Arkansas Society for Cinema and Television Production (ASCTP)

(a Non-Profit Education Corporation)

contact: Gary William Jones gary@jonesfilmvideo.com

Glossary of Film Terms: http://www.filmsite.org/filmterms1.html

RTV 3303-001 Spring 2010 Class #6 Citizen Kane (1941)

Chapter 10: Orson Welles and the Modern Sound Film

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, Third Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

Welles claimed that his only preparation for directing Citizen Kane was to watch John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939)…If Kane’s narrative economy owes much to the example of Ford, its visual texture is heavily indebted to the chiaroscuro lighting of Lang, the fluid camera of Murnau, the baroque mise-en-scene of von Sternberg, and the deep-focus realism of Renoir…But Welles’ greatest single technical asset in the filming of Kane was his brilliant director of photography, Gregg Toland (1904-48). (p. 394)

…Toland perfected for Welles a method of deep-focus photography capable of achieving an unprecedented depth of field…Welles’ use of the deep-focus sequence shot in Kane demonstrated an absolute mastery of composition in depth. Like Renoir, he used the deep-focus format functionally, to develop scenes without resorting to montage, but he also used it expressively—as Eisenstein had used montage—to create metaphors for things that the cinema cannot represent directly on the screen. (pp. 394-5)

Kane is a film of much fluid intraframe movement…Other remarkable aspects of this wholly remarkable film are its expressive chiaroscuro lighting and frequent use of extreme low-angle photography in connection with the figure of Kane….Finally, and most significantly, attention must be called to Kane’s innovative use of sound. (p.396)

…Citizen Kane was a radically experimental film—fully twenty years ahead of its time—and was widely recognized as such by American critics. ZBut it failed at the box office less because of its experimental nature than because of an aura of fear in Hollywwod created by attacks on Welles and RKO in the Hearst press…The film’s impact did not begin to be felt until after the war, when its use of low-key lighting and wide-angle lenses to achieve greater depth of field influenced the visual style of American film noir and its flashback narrative technique began to be imitated in more conventional films…(p. 409)

Kane’s most important and pervasive influence, howe3ver, did not begin to be felt until the mid-fifties, after the advent of the widescreen processes, when European critics—notably Bazin—discovered in it…the model for a new film aesthetic based not upon montage, but the disposition of space within the frame, or mise-en-scene. Welles is today regarded for all practical purposes as the founder and master of this aesthetic (in the same way that Eisenstein is regarded as the founder and master of montage)…Kane was the first recognizably modern sound film; and it stood in the same relationship to its medium in 1941 as did The Birth of a Nation in 1914 and Potemkin in 1925—that is, it was an achievement in the development of narrative form, years in advance of its time, which significantly influenced most of the important films that followed it. (p.410)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Welles

(Biographical excerpts on Wikipedia entry for ORSON WELLES:)

George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985), best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, writer, actor, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television, and radio. Noted for his innovative dramatic productions as well as his distinctive voice and personality, Welles is widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished dramatic artists of the twentieth century, in spite of the failure of many film projects after his impressive initial debut.

Welles first found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds which, performed in the style of a news broadcast, caused widespread panic when listeners thought that a extraterrestrial invasion was occurring and being reported by newscasters. His first two films with RKO, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, are widely considered two of the greatest films ever made. Several of his other films, particularly Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight, are also considered masterpieces by many.[1][2] In 2002 he was voted the greatest film director of all time in the British Film Institute's poll of Top Ten Directors.[3][4]

Welles also was an accomplished magician, starring in troop variety spectacles in the war years.

Youth and early career (1915–1934)

Welles was born May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin and was brought up as a Roman Catholic. He had English ancestry.^{[citation needed]} Despite his parents' affluence, Welles encountered many hardships in childhood. In 1919, his parents separated and moved to Chicago. His father, Richard Head Welles, who had made a fortune as the inventor of a popular bicycle lamp,[5] became an alcoholic and stopped working. Welles's mother, Beatrice (née Ives), a trained concert pianist, played during lectures by Dr. Dudley Crafts Watson at the Chicago Art Institute to support her son and herself. (The oldest Welles boy, "Dickie" had been institutionalized at an early age because he was, in the terms of the day, "not fully baked.") Beatrice died of jaundice on May 10, 1924, in a Chicago hospital, four days after Welles's ninth birthday.[6] After his mother's death, Welles ceased pursuing his interest in music. He was taken in by Dr. Dudley Crafts Watson, and lived with the family at Dr. Watson's family home, "Trillium Dell", on Marshman Avenue in Highland Park, Illinois. At the age of ten, Orson, along with Dr. Watson's third daughter, Marjorie (of the same age) ran away from home. They were found a week later, singing and dancing for money on a street corner in Milwaukee. His father died when Orson was fifteen – during the summer after Orson's graduation from Todd School for Boys, an independent school in Woodstock, Illinois – whereupon Maurice Bernstein, a physician from Chicago, became his guardian.

