In Our Time - Citizen Kane

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Orson Welles' film, released in 1941, which is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, films yet made. Welles plays the lead role of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate, and Welles directed, produced and co-wrote this story of loneliness at the heart of a megalomaniac. The plot was partly inspired by the life of William Randolph Hearst, who then used the power of his own newspapers to try to suppress the film’s release. It was to take some years before Citizen Kane reached a fuller audience and, from that point, become so celebrated.The image above is of Kane addressing a public meeting while running for Governor.With Stella Bruzzi Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College LondonIan Christie Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of LondonAnd John David Rhodes Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, Citizen Kane released in 1941 is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, films ever made. Orson Wells plays the lead role of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate,

And Wells directed, produced and co-wrote this story of loneliness and megalomania. It was inspired by the life of the mighty William Randolph Hurst, who used the power of his own newspapers to try to suppress the film's release, and it was to take some years before Citizen Kane became the sensation it remains. With me to discuss, Cisdice, Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London, Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London, and John David Rhodes, Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge. J.D. Rhodes, what did Orson Wells done before this that we ought to know about?

I suppose it's where do you start or what didn't he do before that. He was the ultimate wonder child. He was very prodigious, very precocious. He had acted as early as age 16 at the Gate Theatre in Dublin and used that performance as a bit of a calling card when he returned to the US and was sent to New York, basically, to meet Catherine Cornell by Thornton Wilder, who was a family acquaintance. And from there, he toured with Cornell and in a performance of Romeo and Juliet and some other performances that toured and also returned back to New York. I think, more importantly, he became involved in the Federal Theater Project in collaboration with John Hausman,

very famously mounted a production of Macbeth with an all-black cast in Harlem that was set in Haiti. that collaboration during the New Deal also saw the cradle will rock the adjutop-prob musical and he worked in radio as well and he did it and finally in radio most famously War of the Worlds which became obviously a very notorious

program that eventually sent him to Hollywood under the invitation from RKO would you be true to say the War of the Worlds gave him the Tint of a sensational reputation well it certainly made him he was already a celebrity and was already being celebrated

celebrated as a celebrity during the radio and theater years. But then that made him this completely sort of unstoppable force. Also, that's where he honed his sort of reputation as writer, director, producer, and performer. And I think that's one of the important things about the radio history. When he was asked by Archa to do what was to be his first film, he asked for the same thing, control of everything. So how did he assemble the crew? He drew on some of the talents that he had assembled at the Mercury Theater, the repertory theater.

He had run in New York, again with Hausman. So he brought along, it was important to him to bring actors who mostly had not appeared before the camera up until this point. It gave the film an element of, given that we move into the film in this very mysterious way, not meeting very recognizable faces, I think, lends an aura of mystery to the film. So we're seeing Joseph Cotton for more or less the first time on screen, Agnes Moorhead. Dorothy Common Gore, who appeared in bit parts before this film is also relatively unknown. and George Kuloris, also relatively unknown in Hollywood. So I think that there's something important about not being immediately plunged into the familiarity of the studio star system that makes the film. It was a sensational move.

Yeah. We gave it to freshness and still does when you see it now. I've seen it 50 years up for us all the first time. And there's something amazing about when you're seeing that first shot of Agnes Moorhead and realizing that you're seeing Agnes Moorhead's... That's the mother. Yes, exactly. I'm the boy who plays young Kane's mother. Most of the actors are unknown to a cinema-going audience,

which would be very religious synonymous-going audience at that time. People turned up at the regular times to see films in numbers. But the crew was quite experienced, wasn't it? I mean, they're very experienced photographer. Greg Tolland, yes, who would have collaborated with William Weiler and John Ford and Dorothy Arsner and all the other, a number of other major filmmakers up until that point.

And I think their meeting was very productive and generative and was apparently by biographical accounts a very kind of congenial collaboration where Toland was already, already had a reputation as an experimenter and had seen Wells' production of Julius Caesar and admired its experimentalism. And so I think that formed right away a basis

for a very productive working relationship. The photography itself drew comment because it was so bold and daring and consistently good. Well, I think what we're seeing a lot is an emphasis on deep focus that we can see sort of every plane of the image equally in focus. The film was often favored low-angle shots so that we're seeing a kind of yawning expanse behind the characters and these interiors. Often a kind of false ceiling was used to create that more realistic sense of being inside these cavernous spaces of Kane's mansion, Zanadu.

You talk about the place and the place is Zanadu, which Citizen Kane built for himself. the film stars like that, it's almost like this a gothic horror film, enormous mention with the art of Western Europe littering it all over the place and then goes on a fantastic

rampage of a newsreel, a seeming contemporary newsreel. Can you tell us about that juxtaposition, Stella? As you say, it's incredibly slow, languid camera, subjective camera, you know, all about style. And all of a sudden you hear this bold, brassy music.

and news on the March starts. It's very reminiscent of another archaeo production. It's sort of a pastiche of the March of Time, which was a regular newsreel that ran on the radio from 1931, on film from 1935, told you the big stories of the day. What it's giving you, first off, is the story of Kane in miniature, rooting it in contemporary history, in contemporary politics, which for Wells was important.

