all its greatness, is a “shallow masterpiece.” Its brilliance lies largely on the surface.
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| Pauline Kael poses for photographer Jill Krementz at her office in 1980. Kael had by then established herself simultaneously as champion and antagonist of maverick film directors, a reputation which her "Raising Kane" essay helped to cement. Image from http://www.thebetamaxrevolt.com/2012/04/pauline-kael-i-talk-about-you-too-much.html |
On this, she’s right. The shooting script reads like a well-written comic book, its emphasis on motion and snappy banter rather than character detail. Not that it is a thin piece of writing. Stretched out over 200 pages, with ample stills from the film, the shooting script offers many tangents.
The silent, moody opening, which lasts about a minute and a half on screen, really benefits from the deft touch of whoever wrote it. One part reminds me of another famous director, Stanley Kubrick, and his cinematic milestone, 2001: A Space Odyssey:
5 The Monkey Terrace (Miniature)
In the f.g., a great obscene ape is outlined against the dawn murk. He is scratching himself slowly, thoughtfully, looking out across the estates of Charles Foster Kane, to the distant light glowing in the castle on the hill.
Comedy was Mankiewicz’s forte back in the 1930s, having worked on successful films with the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields. Kael suggests this was also an agenda item for Citizen Kane.
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| Dorothy Comingore as the tonally challenged Susan Alexander embarks on a short-lived opera career. Kael notes that Marion Davies's career was no joke. Her many film comedies were well received and won over a legion of fans, including not only William Randolph Hearst but a young Pauline Kael. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033467/mediaviewer/rm1331435777 |
One line in the original shooting script has Kane take his staff to a rival newspaper with a much larger circulation: “Well, as the rooster said to the hens when they looked at the ostrich eggs – I am not criticizing, ladies – I am merely trying to show you what is being done in the same line by your competitors.”
There is also this exchange between Kane and his first wife, who doesn’t approve of his newspaper’s liberal line:
EMILY: Charles, when people make a point of not having the Inquirer in their homes – Margaret English says that the reading room at the Assembly already has more than forty names that have agreed to cancel the paper –
KANE: That’s wonderful. Mr. Bernstein will be delighted. You see, Emily, when your friends cancel the paper, that just takes another name off our deadbeat list. You know, don’t you, it’s practically a point of honor among the rich not to pay the newsdealer.
While these lines don’t make the final film, they show what Kael identifies as a key Mankiewicz contribution, a sharp, cynical wit.
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| Despite her withering take on Welles's authorship of Kane, Kael has only high praise for his acting and direction. "Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened," is how her "Raising Kane" essay begins. Image from https://www.posterazzi.com/citizen-kane-us-poster-orson-welles-1941-movie-poster-masterprint-item-varevcmsdcikaec002h/ |
What about Welles? If Kael’s essay doesn’t come out and call him a great pretender, it swings pretty close. She claims after picking up Mankiewicz’s script with little input of his own, Welles tried to buy him off without a screen credit. “There’s no doubt that Welles – the fabulous Orson Welles – wasn’t accustomed to sharing credit,” she sneers.
Kael’s opinionated manner does not always win me over – she takes many detours in her long essay, quite a contrast from the tight script it is paired with here. She spends much time on Mankiewicz’s eventual fall from grace, pushing an argument that he was bent on self-destruction. His life ended badly, but I’m not sure Kane made a difference in that.
The joy for me of reading Kael is not in her concision, or her accuracy. I have no doubt she oversells Mankiewicz as author of Kane at Welles’s unfair expense. If Welles never produced another film on par with Kane – a fair if suspect contention – neither did Mankiewicz.
What she did so well was express compelling ideas about film in a way that made you feel you were in the know. As a critic, she was outspoken on the need to avoid a dry, term-paper approach. Raising Kane, for all its hubris and shiftiness, is a dazzling joyride across the art of cinema.
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| One of many famous shots from Citizen Kane, of the tycoon, now alone in his stately palace, accompanied only by his reflections. Kael notes a debt in these scenes to another film shot by cinematographer Gregg Toland, Mad Love with Peter Lorre. Image from https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-citizen-kane-1941 |
So is the shooting script for the film, which carries a sense of motion in its many set-ups and quotable lines, many of which do appear in the film intact. Like Bernstein’s anecdote about a girl he once saw on the New Jersey shore, and Kane’s rousing speech against the bosses running the big city (Edward G. Rogers in the script, Jim Gettys in the movie.) Even the sweep of the film is preserved. There is a lot to love here.
What links the Kane script to Kael’s essay lands on a common theme of sad betrayal in pursuit of earthly glories. The shooting script has this from Thompson, the reporter we have watched hunt down the story since the beginning of the film:
THOMPSON: Well – it’s
become a very clear picture. He was the most honest man who ever lived, with a
streak of crookedness a yard wide. He was a liberal and a reactionary. He was a
loving husband – and both his wives left him. He had a gift for friendship such
as few men have – and he broke his oldest friend’s heart like you throw away a
cigarette you were through with.
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