Orson Welles Interview - "Citizen Kane": The Greatest Film That Almost Never Was

A 1960 interview where Orson Welles gives background on the making of one of the most famous, controversial and critically acclaimed films made in the United States.

"Citizen Kane" was not the film Welles and his Mercury Theater group was going to make when he was brought to Hollywood by the RKO Studio boss George Schaffer in 1939. Welles was already a well-known figure thanks to his memorable "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast on Halloween Eve, 1938, a broadcast that caused an estimated one in five listeners to his CBS program to believe there was an actual Martian invasion taking place near New York City. Welles was also an acclaimed theatrical director, radio star and actor in both mediums. All of 23 years old at the time of his New York success, he had an uncanny knack of playing characters of any age. His role as Captain Shotover in an Broadway production of GB Shaw's "Heartbreak House earned him the cover of Time magazine.

It also earned him a lot of jealousy. He was the classic "enfant terrible", a young genius capable of great sensitivity in dealing with casts and crew and also biting sarcasm and towering rages when he didn't get what he wanted from an actor or a stagehand. Generally those that worked for him, however, would stay loyal to the man because he brought out the best in all around any project he was associated with.

His original film for RKO was supposed to be an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" with Welles as Marlowe and much of the film shot with a subjective camera as the protagonist journeys down the Congo River toward the remote ivory station of the powerful and mentally unhinged Mr. Kurtz. But, despite Welles' carte blance contract with RKO, he couldn't bring the primary budget in at an acceptable cost.

The "Heart of Darkness" project ate up a lot of time before it was cancelled. The media and the established Hollywood film community began to wonder when Welles would make his first film. He tried to get a second film started, a thriller called "The Smiler With a Knife", but he needed a strong leading lady for the box office and both Carole Lombard and Rosalind Russell turned him down. He wanted to use RKO B-film star Lucille Ball for the role but the executives talked him out of the project.

According to Barbara Leaming's authorized biography of Welles, he was under the gun (it was mid-1940) and needed a project off the ground to satisfy his critics in and out of the industry. Then the idea came when he and producer-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz got together and decided to make a film about the press baron William Randolph Hearst. Hearst, a ersatz progressive news titan turned politician had developed into an arch-conservative, isolationist and red-baiter by 1940. He had a great deal of power in Hollywood and New York and was not averse to using that power to assassinate in press ink anyone who displeased him. His closest associate was the powerful Louis B. Mayer of MGM studios, who nearly managed to get RKO to sell the film to his studio--so he could burn the negative!



Working with master cinematographer Gregg Toland, first-time film composer Bernard Hermann and a cast including Joseph Cotton and Agnes Morehead, Welles employed story-telling skills gleamed from his radio experience. Critically, the film exceeded almost everyone's expectations about the "boy wonder".

But "Citizen Kane" faced such powerful opposition from the mighty Hearst media, that it was banned by many theater chains and thus never became the commercial hit Welles needed to make the kind of singular films he was interested in directing.

One more film under his RKO contract, "The Magnificent Ambersons", had the bad luck to come out right after the USA entered the Second World War. Despite its fine acting (again with Cotton and Morehead but without Welles) a early 20 Century period drama with a downbeat ending was not what the public was looking for.

Attempts to edit the film were complicated by the fact that Welles was in Brazil as the picture was premiering, making a film for the war effort (financed by Nelson Rockefeller) that was designed to mend fences between North America and parts of South America that were leaning culturally and politically towards fascism.

Welles absence from Hollywood further hurt his chances and he and the bosses at RKO soon parted company. He continued to have a long and amazing career, but never was he able to direct a successful film with the public in America despite great efforts. (His career and critical reception in Europe was more favorable.)

With Orson Welles one might wonder what might have become of him had he made a less controversial film at the onset of his film career. But anybody who has seen "Citizen Kane" can only regret the potential loss of such a masterpiece.

One O'Clock Jump - Count Basie (1943)

This tune is one of the Big Band standards for its era. Released in the Summer of 1937, it became the signature tune for William "Count" Basie and his band, the purveyors of a new jazz sound that came out of the heartland metropolis of Kansas City, Missouri.

Basie (1904-1984) was already a big local success in night clubs and local radio shows when he was discovered via a late night program by a VIP listener, John Hammond, a producer for Benny Goodman and many other swing greats.

The Basie Band (which originally featured featured jazz legends like Lester Young on tenor sax and Buck Clayton on trumpet) proved popular enough to break out early and stay one of the top bands of the era.

One of Basie's earliest piano teachers was none other than the great "Mayor of Harlem" and piano virtuoso, Fats Waller.

Despite the loss of big band popularity in the early fifties, Count Basie continued to tour with his band and new members right in the 1980's. He recorded and performed with legends like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra in bands and smaller groups in Hollywood, New York and Las Vegas.