It starts with telling you about Zanadu, likening Kane, to Noah Kubla Khan, obviously. Then it tells you his whole life in kind of miniature. And it does it through faked archive and through real library footage, which are seamlessly intercut. It gallops through all of Kane's life telling you the story. So you get Charles Foster Kane on Hitler's balcony, you get Charles Foster Kane alongside Teddy Roosevelt,

You get him getting married on the White House law, and you get him integrated into a history that the viewer has understood. Is it possible to summarise the plot in half a dozen sentences? It's a very simple plot. It is a very simple plot. Charles Foster Kane, born into a kind of humble beginnings, comes unexpectedly into a huge fortune, is signed away to a legal guardian when he comes of age,

decides to kind of use that fortune, builds a massive print media and business empire, which in 1929 and through the Depression he loses, builds this amazing mansion with the biggest zoo in the world and dies a recluse. That's a very simple story, just like Time on the March is a very simple story. But obviously what that sets up is the fact that Citizen Kane

isn't going to be that simple story. And so as the news will comes to a rather ignominious and inglorious end as the projector just gets turned off, the producer turns around to all the journalists around him in the screening room and says this film needs an end what we've got here is what the man did we don't know who he was the fiction film is to do with his saying the word rosebud

and that the hunt is on the McGoffin it's the excuse for a plot to find what rosebud means and that trickles through doesn't pound through the film but trickles through the film Ian Christie, William Randolph Hurst, who was he and was he the model for, Citizen Kane? Well, in a way he was the model, although there was quite a lot of denial going on for good and obvious legal reasons.

Hurst was a phenomenon in the tabloid press, the yellow press, and he had built up an empire of newspapers all over America. He saw himself as a man intervening in world events. He was very active during the Spanish-American War, for instance, and that's kind of reflected in Citizen Kane. He was also really engaged in public affairs. During the 1930s, he had signed up all these extraordinary columnists. Trotsky, Hitler, Mussolini. They were all columnists for the Saturday supplement of Hearst's newspapers.

Hitler wasn't a very good, he didn't keep up his copy, so Goring would step in and do it for him. But he saw himself as a man influencing world affairs, and he was very good at picking up ex-prime ministers and presidents and signing him up to write for him. Lloyd George wrote for him. Do you think that Wells was conscious of that and modelled Kane on that? I think there's no question about it.

He made a very measured statement saying, well, if you're making a film about a newspaper tycoon, you obviously must be aware of, you know, the great newspaper tycoon of our times, William Randolph First. So he kind of implies that he knew as much as anybody knew about her, but there are a few crucial aspects that do tie it more closely to Hurst, especially the love object in the film. Basically, Hurst had a mistress on the West Coast.

On the West Coast, Marion Davis, who was an important star in Hollywood film. They were a very happy pair, really quite devoted to each other. He had a wife as well. In the film, Charles Foster Kane abandons his wife and takes up with a would-be singer or somebody that he would like to be a singer and it doesn't end well, which is kind of, I suppose,

the striking difference between the truth about Hurst and the truth of the story of the film. Yeah, it turns in anguish, really, so it's the most... It does. And Wells as Kane is the most moving part of the film for him, in my view, anyway. Archaeo took him on in the more or smallish studio

by studio standards at those times, and they more or less said you can do what you want. What was the result of that for Archaeo? Well, it wasn't a happy outcome for Archaeo, really. Wells had insisted on total control, and he was, as J.D. said, he was very much a buntar kint, so he could lay down his terms. I think it has to be said that Archaeo was the smallest of the studios, of the major studios, and they weren't in a very good financial position. And you also have to understand that studios at this period weren't just production studios. They also owned strings of theatres.

so Archeo didn't have many theatres and that would turn out to be quite important. It wasn't a very expensive film, it was $686,000. It was a relatively cheap film by the standards of Hollywood at the time even though it looks like a very complex film to us. A lot of it is very clever process photography,

brilliant production design which is never properly acknowledged and of course great cinematography. Did they feel they were taking a gamble one? They were doing something which studios had done before. I mean, when you think back to the great turning point in film history, which was the coming of sound, it was Warners, which was a pretty impoverished studio,

that took a gamble on the jazz singer, and it got them out of a bad situation. I think RKO felt something of the same, that they might as well stake something on Wells, because who knows, he might pull something out of the hat. He did, but rather later than they'd hoped. Well, he produced a film which absolutely, knocked out everybody who saw it, especially

filmmakers, film critics. There's a wonderful column that accompanied the early press shows of the film by John O'Hara, the writer, who said, I've just seen the greatest film of all time. J.D., Chetty Rose, it's a tale in part told through objects,

in part, in a sense, everything and everybody becomes an object to Citizen Kane. But can we start with this Rosebud, which I mentioned earlier? I mean, it's the first word we hear, coming out of the mouth of a man who we come to know finally or very soon as Charles Foster Kane. And it sets off, and you've already mentioned the word McGuffin, it's a kind of conceit or