At Todd School, Welles came under the positive influence and guidance of Roger Hill, a teacher who later became Todd's headmaster. Hill provided Welles with an ad hoc educational environment that proved invaluable to his creative experience, allowing Welles to concentrate on subjects that interested him. Welles performed and staged his first theatrical experiments and productions there.

After his father's death, Welles traveled to Europe with the aid of a small inheritance. Welles later reported that while on a walking and painting trip through Ireland, he strode into the Gate Theatre in Dublin and claimed he was a Broadway star. The manager of Gate, Hilton Edwards, later said he didn't believe him, but was impressed by his brashness and some impassioned quality in his audition.^{[citation needed]} Welles made his stage debut at the Gate in 1931, appearing in Jew Suss as the Duke. He acted to great acclaim, which reached the United States. He performed smaller supporting roles as well. On returning to the United States he found his fame ephemeral and turned to a writing project at Todd School that would become the immensely successful Everybody's Shakespeare, and subsequently, The Mercury Shakespeare. Welles traveled to North Africa while working on thousands of illustrations for the Everybody's Shakespeare series of educational books, a series that remained in print for decades.

An introduction by Thornton Wilder led Welles to the New York stage. In 1933, he toured in three off-Broadway productions with Katharine Cornell's company, including two roles in Romeo and Juliet.[7] Restless and impatient when the planned Broadway opening of Romeo and Juliet was canceled, Welles staged a drama festival of his own with the Todd School, inviting Micheál MacLíammóir and Hilton Edwards from Dublin's Gate Theatre to appear, along with New York stage luminaries. It was a roaring success. The subsequent revival of Romeo and Juliet brought Welles to the notice of John Houseman, who was casting for an unusual lead actor for the lead role in the Federal Theatre Project.

By 1935 Welles was supplementing his earnings in the theater as a radio actor in Manhattan, working with many of the actors who would later form the core of his Mercury Theatre. He married Chicago actress Virginia Nicholson in 1934; and that same year he shot an eight-minute silent short film, The Hearts of Age with her. The couple had one daughter, Christopher. She made her only film appearance in 1948, taking the role of Macduff’s son in Welles' film Macbeth and later became known as Chris Welles Feder, an author of educational materials for children.

Renown in theater and radio (1936–1940)

In 1936, the Federal Theatre Project (part of Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration) put unemployed theater performers and employees to work. Welles was hired by John Houseman and assigned to direct a play for the Federal Theatre Project's Negro Theater Unit. He offered them Macbeth,[8] in a production that became known as the Voodoo Macbeth, because Welles set it in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe, with voodoo witch doctors for the three Weird Sisters. Jack Carter played Macbeth. The incidental music was composed by Virgil Thomson

. The play was received rapturously and later toured the nation. When the lead actor, Maurice Ellis, fell ill on tour, Welles quickly boarded an airplane to fly to the location, and stepped into the part playing the role in blackface.[9] At the age of twenty, Welles was hailed as a prodigy. A few minutes of the Welles production of Macbeth was recorded on film in a 1937 documentary called We Work Again.[10]

The Cradle Will Rock

After the success of Macbeth, Welles mounted the absurd farce Horse Eats Hat. He consolidated his "White Hope" reputation with Dr Faustus which used light as a prime unifying scenic element in a nearly blacked-out stage. In 1937, he rehearsed Marc Blitzstein's highly political operetta, The Cradle Will Rock. Because of severe federal cutbacks in the Works Progress projects, the show's premiere at the Maxine Elliott Theatre was canceled. The theater was locked and guarded to prevent any of the government-purchased materials being used for a commercial production of the work. In a last-minute move Welles announced to waiting ticket-holders that the show was being transferred to the Venice, about twenty blocks away. Some cast, as well as some crew and audience walked the distance on foot. The union musicians refused to perform in a commercial theater for lower non-union government wages. The actors' union stated that the production belonged to the federal theater project and could not be performed outside that context without permission. Lacking the participation of the union members, The Cradle Will Rock began with Blitzstein introducing the show and playing the piano accompaniment on stage, with some cast members performing their parts from the audience. This impromptu performance was well received by its audience. It afterward played at the Venice for two weeks in the same informal circumstances as the first performance.

