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.

Visions of Shakespeare's "Othello"

(below,  the great American actor Paul Robeson and Peggy Ashcroft in a scene from the London, 1930 production of Othello in London.) 

 

 

"Othello" was likely written by Shakespeare sometime around 1604, at least that is when it was recorded as being first performed.  It is taken from a short story by an Italian writer named Giraldi Cinthio, but seems considerably improved by the playwright based on the available English version, which is rather a rambling and disjointed tale.  A friend of mine who has studied Italian literature called the story a "hack job".

Shakespeare's "Othello" is direct and precise by contrast---we see a story set in Venice and later in Cyprus of a great general who is a Moor and a converted Christian who does great service to the Venetian Republic.  Despite his great travails of a life in exotic places and in countless battles,  he is taken in by Iago, a villain of rare power who seemingly  is willing to destroy all those around Othello and then himself and will do anything and use anyone--even his own wife, Emilia--to set the course of this evil plot involving a misplaced handkerchief, invidious gossip,  false and misleading interpretations of simple chivalrous gestures, and literal back-stabbing of his fellow officers.

Iago knows the weaknesses of all those around him, and yet no one suspects him until they are wounded or wronged beyond measure.    

What drives Iago? Is it just because he is an ensign and is past up for promotion to lieutenant by a younger man, Cassio? It hardly seems enough of a reason to justify the deviousness and malice in the way Iago takes advantage of Othello's trust and twists him into a terrible crime.  

A lot of theories are out there about this--racism, sexual attraction to either Desdemona or maybe Othello himself, but Shakespeare doesn't seem to me to be too worried about any specific reason.  Othello is a great man with a gaping blind spot for the virtue of his new wife,  and so his fall will be pitied because it is from such a height  that the falls, and that, unlike, say, Hamlet who doubts everybody, the Moor's inherent trust in Iago is so abused.  

I wondered when I last read this play if Iago is,simply,  evil for the sake of being evil. This makes the play perhaps the most modern of the great tragedies of Shakespeare--we live in a world where sociopaths and serial killers haunt our media.  Like the scorpion in Franz Kafka's  fable from "The Trial" about the reptile killing a frog while on his back in the middle of a stream, even though the scorpion himself will die. It is just Iago's nature and no explanation therefore could be seen as having a purpose.  How else, perhaps,  to explain the speech here by Kenneth Branagh in a 1995 version of the play:   

 

Here is from the Third Scene of the First Act, where Othello speaks to the Venetian Senate and his new father-in-law, Brabentio, a worthy of the city, on how he and the older man's daughter were secretly wed.  This is from Orson Welles' 1952 version, and it also my favorite speech in the play.          

 

ORSON WELLES as Shakespeare's FALSTAFF, Dean Martin Show 1968

A wonderful and rare moment in a variety television show. Orson Welles reciting the "sheeri-sack" speech from Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part Two" from Act Four of the great Elizabethan history play.

As a young writer/director, Welles redacted five of Shakespeare's plays--two featuring the mischief-making reprobate Sir John Falstaff--into a late 1930's Broadway production called "Five Kings".

After playing all of Shakespeare's great tragic characters--save "Hamlet"--either on stage, screen or television in between, he played the "fat knight" himself in his own favorite film "Chimes at Midnight" (1964). Here he is four years later on his friend Dean Martin's program, recreating a brief bit of his original theatrical genius for millions of viewers.

Orson Welles: The Making, Undoing and Remaking of A Legend, Part Two

 

"They may turn their backs on me now, but you wait and see, darling girl...they're going to love me when I'm dead."--Orson Welles to his daughter Christina shortly before his death in 1985.  

Welles was a great prognosticator of his own reputation.  He was indeed snubbed by a multitude of producers and younger filmmakers (One famous producer-director, who praised Welles to the skies after he died and even bought one of the sleds used as "Rosebud" in "Citizen Kane", refused to help lend any help to the man who inspired him to make his own version of a film based on a famous radio play, according to a book called "Citizen Welles" by Frank Brady.

 According to Brady, "The young multi-millionaire even left him to pay the tab at the restaurant they dined in!" 

 But it might be wrong to blame Mr. Steven Spielberg   too much or that--much lesser Hollywood producers did pretty much the same thing. That's why the man who made the greatest film of the 20th Century couldn't direct a film in America after "Touch of Evil" was finished in 1958.    

In my first part of this blog, I wrote that I considered Orson Welles, arguably the greatest artist-performer Ameirca produced in the mid-20 Century, was a one man double-act. The American Da Vinci and The Old Fat Man.  

The first Welles was the man who was revered as a maverick film director and showman, a tireless entertainer who wrote his own screenplays and television scripts, worked on his own films whenever he made enough money to get a crew together in some location (usually in Europe or Morocco) and financed his work mainly by appearing in commercials and in cameo roles in other director's work.   

Then there was the other part of the act: Orson Welles the celebrity Old Fat Man, a sort of sideshow Sir John Falstaff, ironically one of his greatest roles from the movie "Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight" (1965):  the man who had to sell everything from  frozen peas to photocopiers to cheap domestic wine to make ends meet.  He was also the rotund man who did magic tricks on talk shows and seemed to be a walking relic; he was also the butt of jokes by lesser talents like those great American chat show hacks Johnny Carson and Tom Snyder of NBC.   It is the second public Welles, I would argue, that was a strange disservice to a man who should have been given more honor in his own land.      

  Here's Welles hawking wine in what became his most famous endorsement. It would be good to say this work--which he undertook in part to keep his name before the public--earned him a plum job directing a major feature film or at least a  part in a film worthy of his stature.  But it was not to be. 

The second clip is a CBC interview.  Although the interviewer is too critical to suit my taste, he does illicit from Welles a frank assessment of his career as he was reaching his older years. What the older man says about his critics is in the main true: he was a prophet without honor in his own country and often in England as well. 

The third clip is where "they'll love me when I'm dead" comes true, as he predicted. In 1995, Universal spent a lot of money to restore Welles film noir classic, "Touch of Evil", to the original way he intended it to open, as well as restoring many of his editorial suggestions he made after the film was taken away from him by the original studio bosses.  

The clip is a stunning three-minute one-take masterpiece!  

  It actually made money on its re-release, the first Welles movie to get a decent release in America in forty years. But why couldn't they have done it in 1975 or 1980?