ploy to motivate the plot to figure out what is the meaning or what of this word that was the last word spoken by this by this character, Charles Foster Kane. We find out at the very end of the film, spoiler alert, that it's the sled that we've actually already seen in the amazing scene at his Colorado home when he's taken away from his mother by the agent of this bank, Thatcher. And so it symbolizes the sled symbolizes this lost dream of a childhood. And so that's the sort of, that's the sort of motivating prop that leads him on. But it's also, I think, matched in significance by really the first prop that we see, the first object that we see in close up to tail, which is this funny little cheap snow globe with a log cabin covered in snow that falls from the hands of, or the hand, rather,

of the dying cane and crashes into pieces on the floor. And that we see at another key point, which is in the apartment of his lover, his mistress, Susan Alexander. And so this is a wonderful way in which we see these objects at various points in time, but the camera doesn't always privilege them. So we actually seen Rosebud in the Colorado scene of his childhood. We don't really see it again until it's thrown into a furnace

and burnt with some of his less, what seemed to be his less meaningful, possessions. And so the film sort of discloses finally the secret only to us, to the spectator, which is, again, one of its interesting conceits. I mean, Wells was in some interviews later, was a little bit withering or about the use of Rosebud as this. I think he thought it was a little bit corny. And I think a lot of Citizen Kane is interestingly actually quite corny, and that's what makes it such a compelling film, is I think it flirts with a kind of hamminess around some of its... Can you explain that further? Well, I think, I think the acting, is kind of brilliantly

over the top. It sounds more like people are playing for radio and of course that we're clearly hearing Wells' history in radio. Who do you think is playing for radio? I think Wells' declamatory style

in his performance. But I'll be the style of citizen Kane. He shouted because you wanted to be overbearing. Of course. But I think for filmgoers who would have, most of whom I think, would have probably heard some of the Mercury broadcast

the productions for CBS, you know, this voice would have been a familiar voice in the American cultural scene. And so I think there's something really wonderfully theatrical, and that isn't exactly immediately what we think of is cinematic in the film's handling of actors or in the way in which Wells handles the actors. Seems to work, though.

Yeah, that's why it works. I mean, I think the closer it draws to theatre, in a way, the more it opens on to a new form of the cinematic. Stella, what drives Kane? What drives Charles Foster Kane? I don't think you can quite say what drives him, or it's never quite clear, rather like Rosebud is both an object, but also a kind of state of being and subliminal sense of loss.

So there is a motivation there, which it seems to be partly wanting to get back to that lost childhood. Charles Foster Kane has been untimely ripped from his childhood. He's not, he doesn't kind of complete childhood. And actually, you know, there's a little echo of Orson Wells' own. life there, you know, when his mother died young and he had an alcoholic father and he describes having to be, being an adult too soon. So there's a hankering for that, which is one of the motivations. And that partly explains his lack of interest in the money, although there's a fascination with what he can do with it, for example, when he comes into money. And he says at one

point, just imagine I could have been, you know, I could have been a very great man if I hadn't been rich, but then we wouldn't have had a film. So he's always going round. There's this dislike of wealth, but there's never a sense of what he would have done. There's a sense, you know, there's the idealism there. He wants to help the disadvantaged. And so his motivation, I think, is to become someone that he was never allowed to find out whether or not he could ever be. He's driven. And when he gets the money, the only thing he's interested in is setting up newspapers. But he's got $60 million. If he's a million a year, he loses, he can go

for 60 years, he says. And it's the greatest toy a boy ever had when he saw the print room. Is that what's driving him, the newspapers, the power the newspapers will give him? Is it the power side? I think he thinks it is. But I think there is a real sense of complete emptiness.

You know, at the end when Susan Alexander says, she too feels really sorry, yeah, his second wife, that she feels sorry for him. He's very much, he's a kind of He's a quite two-dimensional. We've talked about the kind of performance. He's quite a two-dimensional character.

He's got this tremendous drive to amass this huge empire. But what you feel, if you're going to look at what that means in terms of psychological motivation, that he amasses this empire because there's a kind of vacuum inside. He doesn't actually, he's never happy. You never see him really happy. You see him exuberant and vibrant and. and moving through space wanting to control, but you never get a sense that that's going to bring him satisfaction.

There's always that real tension there between what the money can bring him and the vacuum it can never fill. Thank you. Ian Christie, we've talked a little bit about the techniques of film. Can you develop it a little? Well, it's interesting that really Wells was developing things which were already present in Hollywood production.

Very shrewdly. I mean, when you consider, we keep coming back to that. He was only 25. He'd never made a film before. His apparent ability to incorporate so many advances that Hollywood films

had been making at this time is extraordinary. I mean, he was a fast learner. The story goes that he sat down and watched John Ford's stagecoach a lot beforehand. So he kind of self-taught himself by looking at recent films,

that's a 1939 film, to bring himself up to speed. So what he's doing, is using very contrastive photography with Greg Toland shooting it. Jady's already mentioned tremendous depth of fields. So we're seeing things in the foreground, we're seeing things

halfway, and then we're seeing things in the far, far distance, all with startling clarity. And I think you really get a sense of that right at the beginning when we're in the Zanadu, the palace, stuffed full of all the treasures that he's accumulated from all over the world. I mean, this is a real bit of William Randolph-Hawest,

who did indeed ship castles and antiques of all kinds from Europe to America. But it gives Wells and Toland a chance to actually show this extraordinary panoply of accumulation, of stuff, just stuff on a monster scale. And as you rightly said at the beginning, it's a rather creepy beginning because it's a gothic castle. It begins in a kind of modern Californian Gothic setting before we go back into the brashness of Cain's rise to power. Jada, you put your hand up, but before you say what you want to say, can I ask you a question?