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Mercury Theatre

Resigning from the Federal Theatre, Welles and Houseman formed their own company, the Mercury Theatre, which eventually included actors such as Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Cotten, Dolores del Río, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Frank Readick, Everett Sloane, Eustace Wyatt, and Erskine Sanford, all of whom would continue to work for Welles for years. The first Mercury Theatre production was a melodramatic and heavily edited version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, set in a contemporary frame of fascist Italy. Cinna the Poet dies at the hands not of a mob, but of a secret police force. According to Norman Lloyd, who played Cinna, "it stopped the show". The applause lasted more than three minutes and the production was widely acclaimed.

In the second year of the Mercury Theater, Welles shifted his interests to radio, as an actor, director, and producer. He played Hamlet for CBS on The Columbia Workshop, while adapting and directing the play. The Mutual Network gave him a seven-week series to adapt Les Misérables, which he did with great success. In late 1937, Mutual chose Welles to play Lamont Cranston The Shadow anonymously, and in the summer of 1938 CBS gave him (and the Mercury Theatre) a weekly hour-long show to broadcast radio plays based on classic literary works. The show was titled The Mercury Theatre on the Air, with original music by Bernard Herrmann, who would continue working with Welles on radio and in films for years.

War of the Worlds

Their October 30, 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells brought Welles prominence and instant fame on both a national and international level. The combination of the news bulletin format of the performance with the between-breaks dial spinning habits of listeners from the rival and far more popular Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy program, created widespread confusion among listeners who failed to hear the introduction. Panic spread among many listeners who believed the news reports of a Martian invasion. The resulting panic created by the combination was reported around the world and disparagingly mentioned by Adolf Hitler in a public speech a few months later.[11]

Welles's growing fame soon drew Hollywood offers, lures which the independent-minded Welles resisted at first. The Mercury Theatre on the Air, which had been a "sustaining show" (without sponsorship) was picked up by Campbell Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse, however.[12]

Welles in Hollywood (1939–1948)

RKO Pictures president George Schaefer eventually offered Welles what generally is considered the greatest contract ever offered to an untried director: complete artistic control. RKO signed Welles in a two-picture deal; including script, cast, crew, and most importantly, final cut, although Welles had a budget limit for his projects. With this contract in hand, Welles (and nearly the entire Mercury Theatre troupe) moved to Hollywood. He commuted weekly to New York to maintain his commitment to The Campbell Playhouse.

Welles toyed with various ideas for his first project for RKO Pictures, settling on an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which he worked on in great detail. He planned to film the action with a subjective camera from the protagonist's point of view. When a budget was drawn up, RKO's enthusiasm cooled, because it was greater than the previously agreed limit. RKO also declined to approve another Welles project, The Smiler with the Knife, ostensibly because they lacked faith in Lucille Ball's ability to carry the leading lady role.

In a sign of things to come, Welles left The Campbell Playhouse in 1940, due to creative differences with the sponsor. The show continued without him, produced by John Houseman. In perhaps another sign of things to come, Welles's first experience on a Hollywood film wound up being as narrator for RKO's 1940 production of The Swiss Family Robinson.

Citizen Kane

RKO, having rejected Welles' first two movie proposals, finally agreed on the third offer, Citizen Kane, which Welles co-wrote, produced, directed, and performed the lead role.[13]

Welles found a suitable film project in an idea he conceived with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, (who was then writing radio plays for The Campbell Playhouse). Initially entitled, American, it eventually became Welles's first feature film (also his most famous and honored role), Citizen Kane (1941).

