The Varnished Culture's Thumbnail Reviews

(Dir. Carol Reed) (1949)

Graham Greene once wrote on the back of an envelope;

“I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.”

Thus the idea of a story was born and, although substantially re-jigged later, Greene had the outline and as he claims, “it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story.  Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterisation, on mood and atmosphere; and these seem to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script.”  This seems to us inherently wise but alas, these days, honoured in the breach.

From this promising beginning, and even more fortunately, Alexander Korda wanted to do something based in post-war Vienna, with Carol Reed (Odd Man Out) to direct.  The result was a classic: a hard-bitten, funny and suave account of a hack writer who thinks his old pal Harry Lime is dead and not a monster.

Joseph Cotton has the main role as Holly Martins, author of such masterpieces as The Lone Rider of Santa Fe, Oklahoma Kid and Death at Double XX Ranch but there are several vital roles.  Trevor Howard as Calloway (not Callaghan), hot on Harry’s trail, was never better.  Ernst Deutsch (Baron Kurtz) Siegfried Breuer (Mr Popescu) and Erich Ponto (Dr Winkel) are vivid as members of the Penicillin Gang.

“I never knew there were snake charmers in Texas.”

Alida Valli stubbornly cleaves to Harry’s memory – she is unsurpassed at portraying stubborn doomed devotion and spends a great deal of time ignoring (magnificently) Holly’s attentions.

And of course, the Third Man.  Orson Welles only has a short amount of screen time but he is central as Lime, his first appearance (an hour into the film) momentous, a huge and knowing performance, that features the weighty line (which he wrote into the script): “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly. “*

This bird has flown

The direction, settings about the grand and war-ruined Vienna (streets, sewers, the Wiener Riesenrad, the Casanova Club), and cinematography are superb.  And dig that zither!

(Dir. Orson Welles) (1941)

The Most Famous Best Film in the World.  Stunningly modern, stunningly Big, even today: when the RKO Radio signal and production credit fades, there it is in silently screaming faux neon: CITIZEN KANE.  No film has ever made good on such immense ambition, no film has ever been so radically fresh in structure, tone, staging.  It may take another art form to produce something as pure in its radical and daring arrogance.

Charlie went off to Lord it over the monkeys…

The opening is a morbid montage right out of S.T.Coleridge & Hammer Horror films – a “No Trespassing” sign, unofficial thematic emblem; an ascending cyclone fence, some iron tracery and a gothic pile in the old despotic style, fit for Tamerlane.  An air of desolation and decay (including an abandoned golf course and zoo), redolent of Ozymandias. Fog. Through the fog, sounds the grim Taxi Driver style horns of Bernard Herrmann, homage to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.  Looking up at a high leadlight window, we see the lights go out – from the inside, we see the ambient external light of night dimly alight on an aged bedridden figure of a man.

A snowdrift in a glass, a dying declaration (“Rosebud” – the MacGuffin) and as the snow-globe falls from a dying hand and breaks, a mock newsreel tells us of the key events in the life of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper mogul with a passing resemblance to William Randolph Hearst.

The film thus gives away its ending in the initial minutes but Welles is able to give context and depth to the rest of his story, including establishment of the back story, whilst retaining a sense of suspense via his MacGuffin.

The various scenes in which the reporter, Thompson (William Allard) engages with people from Kane’s past – his school friend and drama critic Jed Leland (Joseph Cotton), his business manager Bernstein (Everett Sloane), his second wife (Dorothy Comingore) and through them, past people, such as his mother (Agnes Moorhead), his guardian Mr Thatcher (George Coulouris) and his first wife (Ruth Warrick) – are potently done, brilliantly scripted and shot (by Gregg Toland) and superbly, dynamically edited (by Robert Wise).  RKO production values were then as good as any and helped create a sense of enormity central to the film.

Orson Welles (b. 6 May 1915) made Citizen Kane (his first film) like the early Kane ran “The Enquirer” – he didn’t know how to do it so he tried everything he knew.  There are theatrical touches that had never been translated to film because of various advantages or disadvantages of that medium.  Welles tried them out.  As a result, despite several accidents on set and interference from RKO’s front office, there is a great freshness yet maturity about the production.  And although Kane is a monster, of course, he somehow, with his faults all on his sleeve and his acknowledged sense of failure and loss, manages to retain our respectful sympathy.

‘He WAS a dirty old man, but ROSEBUD?’

There has been a famous and largely worthless debate over screen credit, in which Herman J Mankiewicz, fearful of being left out, asserted that the script was his.  In fact, it was, but with Welles coming up with the original concept and then working on re-writes for several months before the cameras tentatively commenced to turn in June 1940, the credit to Mankiewicz and Welles would appear to be entirely apt.

‘I wrote the script? HE wrote the script?’

Joseph Cotton is impressive, as a young and old man, but Welles’ other achievements in the film tend to obscure how great he is as Kane, a portrayal from a man in his 20s to one in his dotage, convincing us of Kane’s vitality, ego, arrogance and appetite (qua Welles himself?).

Not all of the performances work.  Some of the key roles are taken by actors mainly versed in radio or theatre and the intimacy of the movie camera seems to have prompted an undue amount of mugging.  Nevertheless, the main film crime is to be boring and the element of caricature does not defeat and may even enhance the overall theatrical effect.

“I get to pretend to act AND sing?”

In her biography of Orson Welles (1985), Barbara Leaming quotes him thus: “I have this terrible sense that a film is dead – that it’s a piece of film in a machine that will be run off and shown to people.  That is why, I think, my films are theatrical, and strongly stated, because I can’t believe that anybody won’t fall asleep unless they are.  There’s an awful lot of Bergman and Antonioni that I’d rather be dead than sit through. For myself, unless a film is hallucinatory, unless it becomes that kind of an experience, it doesn’t come alive.  I know that directors find serious and sensitive audiences for films where people sit around peeling potatoes in the peasant houses – but I can’t read that kind of novel either.  Somebody had to be knocking at the door – I figure that is the way Shakespeare thought…”

How could you visit San Simeon near the Californian coast, north of Los Angeles (see main building and outdoor pool above -indoor pool further below) and draw the conclusion Xanadu (immediately below) bears any resemblance to Hearst’s Castle?

Cheerily at home by hearth

Hearst’s relationship with Marion Davies was eerily similar to the Kane/Susan Alexander affair.  As David Niven remarked in Bring On The Empty Horses, for example, Hearst meddled in her films to an intolerable degree “and usually insisted that somewhere in the picture, however out of place, Marion should sing a song.”

Understatement

Hearst could be kind but he was also ruthless.  One has little difficulty seeing him doing to a friend what Kane does to Leland in the Chicago office of “The Enquirer”, when, in response to Jed’s remarking on the fact they were talking again after years of estrangement, says to him “Sure we’re talking Jedediah…you’re fired.”

In any event, like Charlie, viewers can love this film on their own terms.