Then it moves to a zapping style of the newsreel. You, you say this is, it mimics the newsreels of the time, the fast voice. Is it Key Wells's way? Wells's way and wanted to move the story on very, very quickly and make it exciting. I think as it a film that first begins twice and then keeps on beginning. And so the first beginning is shrouded in secrecy, darkness, and the mystery of Rosebud. Then the second one is so explanatory. And so there's a kind of tension between two storytelling methods that continues to play out across the film.

There's always this aura or this feeling, this ambience of the Gothic, particularly when we return to Zanadu throughout. But then there's this kind of, the thing is driven by investigative news journalism. So it constantly is kind of playing off, I think, those kind of. kind of those two tensions in the narrative style. Because you have somebody in the film whose task is to find out what Rosewood stood for. Well, it's going to say that just then brings us to these encounters with these characters.

And so it's, you know, we never hear from Kane himself. We only hear from the people who loved him or whom he loved. So he does, I think, as Stella says, remains this kind of omnipresent, but still sort of distant or flat, quote-unquote, character. I mean, picking up on that, We also, as the audience, have a very privileged position, we see a lot more than Thompson gets from any of his...

Who's doing the investigation. Yeah, and I think that's really crucial. So that's where, having set up the kind of newsreel, this is the story, we instantly know that that's not the full extent of the story from that very first subjective camera at the beginning, that we get much more access into it than that. I was going to come in again. I'm just going to say that radio is an important component of this new technique.

And Wells' experience with radio had given him a sense of how the speed of radio that you can move very rapidly, without having to waste time on setups and so forth, is something that he transfers into the film. So it moves like one of his radio dramas. And that's new for Hollywood. But it's also, of course, at the beginning of what the period that we now think of as film noir in Hollywood. And it's a film which anticipates many of the films that have become classics, the detective films, the private eye films, which it's got a sort of film noirish feel to it almost ahead of its time. That's a very big point, I think.

I undercourge me, because it's radio, it can move much faster, JD. And one of the things he did on radio was he was hired by CBS to adapt classic works of literature. So, for instance, one of the programs was Le Miserab, which is brilliantly condensed. So he was excellent at condensing these great works of literature, which he does kind of brilliantly and often as the narrator himself. So we're hearing him do these kind of brilliantly elliptical, but nonetheless very full tellings of these classic works of literature. Yeah, and thinking about radio and what you can do on radio, having described the plot of Citizen Kane within like 15 seconds, tells you what Wells announced really with Kane. was this is what film can do. That's where I think the cinematography especially comes into its own.

You know, it would be nothing without probably the most expressive camera. I mean, he has opened a kind of box of tricks, really, with that. There's a wonderful production still of him and Toland literally in the floor, you know, so that the camera is just peeking up. And when Kane has lost the election, the camera is literally at the level of dust. These are things that words cannot convey. And so there's a real split in the film.

There's the rise of Kane, and then there's his demise. And after that election defeat and after the night when he refuses to be blackmailed, the same uses of the low angle, for example, that had denoted a certain power, a certain potency, become something much more precarious. The use of the low-angle camera starts a signal insecurity, not being able to hold on to things, just about, you know, teetering on the edge.

What Wells was really expressing, I think, with his use of the camera was, this is what film can do. This is his first acting role in film. What do you make of him as an actor? I mean, I think he's absolutely brilliant, but there's just this incredible charisma, which, of course, was what had made his career in the theatre.

An amazing voice. He was completely unembarrassed about making himself look unattractive in the period of the film in which he plays, older Charles Foster Kane. At the same time, I would stand by the characterization of this is like being not necessarily the kind of nuanced, psychologically realist performance that one might have expected from a certain type of Hollywood actor in the late 1930s and early 1940s. So I think you feel this larger than life theatrical presence. And of course, Kane, I think, is making, he's casting everyone around him as supporting characters and a production that he mounts

across his life. So I think that the performance is incredibly interesting in the way it kind of merges or forces together, the radio, the theatre and this new medium that he's working in the cinema. Do you go along with that, Ian? Yes. I mean, it's a film which does indeed merge

these aspects of his own experience and it seems to mark a new moment, I think, in kind of film structure and film grammar. And I think what's interesting is to look at the response to the film. The response is really interesting. I think there's an early response from

filmmakers. One of the most dramatic examples that I came across is from the life of David Lean, actually. David Lean was wrestling with Noel Coward Oprah in which we serve and it wasn't coming out, right? That was Leans' first film indirect, wasn't it? Yes, indeed.

And he knew that Coward sort of didn't really know how to write a film script properly, and Citizen Kane comes out and he sends Coward off to see it. And the result is magic. Carwood comes back and says, right now I understand.

This is how to structure the film. And we have that well documented. And I think... It isn't going to intuition in which we said. Precisely. Fragment the narrative. Distribute the narration around a number of characters, mix up the chronology, etc.

