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.
