Orson Welles

There is a moment in “Citizen Kane” where the title character, played inimitably by the film’s co-writer and director Orson Welles, states “I don’t know to run a newspaper, I just try everything I can think of”.  Though the film was based predominantly on the life of an infamous newspaper tycoon scattered throughout the screenplay are lines such as these which point to Kane as being something of a self-portrait.  The Charles Foster Kane who is always hungry, the Charles Foster Kane who is an amateur magician, the Charles Foster Kane whose naive genius, when applied to a new artistic endeavour has the effect of breaking all established rules, creating a fresh aesthetic and dramatic paradigm, is less William Randolph Heart than he is George Orson Welles.

That Welles was a genius has become a truism.  He was probably the greatest director the medium has ever seen, possessing an all-round talent matched only by his one time friend Charles Chaplin.  Unfortunately an intrinsic part of his makeup courted disaster: he worked best in a state of chaos, juggling a multitude of projects at once.  For Welles to focus on one thing at a time was too confining, too claustrophobic, an under-utilisation of energy and ability.  In Golden Age Hollywood, tolerant of eccentrics but still very much about bottom line results, this proved his undoing.

The story of Welles in the 1940s is one of rise and fall.  As he himself liked to say in later life, “I started at the top and worked my way down”.  1941’s “Citizen Kane” is the most celebrated debut in history, rated both popularly and critically as the number one film of all time.  Yet by the end of the decade Welles was unemployable as a director in America.

Arriving in Hollywood as the boy wonder of the theatre and the wireless, his reputation sealed by a stunt performance of his namesake’s “War of the Worlds”, a radio show which panicked the country into thinking a real Martian invasion was happening, Welles negotiated an unprecedented contract with RKO Studios, one which guaranteed artistic control of whatever he felt like making.  Giving himself a crash course in a medium in which he had only dabbled as an amateur, he drew on the experience of veterans looking for a challenge such as cinematographer Gregg Toland and writer Herman Mankiewicz.

After a couple of false starts it was Mankiewicz who came up with the idea of a thinly veiled bio pic of his sometime acquaintance and nemesis Hearst.  To take on Hearst was both ambitious and dangerous. The project became an examination of twentieth century mass media and capitalism, a film about power that almost became a victim of the very thing it was exposing when the tycoon attempted to suppress it.

Welles shows little deference to the way movies are conventionally put together.  He cuts directly from a mysterious, impressionistic opening sequence of a dying man into an unprecedented recreation of the contemporary newsreel style.  “Citizen Kane”’s structure becomes one of journalistic inquiry in which acquaintances of the deceased give testimony that gives way to flash black.  The film is an overlapping series of accounts of Kane’s life told in deliberate non-linear order.

The stylistic innovations match the structural and thematic ones.  Deep focus photography unlike any seen before or really since leads to complex spatial arrangements, framing of great dramatic weight and visual power.  The film is equally ground breaking in its editing, set design, optical effects, make up, and Bernard Herrmann’s sensitive score.

Welles’ follow-up to Kane, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons” which he narrated but declined in appear in, could have bettered its more showy predecessor.  Alas, its editing was taken out of Welles’ hands whilst he was gallivanting around Latin America on another project, and it was partially re-shot by others.

The butchery visited upon “Ambersons” proved a template for nearly all his future studio projects.  “It’s All True”, “Journey into Fear”, “MacBeth” and “The Lady from Shanghai” were removed from Welles’ control and released in severely compromised forms.  While with “The Stranger” he proved he could make an efficient, conventional thriller and even turn a modest profit, for someone of his restless abilities the compromise was too great.  At the end of the 1940s Orson Welles left for Europe and became an artist in exile, forever struggling for financial backing.