Palin Pressburger was certainly impressed by it and you can see it in the life and death of Colonel Blimp. There's almost a direct reference to it. We mentioned at the beginning, it was mentioned at the beginning, that he brought in actors from the radio. and there's been suggestion and therefore they were rather wooden and sages compared with the fluid actors

and the unstagey persons who came from Hollywood. Is that the case? They didn't see all that stages to me, so you're shaking your head, J.D. Well, I don't, I wouldn't have described them as wooden. I don't mean that. I just mean, well, I think there's two things. I think there's one, there's the sort of revelation of these people who have not been seen on screen.

I think sometimes the vocal performance style is what, that's where you hear some of the residue of the theater, which I think is an important part of the way that the film blends these different media. Is that a bad thing? Not at all.

No, I'm not, yeah, no, I'm trying to insist that it's a good thing. Also, I think, you know, like, why do we insist on this film being so cinematically pure when it's made by this brilliant producer of theater and radio? And also cinema, the whole point of cinema, it's an impure medium that is able to cannibalize its sister media. And I think that's what makes it so exciting, as you're kind of seeing. these electric sparks as these different media are rubbed up against each other.

And yet, when the film had part of its major rediscovery from the end of the 50s, really, was in France, and the film was celebrated, became a sort of icon of this new kind of ultra-cinematic cinema that hailed by French critics

because of its use of deep focus, long takes, etc. And so it became a sort of icon of pure cinema. And yet, as JD says, it is precisely a mix of these elements which is what makes it so exciting and makes it so alive for us still today, I think, and yet it became sort of accidentally canonised as something else. There was a real sense in how Wells performs that he is classically trying.

I mean, his kind of diction is amazing. But then there's, and I don't want other people feel, there's that incredible scene when he trashes Susan's bedroom. Yeah. When it's a single take, it's unpremeditated. He at one point, you can sort of tell when it happens, hurts his hand really badly because he's throwing everything around the place. And that is so completely spontaneous when almost nothing else in the film is.

And then you suddenly see that's a completely, there's a totally different register of performance and of being than you've seen anywhere else. And then it goes back to what you're familiar with by then, the kind of extraordinary sets, the doorways, there's this little interlude, which is almost from a different register, from a different movie. I mean, that's the moment when he's losing Susan. And, you know, it's this... Susan is his second wife.

She's a woman who has a voice, but she's no opera singer. He tries to force us to become a famous opera singer, builds an opera house for her, tries to bribe the critics, fails in one particular way disastrously, and so on. Yeah, so she's the... And then she leave, which is the... He suffered the death of his... I mean, he suffered the loss of his mother. he voluntarily gave up his first wife, and now there's this unbearable loss that he's experiencing in that moment.

So there's at that moment it kind of, he's at his most psychologically three-dimensional in a sense, although there seems to only be one emotion that is being registered, but there is a really powerful realism in that moment in that particular scene, also in this, like the destruction of the set that we're watching happen right in front of our eyes. Sean, you and Susan? But I think the moment when he and Susan first meet, is also a really interesting kind of still point in the film. And I think it's full of these moments that depart from its kind of through line of very operatic setups.

When he meets Susan in the street and she invites him upstairs, and there's a kind of naturalism about it. It's a very interesting moment. He's not performing. He's not acting. He's reacting. And it's one of the very few moments in the film, I think, where there is a kind of sense of real.

rapport because most of the time he's not listening to anybody. Here he is really connecting with Susan and you feel that there's something real between them at that moment. Stella. And going back to the things we were saying earlier, one of the reasons that he falls in love with Susan, I'm sure, is that she doesn't know who he is. You know, he's surprised by this, but kind of her ignorance and the fact that then you notice, as J.D. was saying retrospectively that the snow globes on her dressing table, you realize that actually it's part of that that really attracts him to her and, you know, that he can be himself.

Sorry, that's a bit corny, but... No, well, it is corny, because it's something that could have come out of, I don't know, a 19th century story. Rich man, unnoticed, picks up street girl. Do you think that's only a 19th century story? No, it's a much older story. And much younger story?

It's a corny element which he manages to suffuse with a new kind of magic. That moment is also much later in the film, in what is the breakup scene that precedes the scene in which Susan departs, the scene where they go in this bizarre camping trip and they're in this tent. And Susan, I guess, performs the final cycle analysis of Kane. She says, you know, you want people to love you and so you try to buy them. You try to possess them in some way. But it's at that moment where, in this earlier meeting, where it feels like there's a genuine connection. And that's what's so touching also just about the next.

naturalism of that set. Unlike Zanadu, which is a Gothic set, this is 19th century realism. He says emphatically now and then that he's an American, probably an American. Does that signify my, I mean, it means what he says obviously, but does it matter much? I mean, that was the original title of the screenplay as it was being developed by himself in Mankovich. I think just calling it the American, it put too much emphasis on the allegorical, probably, although Citizen Kane has a kind of opacity as a potential kind of allegorical title, but I think there would have been maybe something too heavy-handed about that that would have forced a reading in a particular way. And I think what the film does so brilliantly is it constantly is balancing our interest in this fictional

character and wanting to know him in our sense that we're also following an interesting analysis of capitalist American values in the 1930s and 1940s. We know that his film did okay in America. Randall Hurst tried to stop it in its tracks by not letting him be shown in the cinemas he owned, which were in numerous, his writers writing against it, and so on and so forth. But he took off later. You say the end of the 50s in Europe.

