Heading Upwards

He wanted it to be about him.He knew no other way.Welles made one ugly mistake.It is possible that, on his own, Welles would not have produced as intricate or subtle a script.But that is another way of pointing out how much Citizen Kane conformed with the collaborative nature of the factory film.The film was shot in apparent bliss.A bond developed between Welles and Gregg Toland, the leading cameraman of the day, who had volunteered to be his teacher and guide.Gregg Toland, photography.As for the acting, almost entirely from beginners from the Mercury Company, it is human and chewy, like a parade of characters from Dickens.Welles played the part with nothing less than proud radiance.Kane was done with relished Germanic perfection, all the way through to the dense soundtrack, where you can hear breathing and a lot of spiffy radio tricks, as well as Bernard Herrmann`s first score.As befitted a private or special film, Welles had shot on a closed set, but in a town that thrived on gossip, word got out soon enough that Citizen Kane might be an attack on William Randolph Hearst.Like a kid, he cannot muster the patience.I don`t think such a thing has ever happened in Hollywood, and it didn`t happen in 1941, because George Schaefer would have nothing to do with it.He was marvelous with me. The boss had reason.But Welles was annoyed when Schaefer rejected the idea of showing Kane all over the country in tents with the ad The film they tried to stop.The Hearst press did what they could to oppose or ignore the film.Welles claimed that it never played in major theaters or chains.It is reckoned that in its first run it did about half a million in business.That was not enough, and those were not days when film companies took the long view of things.But in 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2002, a Sight & Sound poll of critics determined that it was the best film ever made.That is a vulgar label and one that groans the more with every passing decade.But just consider the number of times the film has been shown in classrooms and remember that Welles was up for 20 percent of the profits.That`s what deterred Ted Turner from colorizing the film while Welles was still alive.But the picture was well reviewed in newspapers and magazines that did get into print.The Hollywood Reporter said it was a great motion picture. Variety even thought it was a film possessing the sure dollar mark. Those were the trade papers for a business supposedly disapproving.He made that point to Peter Bogdanovich years later, but by then the ways in which Welles had resisted becoming a rich man were legion.The film was nominated for nine Oscars, and it won for its screenplay.When Welles died, in 1985, aged seventy, he was living alone in a small house in the Hollywood hills.The antagonism of the Hearst media had something to do with that, though that legend has grown fat on not much.It did not offer an easy, fluent arc such as audiences were trained to follow.While the work of a young man full of vitality it seemed, the film comes out of the depth of despair and solitude, when very little in the American movie had suggested that that was where America wanted to be.Kane had gone awhile under the working title American, but no one then anticipated that that word could be a synonym for personal disaster.What happened next to Citizen Kane was what happened to more or less every old film.For it was an age in which just about every movie had to be new. Other pictures, the used ones, went away.It was only in 1957 that a despairing film company sold off a package of its old pictures, seven hundred in all, to television for $15 million.So in the 1940s and the early 1950s, Citizen Kane floated, against a background in which Orson Welles himself was peripatetic, fascinating, restless, but hardly a tidy genius.His second picture, The Magnificent Ambersons, had been butchered.A documentary project in South America, It`s All True, came to nothing.He tried to do Around the World in 80 Days onstage.He did a cheap version of Macbeth.He was working on a version of Othello in Europe.His most noticed thing was his acting turn as Harry Lime in The Third Man.Or look like anything other than a fat man staggering around?Not everyone recollected Kane with warmth or in a way that urged newcomers to see it.James Agee, one of the better critics in America, said that Welles was fatuously overrated as a genius. In 1952, Manny Farber wrote an essay for Commentary called The Gimp, which focused on Kane`s malign influence.The entire physical structure of movies has been slowed down and simplified and brought closer to the front plane of the screen so that eccentric effects can be deeply felt.Hollywood has in effect developed a new medium which plays odd tricks with space and human behavior in order to project a content of popular insights beneath a meager surface.Festering or ripening?It`s a matter of taste, maybe.In that sense, Kane is the link between German expressionism and American film noir, even if Welles would say that Toland taught him all he needed to know about moviemaking in a couple of days.Not that the mood of Kane is one that Toland had been developing.You can trace Toland`s interest in deep focus, though the emotional tone of Kane and Best Years of Our Lives is the difference between fatalism and hope.Toland died in 1948, without ever shooting an official film noir.But if you track the work of Stanley Cortez, the links are more suggestive.That picture