Mankiewicz, Welles's collaborator, based his original notion on an exposé of the life of William Randolph Hearst, whom he knew socially, but now hated, having once been great friends with Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. Mankiewicz currently was banished from her company because of his perpetual drunkenness. Mankiewicz, a notorious gossip, exacted revenge with his unflattering depiction of Davies in Citizen Kane for which Welles bore most of the criticisms; Welles also had a connection with Davies through his first wife. Kane's megalomaniacal personality also was modeled loosely on Robert McCormick, Howard Hughes, and Joseph Pulitzer, as Welles wanted to create a broad, complex character, intending to show the character in the same scenes from several points of view. The use of multiple narrative perspectives in Conrad's Heart of Darkness influenced the treatment. Supplying Mankiewicz with 300 pages of notes, Welles urged him to write the first draft of a screenplay under the watchful nursing of John Houseman, who was posted to ensure Mankiewicz stayed sober. On Welles's instruction, Houseman wrote the opening narration as a pastiche of The March of Time newsreels. Orson Welles explained to Peter Bogdanovich about the writers' working separately by saying, "I left him on his own finally, because we'd started to waste too much time haggling. So, after mutual agreements on storyline and character, Mank went off with Houseman and did his version, while I stayed in Hollywood and wrote mine."[13] Taking these drafts, Welles drastically condensed and rearranged them, then added scenes of his own. The industry accused Welles of underplaying Mankiewicz's contribution to the script, but Welles counteracted the attacks by saying, "At the end, naturally, I was the one making the picture, after all--who had to make the decisions. I used what I wanted of Mank's and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own."

The resulting character of Charles Foster Kane is based loosely on parts of Hearst's life as well. Nonetheless, autobiographical allusions to Welles were worked in, most noticeably in the treatment of Kane's childhood and particularly, regarding his guardianship. Welles then added features from other famous American lives to create a general and mysterious personality rather than the narrow journalistic portrait intended by Mankiewicz, whose first drafts included scandalous claims about the death of the film director Thomas Ince.

Once the script was completed, Welles attracted some of Hollywood's best technicians, including cinematographer Gregg Toland, who walked into Welles's office and announced he wanted to work on the picture. Welles later described Toland as "the fastest cameraman who ever lived."[14] For the cast, Welles primarily used actors from his Mercury Theatre. He invited suggestions from everyone, but only if they were directed through him. Filming Citizen Kane took ten weeks.[13]

Mankiewicz handed a copy of the final shooting script to his friend, Charles Lederer, now husband of Welles's ex-wife, Virginia Nicholson, as well as being the nephew of Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper saw a small ad in a newspaper for a preview screening of Citizen Kane and went. Hopper, realizing immediately that the film was based on features of Hearst's life, reported this back to him and threatened to give "Hollywood, Private Lives" if that was what it wanted. Thus began the struggle over the attempted suppression of Citizen Kane.

Hearst's media outlets boycotted the film. They exerted enormous pressure on the Hollywood film community by threatening to expose fifteen years of suppressed scandals and the fact that most of the studio bosses were Jewish. At one point, the heads of the major studios jointly offered RKO the cost of the film in exchange for the negative and all existing prints, fully intending to burn them. RKO declined, and the film was given a limited release. Meanwhile, Hearst successfully intimidated theater chains by threatening to ban advertising for any of their other films in any of his papers, if they showed Citizen Kane.

While the film was well-received critically, by the time it reached the general public, the positive tide of publicity had waned. It garnered nine Academy Award nominations (Orson nominated as a producer, director, writer, and actor), but won only for Best Original Screenplay, shared by Mankiewicz and Welles. Although it basically was ignored at the Academy Awards, Citizen Kane now is hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Andrew Sarris called it "the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since The Birth of a Nation."[13] The delay in its release and its uneven distribution contributed to its average result at the box-office, making back its budget and marketing, but RKO lost any chance of a major profit. The fact that Citizen Kane ignored many Hollywood conventions also meant that the film confused and angered the 1940s cinema public. Exhibitor response was scathing; most theater owners complained bitterly about the adverse audience reaction and the many walkouts. Only a few saw fit to acknowledge Welles's artistic technique. RKO shelved the film and did not re-release it until 1956.

During the 1950s, the film came to be seen by young French film critics such as François Truffaut as exemplifying the "auteur theory", in which the director is the "author" of a film. Truffaut, Godard and others inspired by Welles's example, were to make their own films, giving birth to the Nouvelle Vague. In the 1960s Citizen Kane became popular on college campuses, both as a film-study exercise and as an entertainment subject. Its frequent revivals on television, home video, and DVD have enhanced its "classic" status, and ultimately, it recouped its costs. The film still is considered by most film critics and historians to be one of the greatest motion pictures in cinema history.