What was it that actually made it take off in the way it did? Because it really took off. Can I scroll back a little bit? By all then. Correct you? There's a lot of mythology about the film, you know, that Hurst tried to stop it. Well, yes, he did. He used his newspapers. What happened was that MGM, Lowe's,

who owned the theatres for MGM, tried to buy the film off Archaeo. They offered them a lot of money, but Archaeos stuck to their guns. The cinema owners wouldn't show the film because they were worried about Hurst retaliating through his newspapers. So there's a kind of very complicated power struggle going on.

It doesn't seem very complicated, and if you do that, and we aren't showing in my films, that isn't very complicated. It's more that they were anticipating that Hurst would have it in for them. Yeah. It's a very strange kind of process.

Anyway, the film did get seen, obviously. Of course, it's being made during the war. America's in the war. There are certain places the film doesn't go. And so when, for instance, American films from this period suddenly arrive in Europe after the war, it's like a revelation. Well, Britain has seen the films, but especially in France, where suddenly this great logjam of American films arrives,

and it blows away French critics, who are very attuned to what's happening in Hollywood. So the film's reputation begins to be. build in the late 40s and through the 50s. And what's really interesting is that by the end of the 50s, it has become everyone's greatest American film, if not the greatest film of all time. Is that an accretion, Estella,

or do you think that's something that was waiting to be revealed? There were critics getting behind it. I think there was a sense in which, as Ian said, there was a kind of European quality to it, i.e. style conveying narrative meaning, which I think made it seem like a kind of much more intellectual work of art, let's say, as opposed to just entertainment. And I think that that sense of it built as more and more people saw it.

And as they saw, not just as Ian said, you know, that it kind of led to film noir, perhaps, so it has their tendency. But it also definitely captures German expressionist cinema for the 1920s. There's a sense in which there's a richness to it, which by narrowing it, narrowing the focus down to, was it or was it not a portrait of William Randolph Hurst, suddenly people saw that there was much more to it and those were the critics, they were the French critics from the 50s who basically made that case. J.D. No, could Jody come in. Yeah, I mean, the thing that I think is so important about what both still in E.

And Ian, excuse me, are saying, is that it has this kind of delayed appearance on the European scene. and interestingly it appears alongside neorealism. So it's, and it's the French critics are responding to Kane at the same time that they're seeing Rossellini's Paezza or Germany Year Zero at the same time. So it has this, its reception, its delayed reception, allows it to be received at the same time as what was felt to be the newest of new cinemas coming out of Europe. And interestingly, coming out of Italy, given it's, you know, emerging out of 20 years of fascism. So this reception, I guess, I don't know if this is too specific, but the main critic who I think really creates the fortunes for this is a man named Andre Bazat, who goes on to write a small book on Wells, which is full of all kinds of interesting factual errors, actually.

but it's really Bazan, who in a sense, I think, bestows more than any other critic, gives the film its and draws attention, gives it its world historical significance and draws attention in particular to its cinematography and in particular this depth of focus and these low angle shots that we've been talking about. So what do you think the film did for cinema as an art form in Europe and South? It actually suggested, it actually made the case for cinema as art, which for another film's not. done there? Hollywood films, much less. You know what I mean? I do think that there was a sense in which commercial cinema was that it's a false dichotomy between commercial

cinema and art cinema. But I think what Kane did was to say you can be both. I mean obviously commercially wasn't that successful, but it was a studio movie. And with that came a real

European sensibility, which was that you know, film was there to be intellectually engaging, psychologically engaging, complex. When you finish watching Citizen Kane, you can't but want to go back and to see whether you've missed things. And so there's that sense of it as something rather like a great painting, rather like a great sonata,

that every time you go back to it, you pick out and you learn something new. We're coming to the end now, Ian. I think there's another component of the enormous reputation that the film has by the beginning of the 60s, certainly. And that's the fact that Wells himself had become an outcast. And Wells was seen as a sort of sacrificial goat. He's a man who had risked everything, made the film he wanted to make,

and after that he never had control of a film again. So the fact that it was a downwards slope from this point onwards. He made some good films on. He made some great films. But they were made with compromises. They were edited against his wishes, his next film. the magnificent Ambursons was butchered while he was away on a promotional tour. Was touch of evil, for example, butchard or third man?

No, third man he acts in, of course, rather wonderfully and wrote his own scenes and so forth. Yes, exactly. No, but I think it's important. This sort of sense, and it plays up what Sellow was saying, he is seen as somebody who Hollywood has spat out. Hollywood can't cope with Wells, and therefore that makes him a potential hero figure to some extent in Europe because he's somebody who has shown what it can achieve,

what Hollywood can achieve, but has then been rejected. That helps the reputation of Citizen Kane as the one film that was his shining achievement. You want to come in? Just the other place that we could think about the film is, you know, it's very much a narrative film that is about narrative. And I think it is the Hollywood film that more than any other assumes its place alongside Faulkner, Dospas,

and the other experimenters with narrative and narration. this period. So suddenly we have a Hollywood film that has the same aesthetic significance as the modernist novel. So I think that's also the other context that we haven't really discussed is the context of the literary, because Wells is obviously just absolutely saturated, immersed in both the European and the American literary tradition and has collaborated with some of the major literary figures of his day. So I think that's one of it's, I think, and I think particularly on the experiment with narration is where that affinity comes most into view. It's such a shame that Kane had the troubled history it did.

