THE PICTURE REVIEWED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 114, 29 August 1941, Page 20

THE PICTURE REVIEWED

CCIDENTAL or deliberate, the pother with William Randolph Hearst over the release of Citizen Kane (as re-

corded above) may give the film a curiosity-value, and _ therefore some chance of being noticed by the general public, which it is not likely to achieve on its merits alone, however much it may deserve to. Frankly, though, in spite of Mr. Hearst’s grudging aid as a publicity agent, I am not optimistic about Citizen Kane’s chances at the box office in this country. It is too much a pioneering picture, too much a "freak," to be properly appreciated by any except the critics and those few others who are as much interested in the processes of movie-making as in the finished product. If, coming from a critic, you think that sounds like intellectual snobbery, you'll soon have the chance to prove me wrong by flocking in your thousands to see Citizen Kane, And I hope you do. * * * NTIL then, however, I'll stick to my opinion that this is a film for the minority. The lack of public support may, indeed, be the measure of its revolutionary quality. If Orson Welles, (Continued on next page)

(Continued trom previous page) the producer and star, had been content with one or two novelties, he might have got away with it at the box-office. Instead he has wallowed in sensationalism as much as William Randolph Hearst ever did. He has thrown away all the old clichés of camera presentation, has evolved new techniques of story-telling, photoftaphy, and _ recording. In some respects, Citizen Kane is more like a.radio play than a movie, with sound used as an integral part of the dramatic development, often lifting the audience almost out of their seats with sudden switches from pianissimo to fortissimo. In some respects it is more like a March of Time or a newsreel than a film drama. But mostly Citizen Kane is just itself, unclassifiable, HAVE said that if Orson Welles had confined himself to a few novelties he might have had a better chance ‘with a picture-going public that is traditionally timid about revolutions; and indeed, speaking purely as a critic who is not for the moment interested in the boxoffice, I’ll go further and say that Mr. Welles has often been guilty of showing off, has been just a little too clever. There is no harm, indeed there may sometimes be much value, in saying a thing twice or three times, as Mr. Welles often does, if repetition is worth while; but I imagine this bright young man rather revelled in the prospect of making us jump half out of our skins every now and then with his repeated trick of dropping the sound to a whisper and then raising it toa bellow. There is an amazing and praiseworthy depth in all the photography, but it was not really necessary, except to prove what an original fellow he is, for Mr. Welles to insist on photographing nearly every sequence so that the camera takes in both the floor and ceiling and all between is distorted to our vision. And it is quite impossible, even for Mr. Welles, to have two distinct centres of action and interest in the one scene and expect that we shall be able to take them both in at once. (This is different from gaining an effect from simultaneous action on several contiguous planes, as for in-

stance you "sometimes get in a crosssection of life in a block of flats, for here the interest is intentionally diffused). Ea YET if I was sometimes annoyed by Mr. Welles’s exhibitionism, I was more often fascinated by the wealth of his ingenuity. His biography of Kane (with himself acting the title role) really does give the effect of a man’s life in its wholeness, as distinct from the mere facade which Hollywood so often puts up. Like one of the elaborate jig-saw puzzles with which Kane’s second wife ekes out her boredom in the immensity of her ‘husband’s grotesque castle, the pieces of the life-story are picked out apparently at random, one minute from childhood, the next from old age, but at last they all fit together, and the pattern of a man’s life is com-plete-complete in all its pettiness, cruelty, disharmony and frustration, its

generosity, ambition, friendliness, and romanticism. And at the end, whatever you may think of William Randolph Hearst. you can hardly help but have some sympathy for* the spiritual loneliness of Charles Foster Kane, dying in a junk-heap of the world’s art treasures. A man with millions of dollars and millions of enemies, he wanted only to be loved-but on his own terms. Such a moral judgment is, however, rather out of place; for the essence of the narrative is perhaps its impartiality. Here is the evidence, it says, given by a series of witnesses, each of whomn knew some side of the character of this man who founded an empire of yellow journalism. Listen to their stories. and form your own conclusions. It will not be easy, for to the onlooker a man’s life does not appear as a thread running smoothly from birth to death, but rather as a series of overlapping, haphazard impressions. But it can be done, and the camera, prying here, probing there, will help you. * * ‘HUS, inevitably, one returns from the story itself to the method of telling it. Note, for example, that although he appears in scene after scene, you see nothing but the shadowy back of the reporter of "News Marches On" (the barely-disguised March of Time), whose search for the meaning of Kane’s mysterious last word "rosebud," motivates the ctaruv (You don’t see n:iore. because

8 Gees ---., eek, Bee a> & | as am 20, ¢ he is only an incidental character). Note also with what finality the camera, with one brief shot of two stage-hands, disposes of all Kane’s dreams of operatic success for his second wife. Note alsobut if I were to record all the technical tricks of this picture, I'd be at my typewriter till daylight (and it is now nearly 3 a.m.). Orson Welles may seem at the moment rather like a child with a new toy. But he will grow up, and so will movie audiences. And of this I am sure, that years from now other film producers and technicians will still be tilling the ground which he has broken in Citizen Kane.