Laughing Buddha

I first saw Citizen Kane when I was a student. It was on the classic movie channel at 11:30 after the news. I had never read about it, or even heard of it before. It just came on and I sat mesmerized for two hours.

The last time I saw it was almost forty years later, with my class of English Majors. I have seen it many times in between and it still mesmerizes me. And to think, Orson Welles was only 25 years old when he made it. Not that much older than my students.

I have read since, that the cameraman Greg Toland had a great influence on the look of the film, apart from the innovative chiaroscuro lighting, but it was Orson’s stage background that brought such power to the characters in their wonderful long scenes and use of their own actions to create close-ups. And it was his radio experience that brought such innovations as overlapping dialogue and layers of sound. No shaky camera here. No flashy editing. Just a straight, solid, dramatic performance, with a wonderfully fluid camera that knew when to stop and simply stare. And all in a rich, glossy black and white.

The film was written by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, with remarkable performances from Orson’s Mercury Theatre group. All dead now, but all remarkable stars in their day.

It is a not so thinly disguised portrait of Randolph Hearst, the newspaper baron from the American 30’s, played by Orson Welles. Joseph Cotton as Kane’s best friend, and Everett Sloane as his business manger and most loyal employee are outstanding among a troupe of outstanding performances. I particularly liked Agnes Morehead as the stiff, unrelenting mother who gives the young and newly rich Kane up to the banker (played by George Couloris) who is to become his legal guardian and custodian of his fortune.

Just how Kane spends this fortune and what he does with the power it brings, is the story told through the eyes of a relentless investigative reporter, played by William Alland. Starting with Kane’s death and working backwards and forwards through his life, in a remarkable series of flashbacks, the reporter searches for the meaning of Kane’s famous dying last word “Rosebud”.

Ruth Warrick is Kane’s long suffering first wife, and Dorothy Comingore is his ditsy mistress, who Kane is determined to make into a world class opera singer. A song bird with very little talent, it is his mistress (who Kane marries in the movie only through an unusual respect for conventional morality) that brings down the mighty Kane and reduces him to an eccentric and bitter recluse,

Living in a Xanadu, a great palace filled with art, sculptures, and all the exotic creatures of the world, Kane and his mistress are locked in a struggle over her singing talent that eventually leaves Kane alone and quite mad. It is here the end comes mercifully for Charles Foster Kane in a series of remarkably under lit scenes, and the death breathing of the final word and McGuffin of the film—“Rosebud”

The first time I saw Citizen Kane I missed the revealing of rosebud, and I had to wait to see it again on television for quite a long time (no movie rentals then), before I did catch the reference. But I prefer Gore Vidal’s revelation in 1989 that “Rosebud” was in fact a euphemism for his mistress’s most intimate little muffin. Nothing else could have quite conjured the rage that Randolph Hearst expressed in his attempt to repress the movie when it was first released.

Nothing else could have been such a grand and naughty gesture worthy of Orson Welles’ reputation as the enfant terrible, player of tricks (War of the Worlds*) and master of this magic art form.

* War of the Worlds, a 1938 radio docudrama produced, directed, and starring Orson Welles, that had thousands of American believing their country was being invaded from outer space.