This clip is from a wartime B-picture from 1943 called "Reveille With Beverly" featuring future MGM star Ann Miller as the "disc jockey."

The Spiral Staircase(1946): An Eerie Walk Through the Woods

One of the best suspense films of the 1940's neither directed by Alfred Hitchcock nor produced by Val Lewton, "The Spiral Staircase" is the story of a young woman who was frightened so much as a child by the loss of her parents that she cannot speak a word.

She comes to care for an older bedridden woman (Ethel Barrymore) who lives in a creepy mansion in early 20th Century New England. A grown step-son who is a college professor and another son who is a odd and lasivious character also are at the mansion, along with an assortment of other servants and nurses.

A series of murders of young women with physical afflictions is taking place in the local town. The constable believes the killer may be hiding near the mansion in question. One dark and stromy night later, all is revealed.

Elsa Lanchester from "The Bride of Frankenstein" (1935) also is in this film as Mrs. Oates, the family cook, who doesn't mind "a nip" or two of brandy after a long (or short) day in the kitchen. I have never seen a movie featuring an old dark house where Elsa Lanchester is on staff that would entice a sane person to a weekend visit.


Directed by Robert Siodmak, who also directed "The Killers"(1945), probably the best adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway short story on film, this movie may not be as bloody as post-1970's crop of modern thrillers, but I doubt anyone would be able to watch it alone in a dark house (or, worse, in an empty old theater!) around midnight and not get a serious case of the yips.

Dorothy McGuire--a undeservedly not well-remembered leading lady--gives a fine performance as the mute girl. She received only one Academy Award nomination in her career despite many good performances.

Orson Welles: The Making, Undoing and Remaking of A Creative Legend (Part One)

Orson Welles (1915--1985) was always a walking double-act  in American pop culture---one part of the act was the recognition that here was a great multi-faceted star who could bend cinematic story-telling to his genius for imagery and montage and dramatic flair. 

Exhibit A:  Welles from his debut feature, "Citizen Kane", a film about a newspaper tycoon who had a insatiable desire for political and media power. Probably no performer, director, writer and producer came to Hollywood with more expectations than the twenty-three year old Welles did in 1939.  And two years later he delivered a masterpiece, but not before arousing the ire of many powerful people and making many older professionals in the factory town that was Hollywood wish he'd fall on his butt and never get  up again.  Welles had a major ego, and that rubbed many powerful people the wrong way.  But he could back it up with a film that no one else could have made.  (Which just  ticked off many of his peers and a hostile press all the more.)    

 

 The other act was Welles as a burn-out case, a guy who popped up on variety shows and did "sthick" comedy or card tricks or added a bit of cosmopolitan flavour to an ordinary  documentary or a run of the mill commercial. Sure, folks must have said watching junk like this below, he had done something amazing earlier in his career, something to do with making people think Martians landed in New Jersey back in '38 and really scared people. The "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast put him on the map and he made the cover of Time Magazine, not bad for a guy that young.   Here he is lampooning his own past success some thirty year later.   

 

 

    His first feature, "Citizen Kane", was not a successful picture when it was released in the Spring of 1941 (although many critics and fellow artists regarded it as the best film they had ever seen.)   Welles carried on for the next forty years, both acting and directing films--often doing such work as he could find of any caliber to finance his projects. 

 Like the critics and fellow artists said above in the "Kane" clips, all of Welles eight completed directorial efforts leave one in awe of how much he could do with so little. 

Here is a clip from his last completed film, "F for Fake" (1976), in which Welles used documentary techniques to get to the heart of how art forgers and other con-artists (like a magician, one of Welles' favorite public guises) fool the public and the experts with a talent for artifice.  It is in the middle of this small, wonderful film that Welles gives one of the most moving soliloquies on human creativity.     

How Welles carried off this double act for so long is a sort of testament to the need for creativity at whatever the cost.  One thing is for certain: Orson Welles overcame adversity and is finally getting the recognition he deserved in life a quarter century after his passing. I'll examine that in my next blog.    

 

Casablanca (1943)- Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid and "La Marseillaise"

This one should be familiar to some of you; one of the great Hollywood Studio Era films, period.

Most Hollywood films of the World War II era that both entertain audiences and boost morale seem rather dated and shallow today. There are a handful of exceptions to that rule and here is an important scene from one of them.

Conceived as "just another movie" among dozens of features made in 1942 at Warner Brothers studios in Los Angeles, the film was conceived early in that year, with the future course of the war very much in doubt. By the time it was in general release (January 1943), the Russians had pushed the Nazis back form Stalingrad and the Western Allies had landed in North Africa. Churchill and Roosevelt were "nice enough" to have a summit conference in the real Casablanca the week the film opened across North America. Casablanca went on to be more than "just another movie", winning the Best Picture Oscar the following year.