I mean, Alson Wells himself didn't like really talking about the effect it had on his career. He basically sort of said it was sort of downhill from that point that he spent, I think he describes at one point that throughout his career 98% hustler, two percent filmmaker, that he couldn't actually do what he wanted to do. He was begging for money. Yes, people did. I mean, you know, Touch of Evil was. Fantastic film, though it was.

It was edited by someone else, and then we get the director's cut much later. This real genius who did these amazing Shakespeare productions, for example, and, you know, was effectively silent so much at the time. Finally, yeah. It's an astonishing survivor as a film, isn't it? Because although it had this troubled start, and it was canonized as the greatest film in the world in a poll in 1962,

and it stayed there for 40 years and it's still a reference point. There was another poll just recently when it's still number three. This is an extraordinary survival. And I think it is an astonishing film. It's a very modern film. And I think J.D. is absolutely right

when he compares it with modernist American literature. At last here was a film coming out of America which seemed to be the equal of the great American modernist writers. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thank you, Stalermudy. David Rhodes and Ian Christie and our studio engineer Jackie Marjoram. Next week, Jane Olsen's novel Persuasion, her last and some argue her best.

Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Do you mind talking more about it? Extra. Extra. Extra time. I actually read all about it. The representation of women is, I mean, Susan,

the opera scenes she's made to look like a grotesque gargoyle and with everyone laughing at her and it's painful to watch rather like... It is supposed to be painful. It is supposed to be painful but there's little redemption.

I feel that it's a very masculine it's a very gendered film, it's very male and I just feel that there is a sense... Let's go back to Susan. She can't sing... She's got a voice but she can't sing grand opera. She's not Florence Foster Jenkins she's not as bad as, anyway. She, it is, it does allow us, I think it gives an opportunity for her to stage her resistance and she does leave, which is something a lot of women don't do and didn't do.

I mean, in that sense, I mean, we clearly see his sadism as sadism. It doesn't mean it's pleasant to watch when he's basically putting her in this abusive situation. But you feel like, I think we don't identify with him in that position. We identify with her, I think. And that's, I mean, if the core of the film psychologically is, you know, if the core of the film psychologically is, you know, is that the young Charles Kane has been taken from his mother. He's got two very troubled relationships with his first wife, who is a social success, as it were,

and is not in tune with his thrusting ambition. I think one of the great sequences in the film is the disintegration of their marriage. They whip pans that show us their breakfast meetings getting shorter and shorter and shorter, and it's a brilliant passage. and it's echoed in a way, filmically, by the great scene of Susan's humiliation when we see her on stage in this opera that's been concocted for her and the camera just goes up and up and up and up

into the flies, and we see the stage hands looking down and shaking their heads and holding their noses. These are two of the greatest cinematic moments, I think, in the film. And they're actually about his inability to form constructive proper relationships with women. I mean, you could say, and Laura Mulvius argued this in her book on the film,

you could say that that's the whole issue. The issue is that he, having been taken from his mother, he can never form a proper relationship with a woman again. And we see two very improper relationships, too unsatisfactory botched relationships. Despite the fact that when he starts with Susan, you do have hope there because there is the link back to the mother and it's interesting when you do have hope

it begins again as realism you know it doesn't begin you know so it establishes like this very kind of familiar texture the decoration and the set design of her apartment is so perfectly naturalistic and so it seems like you know aha like it's going to be the everydayness

of this life that might give rise to a better version of the story that's been told so far and then of course it collapses back into the Gothic again. You mentioned the art direction. I think the one thing that never gets the credit that it deserves, and this came out only very, very late in the history of people writing about the film, trying to find out what really happened. We now know that the art director was Perry Ferguson. His name has never been much discussed. There's a tradition in Hollywood that the head of the art department got their name on every film. So that the

formal name on the film is the name of someone who didn't play any part in the making of the film at all. It's an old tradition than Hollywood. It's really difficult to find out who actually designed the set, who did the drawings, and even more difficult to find out who was the set decorator, because the set decoration, you picked out the scene in Susan's room. The set decoration throughout is spectacular, unbelievable.

It's a film of objects, it's a film of decor, many, many decors. And that has never been properly celebrated. It's all seen as down to Wells. Wells didn't put those things there. He had a fabulous art department. and ready and willing to answer his wishes. Yes, because there's that, I mean, one of the things that the, you know, Susan's bedroom in Zanadu, it's so different from the monumental Zanadu elsewhere.

It's so feminine in the sense that it's very small. You feel, you know, the ceiling seems artificially low. It's crammed full of objects. And then for that all to be trashed, it's a really interesting moment. you think, no, this is actually a room that's breathing, you know, that's got life in it. The others are so artificial. And yes, you're right, Ian, there is such precision. I can't think of a moment in Cambridge when something seems to jar or something you think they should have done that a bit more carefully.

They should have, especially when it comes to decor sets, there is such thought has gone into every single moment. One of the ways it kept to budget, because as Ian's pointed out, it's mythical that it overran its budget and that Wells was undisciplined and pecuniary matters because actually it was fairly well kept. And one of the ways it did that was through set design and through the very clever reuse of all kinds of sets from other productions at RKO. So when you're seeing Xanadu and often if you look closely, you'll see that sort of towards the back of the scene, there'll suddenly be a bunch of drapes or it'll sort of just, the image kind of goes into a kind of unreadable obscurity.

And that's where there's just this kind of clever use of cinematography and a reuse of props and sets that allows for it to mount this image of scale that didn't actually exist. So that's another way. It's not only kind of sort of exquisite. It was also financially very clever and was crucial to its, you know, kind of... And that was the one thing that Wells hadn't had experience of doing

because if you look at the pictures of his famous productions, they're really quite sort of monumental. They're spectacular theatre in the 30s style. They're not full of detail. And this was new. He had to fill the frame with detail. And my goodness, he does fill the frame with detail. This is what makes the film so fascinating.

To see it on a big screen is to really appreciate that fantastic sort of fetishistic preoccupation with decor. The decor is telling us what is happening to Kay at every stage in the film. Yeah, there's an incredible shot, isn't there? there's an image of him in that fireplace, the biggest fireplace.

You know, it's dwarfed by this. And up until that point, he's been big. Yeah, you know. But there's the extraordinary cockatoo. I think you want to talk. You suddenly think this is a completely different film. That whole sequence is so wild, actually. Like literally.

And not only you have this close-up of the cockatoo, and that's where I feel like I was thinking about the film as being so, it must be so important to lynch. I mean, it's a kind of Mulholland drive with these strange over-large presence of creatures, objects. And then you have a real cockatoo screeching in incredible close-up that begins that sequence. But then as the scene goes, the sequence goes on, there are these wonderful, absolutely clearly artificial birds flying that are produced through optical printing, flying in the background of the jazz band. And so it wants you to feel so powerfully its own artifice

at key moments. And I think that's also a way in which Wells is allowing everyone in a way to get their due, even if the credits don't completely testify to that. He wants you to see the work that goes into producing a Hollywood film. And he wants us

to, the people watching. That's what's so amazing is that it's the dialogue between the film and Wells and us. You know, it's not just about the plot, but it's saying, I want you to be in dialogue. with me to be picking up on these things, not quite knowing what they mean.

Did he lose your affection? Did you have any affection for him at the beginning? No, I think Kane actually because he feels so lost, I mean, in the scene, when Susan's left him and he trashes the bedroom, he doesn't just lose it. He's also completely lost, his stumbling around. And actually, just when you want to hate him most, you actually feel the most pity for him

and the most sympathy for him. Absolutely. It's a real demonstration of anguish, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And he had to then... He realizes what is lost. When it's...

When it's too late. You know, great melodrama moment. It is a melodrama too. It's a deconstructive melodrama. Yeah. I mean, that for... It's spoken to... The thing that I think is funny

is that if anyone heard Rosebud, it would be that nurse. But it seems like the nurse is coming in. I mean, unless... you know, it's sort of like who, that word is spoken to us more than it's spoken to anyone. And actually, part of the whole conceit of the film was that someone would have ever heard this. But if you actually, what the film offers us evidence of is actually the nurse coming in after that word's already been uttered. So if it doesn't really quite explain how we even know that this was his last word.

So the whole thing hinges on a kind of impossibility. Yes, and there's the close-up of the mouth. So it is to us. Yeah, it's just to us. So we want to know. And then we do, funnily enough, we get to know. But by knowing what Rosebud is, we kind of don't know anything. I mean, that's the other thing I think is just the film ends and begins in the same way.

So it's, I think we have to see it as a kiasmus. And I was trying to think of other films that do like that, that, that can full circle or reflections of themselves. Yeah. I think our producers lying to burst through the door. Fine. Just making sure. You want to your coffee and one of the key's got to go. I love two, please.

I've got an opera to go to. I'll have to screw it. Would you want to take? No, I wouldn't. Thank you very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, it's Chris Van Tiliken here. My brother Zand, that's me.

I'm here too. And I are back. Now, in series two of our Radio 4 podcast, a thorough examination, we are on a mission to find out whether or not people can change. It's called Can I Change. We're thinking about all the things we want to change about ourselves and each other. Wait, what?

I want to be more confident. I'd like to be less of a people pleaser. I'd like to be more of an extrovert, but then sometimes I also think I should shut up. A quiet confident man. That's very attractive. Yeah, I'd like a quiet confidence. I think everyone has something they'd like to change about themselves. Change is important to me because I think it's going to improve the key relationships in my life.

and one of those is you, Zandt. You can change whatever you like. Just don't make me do it again. Well, nonetheless, Zand, we are going to speak to some experts who are going to guide us through the idea of change. The last time you made me do this, it changed my life for the better. Yeah. But I still don't want to do it.

And if you at home think there's something stuck in your life that needs changing, this might be helpful for you too. Search for a thorough examination with Drs Chris and Zand. sounds.