is ostensibly a family drama, but its feeling for noir is undeniable.This is a history of adventurous noir projects, even if few of the films seem to qualify thematically.It was spurred by the disillusion and anxiety that came with the end of the war.The next generation of young filmmakers was excited by Kane`s prescient mood and look, and intrigued by the personal melodrama of Orson himself.Was he a rejected genius, or a flash in the pan?Could Hollywood be reformed?Could directors command their films?People from Nicholas Ray to Elia Kazan lived on that hope.But what about Welles?Had he really, as it seemed by 1950, given up on America?Who did he think he was?Arkadin and Touch of Evil.Somehow he was still only in his early forties!Arkadin looked like a victim of money troubles.It was a surreal sketch on the edge of farce.But it was so plainly a remake of Citizen Kane, as if done in a rushed, partygoing weekend, tongue in cheek, and with a bravado mix of charm and cynicism.By contrast, Touch of Evil was far more finished and more respectful of reality.Something happened with Welles in that period.Kane began to be shown on television.But people sat entranced by the film, amazed to think that the small box could deliver beauty!There were theatrical revivals.And his new films suggested that Welles had not given up, or turned into a sleeping boy wonder.At the Brussels World`s Fair in 1958, Touch of Evil won the Grand Prix in the film contest, and then a panel of filmmakers voted on the best films of all time.Satyajit Ray, Robert Aldrich, and Alexander Mackendrick.Battleship Potemkin was voted number one, but Citizen Kane was in ninth place.Though hardly anyone quite appreciated it at that moment, we were at the start of a great wave of enthusiasm for film that would sweep though colleges and universities.That French generation loved Citizen Kane.He comes to a cinema that is playing Citizen Kane and he uses his own cane to steal a still from it.As film courses proliferated, Citizen Kane became a new standard in curricula.The ensuing controversy fueled film classes examining Welles.There were bootleg recordings of Orson hilarious as he made humiliating commercials for frozen peas, and there were anecdotes of him keeping dinner parties awake with all he knew of life.There were stories, too, of how, near the end, he would take lunch at Ma Maison in Los Angeles, ostentatiously ordering steamed fish to show the town he was in shape and ready for work.Then he would go home and have a big steak lunch, to feel better about himself.What does that make us?Charlie Kane`s faithful?The ones who will not give him up?As a device and as a narrative ploy, it seems to suggest that the story feeds on itself.It serves as an automatic locking device.It is like the thing we note so often in great movies, the way the project makes its final comment or reference about film, not that larger thing called life.And surely it was Welles`s way of saying, look, it`s me, doing it all, giving us the question and the answer.And as the film stays imprisoned in first place, I wonder whether that doesn`t confirm something dazzling but shallow about the whole medium.AmbersonsIt was Welles`s mistake on Kane that he did not trust simplicity, the confidence that lets feelings stand alone for a moment so they can sink in.As Gilbert Adair put it, he overdirected his masterpieces. That is a reason to stress his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons.It comes from a novel by Booth Tarkington, published in 1918, a minor classic of the Midwest, and a Pulitzer Prize winner.The Mercury Theatre had done it on radio in October 1939, in a version Welles adapted and in which he played George Minafer himself.The studio did not seek to terminate this contract, though this time they did require the right to make changes to the director`s cut.Welles accepted that amendment, though it may be judged that he did not pay proper attention to it.A key decision on the picture was to have someone else, the young actor, Tim Holt, play George.Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that that was a great relief, allowing him to direct the picture with more ease and simplicity.Stanley Cortez was the cameraman, and if he was a little less inventive than Toland, he was more a master of mood.So whereas Kane seems to take place everywhere, Ambersons is the story of one house and one town.It is a calmer, sadder film in which the sequence style of cinema I`ve described with Renoir reaches one of its heights.The space in Kane is stretched and distorted, it is megalomaniacal, like a tyrant struggling to be born, not die.In the ball sequence, there are camera movements and extended takes among the most beguiling in cinema.In the scene where George eats strawberry shortcake and Aunt Fanny goes quietly mad, there are no cuts or asides.Quite simply, we are asked to watch people passing time.This is the most humane aspect of what can be a hectic, jittery medium.All of this is there to be seen still in the first seventy minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons.And if you were chilled by Kane, here is evidence that Welles had human understanding and a love of character in his heart.The film reaches the point where the fortunes of the Ambersons decline.But then, really, the film curls up and dies.The magnificence of the Ambersons had been eroded by the grim twentieth century, just as their city suffered from the invention of the automobile.The film was shot happily enough, and Welles began supervising the assembly and the editing.But then, on February 4, 1942, he left for Rio de Janeiro.He had to leave then, to be in time for the Carnival.The government was supporting the venture but not paying for it.The money was studio money.Welles had a thing about dancers.Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the editor, Robert Wise, and Welles`s manager, Jack Moss, did their best to supervise the final work on Ambersons.The film existed as Welles wanted it, in a version that was flown down to Rio for him to look at and refine.But then attitudes changed.It was a little weary of its own campaign on behalf of genius, and studio spies pointed out that Ambersons was long, dark, and depressing.There was a preview of the film, with very mixed results, that prompted studio intervention in the editing.Welles was aware of what was happening, and yet he was still filming Carnival stuff, no matter that the Carnival was over.He was warned, and he had no reason to take for granted the benevolence of the studio.People urged him to return, and he could have done so.But he stayed on, and soon enough the picture was taken out of Mercury`s hands and redone by studio people.The result is the more painful in that for over an hour it is easy to see what a film Ambersons was going to be.The script for the cut material remains, and there are even some stills.George Schaefer was dismissed and replaced by Charles Koerner.He soon gave orders for all the cut footage from Ambersons to be destroyed.As far as is known, it was dumped off the Pacific shore.One grail is that the version sent to Rio is still there, somewhere, in some attic or favela, waiting on film scholarship.It is one of the several legends of Orson Welles.He might not have prevented the studio from butchering it, though Welles could be intimidating in person and he might have rallied support.At the least, he should have been in a position to save or steal a version of his cut for posterity.But he had such mixed feelings toward posterity.He was his own worst enemy.He could get into fights where he should have known to back down.And perhaps he had a feeling that nothing mattered, nothing truly survived.In the end, too, there is a reappraisal of meaning itself.The dying man says Rosebud and hopes his life will crystallize in eternity on that thread.But Rosebud is a gesture, a McGuffin, if you like, a trick the magician has for keeping our gaze off his hands.Is it his bitter, bleak insight into the punishing rewards for seeking art in an unkind business?Is it a commentary on the nature of film and America that the attempt has been hopeless?She was born in Salinas, California, East of Eden country, and her father owned several fish canneries in Monterey.She was a beautiful convent girl, but a spirit of adventure and a sports car took her to the Furnace Creek Inn, a classy resort in Death Valley, not far from the Nevada border.Next thing, she was invited to San Simeon, and became friendly with its owner, William Randolph Hearst, and with Marion Davies.After the boxing they went to the Clover Club, the most fashionable gambling nightclub in town.He was known as the Silver Fox, and he was watching her.Watching, it would prove, was Howard`s most loving attention.So, she wanted to be in movies?No, she said, and she meant it, though in the end she would affect Hawks`s work more than any other woman.He asked Nancy to come up to his house for a swim the next day, and she accepted.They were soon in love, and then he told her about Athole.It was Athole`s second marriage after a union with John Ward.They had had a son, Peter.But Athole was not always well.She took to her bed.She heard voices or ghosts.Athole was very pretty.It was in 1927 that Norma Shearer married Irving Thalberg.So Hawks had joined Hollywood society and the croquet set.His biographer Todd McCarthy is properly skeptical of any suggestion that Howard didn`t know about Athole`s condition.They had two children, Barbara and David, but by the time Howard met Slim, he told her his wife was ill a great part of the time. What did ill mean, especially when California law forbade the divorcing of certified spouses?Athole`s illness had not gone that far, but it is estimated now that she was bipolar.You may feel this is more gossip than film commentary, but the way Howard Hawks looks at women, or fantasizes them into movie life, is at the heart of his work and of a larger yearning in movies.Athole Hawks lived until 1985, and spent much of her last years in institutions.This Slim is a million miles from Hemingway`s Marie in the novel, and famously Hawks warned Humphrey Bogart that Bacall would outdo him in insolence.To Have and Have Not comes on sultry tough, and we all know the film`s lines, with Bacall holding up a doorway in case it faints.Bacall for a moment had the reputation of a slinky noir girl with an acid tongue.Wouldn`t it be pretty to think so?This is the central film of the Slim years.Maybe as the magazine was in midair the wife had second thoughts.Did she guess that Howard might take a fancy to his discovery?The film was under way from that moment, and the machinery of Hollywood`s dream surged into high gear.Betty Perske was located.She was put under a personal service contract to Howard Hawks and taught to lower her deep voice.Hawks started to ask Slim what she`d say in certain situations.In Martinique, Slim ended up wearing a beautifully cut houndstooth suit exactly like ones Slim Hawks favored.