Of the many extras and bit players in the scenes at "Rick's Cafe American" in Casablanca, French Morocco, many of them were genuine refugees from Hitler's Germany and other parts of Europe. The actor playing the anti-Nazi underground leader Victor Lazlo opposite Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine was Paul Henreid. He was a real-life refugee from Austria whose politics would have put him in a concentration camp. The number of German, Austrian and French refugees from Hitler's mad march across Europe had the effect of making Hollywood a shaky refuge in a new and strange land for many continental Europeans.

It's fitting then that Aljean Hermatz reports that there were actual tears on the set when "La Marseillaise" is sung.

For all the skepticism and doubt and anxiety of modern life, this film reminds me that there are times in history when such feelings need to be tabled and the fight joined if there can even be freedom to doubt and dissent the imperfect authorities we elect and struggle to wrest power from in a peaceful manner.

And, if you must join a fight against evil, what better way to do it than in a swank nightclub with booze, gambling tables, good-looking people and great lighting.

Alfred Hitchcock and "The Man In A Spot"

Sir Alfred Hitchcock made over 50-odd movies, several of which are some of the best cinematic thrillers ever produced, either in the UK or Hollywood.  Of all the different variations on the thrillers genre he succeeded at, one of the most satisfying for me were his films about, as he put in an interview, "The Man in A Spot".  

The basic plot for this story is simple and existed long Hitchcock mastered it: an ordinary but intelligent fellow finds himself in over his head, usually accused of a murder or two he didn't commit, despite the fact that the circumstantial evidence indites him in the eyes of the police.  To save himself, he must not only flee from the police inspectoprs who are dead set to hang him, but also find the real killer(s).  Along the way, he meets a beautiful lady (usually a blond) who is convinced he's the killer.  Through the circumstances of being thrown together--or literally handcuffed together, as in the case of Robert Donat and Madelaine Carroll in "The 39 Steps"--she discovers he's really an innocent man, and takes on the task of helping him stay out of jail and catch the real culprits.

He's a clip from "The 39 Steps" (1935), a film which has been adapted into a recent award-winning  comic play that gained success on the West End and now on Broadway.  Based on a John Buchan novella, this was the 35-year old director's first international success and established him as an "A"-list director.

 In this scene, fugitive Richard Hannay (Donat) plays a nice Canadian ex-pat in London who helps a female stranger out with a chaste place to stay the night after she begs for his help at a local music hall.  The poor chap.  He wakes up the next morning to find his chivalry unrewarded: she's been murdered in his bedroom (through no fault of his own. ) He escapes via a train (The Highland Express) but a squad of policemen  catch up to him on the railway.  

 

 

Twenty-four years later: same situation almost, and another train scene. It's  from "North By Northwest" (1959) .  This time the wanted man is Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant). He manages to have a more successful tete-a-tete with a lady on a train than Hannay.  I love the look on Grant's face in this scene when he realizes Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) is decidedly NOT playing hard to get on the 20th Century Limited. 

Funny, but in all my youthful train trips in and around the States, I don't remember anything close to this type of personal service available on Amtrak.    No brook trout.  No cocktails.  No blonds. *Sigh*

  

    

 

Finally, here's a bit more of the "man on the spot" sub-genre. It's from Hitchcock's 1942 version of this familar plot, a  lesser known film called "Saboteur" with Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane and Norman Lloyd as the guy who framed Cummings character, Barry Kane, for a murder in a defense plant in California. The climax of he film takes place at a studio mock-up of the Statue of Liberty, fulfiling Hitchcock's fondness for   placing scenes at the landmarks of American or British Power and Influence.  There's always something a little sinister about these places after you've seen a film like this.

 

 

"Australia" (2008)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

There's an old saying about telling stories on film, something like "a couple cliches in a movie can make you groan, but a hundred well-placed cliches will make you cry." Although I didn't tear up watching this movie, I found it very entertaining despite the fact I'm sure many who see it will not give it a big thumbs up for originality of story line.




The lack of stunning surprises was okay by me, because "Australia" has the charm of being an old-school style Hollywood movie like "Out of Africa" (1985), "Red River"(1948) or "From Here to Eternity"(1954), which are a rare find when done well these days. The movie never tries to be anything but what it is--an old-school cinematic essay on two good-looking people falling in love, and how disparate individuals of different cultures can at times transcend the bigotry and malice that surrounds them. No heavy messages here.

Director Baz Luhrmann (who also co-wrote the screenplay and produced the film) throws in some gorgeous scenery helped by computer generated imagery, good action scenes, and some hard-driven bad guys. Now just add one very spry old and wise shaman Aboriginal who shows up when necessary to remind us who was in Australia first and understands it better than the white folks, and you have a entertaining movie.
Nicole Kidman plays a character called Lady Ashley. She's an uptight British aristocrat with long legs and a lot of luggage. The War in Europe is starting (it's 1939) but Mrs. Ashley's biggest problem is she apparently mislaid her husband. Seems this genius forgot all about his "looker" of a wife and is biding his time at a cattle station Down Under in the Northern Territories. "Don't come out here," he tells her. She comes out anyway, flying into the port town of Darwin where she discovers she ain't amongst polite society anymore.
Hugh Jackman is the guy who drives her from Darwin to the distant cattle station. He plays a character who's usually just referred to as "The Drover", a cattle-puncher/trail boss. He sets about showing her how different the world operates on a frontier---a terrain that looks remarkably like the American Southwest of Arizona and New Mexico.

On the long truck ride inland, she gets taken down a peg or two by the rustic customs and salt-of-the-earth attitude of The Drover. She gives as good as she gets in the insult department. Pretty soon Miss Tea-and-Crumpets and The Drover can't stand each other. He actually says, "I wouldn't fancy you if you were the last tart left in Australia!" If you ever seen more than a half-dozen movies in your life, you know these two strong-willed and attractive people are going to fall like a ton of bricks over each other. All it takes is for Mr. Ashley to get conveniently murdered, apparently by that aged and wise Aborigine. Seems "King George" doesn't want his half-caste grandson Nullah carted off by a racist policeman to a government school or a church-run mission so the poor lad can learn to be white enough to forget his mother and his maternal lineage.

It looks like the natives are restless, but all is not what it appears (as you might expect.)


The best thing about "Australia" is that it is two movies interlaced nicely into one slightly long (160 minute) movie. The first part is a well-paced American Western where the undermanned (and womanned) Ashley cattle station crew from "Faraway Downs" tries to get hundreds of cattle across the desert to Darwin and into big British ships. The nemesis here is a big-time cattle baron named Carney who must own every square mile in the Territories but "Faraway Downs". King Carney wants to monopolize the pending British Army contract for Aussie beef. The cattle king is played with relish by Bryan Brown.

The scenes involving the huge cattle drive and the attempts at sabotage by King's men feature great camera work and vistas of wide open spaces. Human activity seems small against such a panoramic backdrop and one is reminded of the desert grandeur David Lean achieved in "Lawrence of Arabia" and also John Ford's "cavalry" movies like "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon", shot in Monument Valley, Arizona.

The second part of the film deals with the authorities taking away the half-caste child (Nullah, played by Brandon Walters) by force from Lady Ashley; the Drover going off into the bush after a romantic tiff , and then a rousing finish as all three deal with the attack on Darwin by the Japanese Naval Air Forces. This part is the most authentic and unique to Australia and, while not as good as the first half, brings forth a satisfying emotional climax to the proceedings.

Cast (from Wikipedia)
Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley
Hugh Jackman as an (unnamed) Australian drover
David Wenham as Neil Fletcher
Jack Thompson as Kipling Flynn
Bryan Brown as King Carney
Brandon Walters as the drover's assistant Nullah
David Gulpilil as King George, a magic tribal elder

Hollywood on Women : Femme Fatales

A femme fatale (plural: femmes fatales) is an alluring and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetypal character of literature and art. Her ability to entrance and hypnotize her male victim was in the earliest stories seen as being literally supernatural, hence the most prosaic femme fatale today is still described as having a power akin to an enchantress, vampire, female monster or demon. The ideas involved are closely tied to fears of the female witch  and misogyny. (wikipedia)

Although women had been portrayed in movies for decades as "vamps"--short for vampires, a phrase more common to women than men in the Silent Film Era-- it was during the post World War II era that a block of "film noir" movies came out of Hollywood studios. Such alluring actresses as Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell, Gene Tierney, Gloria Grahame (pictured, left)   and the quintessential femme fatale, Jane Greer in "Out of the Past" (1947) brought to the screen cold-blooded ladies who saw men as their tickets not to marriage and blissful domesticity but as pawns to be used to kill unwanted husbands or anybody else who stood in their way to some kind of "warped"  happiness.

 Commentators have speculated that part of the reason for this trend was the opening up of women into the workforce during war mobilization and the fear among men returning from the war that women would not accept their old roles as domestic helpmates. 

There was probably some truth to that, and these films, while meant to be entertainment, also reinforced the notion that there was something warped about a woman who wanted the same freedom men took for granted.   Or, at the very least, they also offered female viewers a chance to see some "bad girl" escapism.    Of course, the fatal woman is still around in suspense movies today but I doubt she has the impact as a character that she did to audiences back in the 1940's and early 50's.

Here's a little tribute to those films, which speaks for itself.  The first is a few minutes of "Out of the Past" with Ms. Greer as Kathie, a lady so bad she knocked off her gangster boyfriend (Kirk Douglas) and didn't even clean up around the the living room where she plugged him!   The next video is a compilation  of these ladies and their deeds set to the music of The Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale".