The Big Screen (24 page)

La Règle du Jeu
is graver and funnier than
La Grande Illusion.
Together, the two films capture the mood of the late 1930s. But changing history is not a reasonable aim for movies. They should be content with helping us to see life. Some viewers jump to the conclusion that the shoot sequence in
La Règle du Jeu
is a plea against hunting and shooting (and eating meat?). I don't think that's the case. Rather, Renoir is intent to have us see how animals die (animals
were
hurt during this filming) and to show us how more or less decent people do it. Everyone has his reasons. The spoiled rich shoot pheasant and hare, and soon they will live in an occupied country (that fear surely existed), but they are not evil or fit to be condemned. They are foolish.

They are like Octave, who hardly know what he wants or how to get it, or like La Chesnaye, who needs boundaries but no fences, who hopes to keep a mistress and a wife. There are two great moments for the film's La Chesnaye, and for Dalio, who plays the part. This man (Jewish) collects elaborate moving-part toys (an unforced comment on film directing and its perilous distance from life). He has a new acquisition, an organ with dancing figures, and he offers it to his guests like a show. The mixture of pride and modesty is enchanting. But then, finally, after the other shooting, La Chesnaye appears at night on the steps of his château as another shattered impresario:

The chill was real. War was only weeks away. In 1938, Renoir had said his film would be “an exact description of the bourgeois of our time. I want to show that every game has its rules. He who breaks them loses the game.” But after the war, he realized, “I was deeply disturbed by the state of mind of French society and the world in general. It seemed to me that one way of interpreting that state of mind would be to avoid talking about it directly and tell a light-hearted story instead.”

Of course, it's more than a lighthearted story, but comedy should be a very serious business. That balance was beyond French audiences in 1939. The film was attacked. Renoir cut it down from 113 minutes, but it made no difference. In 1940, with Dido, Renoir went to Rome at the encouragement of the French government to make a film of
Tosca
(with Michel Simon as Scarpia). He began it, but then Germany struck at Belgium and Holland. He left
Tosca
to be finished by Carl Koch, and hurried back to Paris. Just before the German invasion Renoir and Dido went to the South of France, and then to Tangier and Lisbon on the way to America.

No film he made there is without interest, but none is quite French or American—or truly Renoir. He was perplexed and then dismayed when some in France regarded him as a quitter after the war. Everyone has his reasons, though this is the moment to defend another fine French director, Marcel Carné, who made moody noir films in the late 1930s—
Quai des Brumes
(1938) and
Le Jour Se Lève
(1939)—who stayed in France (and was afterward mocked or attacked for being gay and some kind of collaborator), and who made
Les Enfants du Paradis
as the war ended. That sweeping period re-creation and tribute to French theater is still one of the most beloved of French films. It may owe as much to its screenwriter, Jacques Prévert, and to its cast (Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Pierre Renoir, María Casares), but it is as much a landmark and a celebration of France as Olivier's
Henry V
was of England.

Renoir came back. He lived in France for part of the 1950s and he would make three subtle and profound films—
The River
(in India),
Le Carrosse d'Or
(with Anna Magnani), and
French Cancan
—in all of which the balance of life and theater tilts toward the latter. These are early modernist films in which the filmmaker realizes he cannot make a movie without admitting it. The director is a presence in the work. In other words, realism, or narrative naturalism—his great goal for much of the 1930s—is a bit of a fraud. Thereafter, Renoir went to live in Los Angeles, in Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, on a property he planted with olive trees to remind him of the South of France. That's where he died, in 1979.

Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1915. He was the son of an inventor and a musician. Neither parent was exactly happy or a success, and neither of them lived after the boy was fifteen. Orson was a large, brilliant, precocious child such as other children hated. He had these parents and an older brother who was of disturbed mind. Richard Welles was ten years in an asylum. He died in 1975 in poverty. Apparently he and Orson had met just once since 1938.

It's hard to offer a diagnosis, but the flights of exhilaration and the slumps in Welles are suggestive. Was he bipolar? Is that relevant? It is if we are prepared to see in Welles one of the cinema's most heartfelt attempts to find lasting meaning and value. If we want to know whether the movies might be important, then Welles is central and tragic. For every complaint that
Citizen Kane
is chilly, mechanical, and show-offy (and it has those traits), it is crammed with unbearable feelings. These range from Bernstein's recollection of the girl he saw on the ferry one day and has never forgotten, to the mother's face as she gets ready to send her boy away, to the revelation that “Rosebud” stands for a lost childhood. It is always loss—from a man who seemed to others so richly endowed.

Welles drew with skill and flourish. He was an expert and devoted magician. He was a talker who rarely lost fluency or grammar; he could be a charmer alike to men and women; and he was one of those people in whom the lack of formal education led to a forbidding knowledge of nearly everything. But I'm not sure he believed in a lasting tie in his life. He turned friends into enemies and waited for betrayal. He was a stranger to his own children.

He was determined to be out of the ordinary. But one way to start with
Citizen Kane
is to treat it as a film like any other. In 1941 the American picture business released 379 films. That total has not been matched in any year since 1941, and it was surpassed only in 1937 and previously in the last years of the silent era—in 1927 more than 500 movies were released by the factory system. Of the 379 put out in 1941, 44 came from RKO. On the studio files,
Kane
was project 281, and when it was released, its MPPDA certificate was 6555.

You hear quite generally, still, that it was made on an unprecedented contract. That is relevant, but it exaggerates to claim that
Kane
was made with more liberty than any other American film. The contract between Welles and RKO (signed on August 21, 1939) called for several unusual freedoms. Welles and his associates were invited to make a film of their choice. Still, the subject had to be approved by the studio, and there was a budgetary limit to what could be spent ($500,000). With those approvals, Welles had the opportunity to do the picture as he liked, and he had final cut—the studio could not interfere with the finished film. In return, Welles would be paid $100,000 for writing, directing, producing, and acting in the picture, and he would receive 20 percent of the profits. In fact, it was a two-picture contract; on the second picture, he would be paid $125,000 and would receive 25 percent of the profits.

At the time, half a million dollars was not unduly generous:
Bringing Up Baby
(a relatively simple comedy) had cost over $1 million;
How Green Was My Valley
(which would beat
Kane
for Best Picture) cost $1.25 million;
Gunga Din
(made at R.K.O.) cost $1.9 million;
The Wizard of Oz
cost about $2.7 million. A regular A picture at RKO was reckoned to cost out at $800,000. In other words, George Schaefer, the executive who made the contract, had placed the Welles project at below-average cost and insisted on studio right of approval on the material—which was duly exercised. In view of all his tasks on the picture, Welles was hardly being greedy. But something often missed in Welles is that he seldom complained about or understood money. He was never quite a film star, but he was a celebrity and a boy wonder, and he was what the studio wanted, ready to deliver in every possible way for a modest salary.

So “carte blanche” does not adequately describe the contract, except in the way it departed from the norm in which a director was hired, given a script and a cast, and moved out before the editing. Granted Welles's talent as already displayed on the stage and on radio and in the October 1938 production of “The War of the Worlds” on CBS Radio (the sensation that prompted the contract), it seems a tribute to Schaefer's business acumen. Moreover, if the picture lost money on its first release—which it did, though not excessively—think of what it has earned in the seventy years since. Beyond that, Schaefer behaved like a prince and a friend.

But now study real independence. When Chaplin made
The Great Dictator
(1940), he took his time and paid for it all with his own money, or money he could raise. (It cost about $2 million.) On
Gone With the Wind
, David O. Selznick allowed the venture to override his business sense and planning. What had been reckoned at first as a picture to be made for under $2 million turned into a $4.25 million expense. Selznick found that extra money as best he could, and he made a distribution deal with his father-in-law, Mr. Mayer, in return for Clark Gable and cash. He hired and fired writers and directors; he changed his mind every morning. In calling for reshoots, in enlarging the script and the running time, Selznick tolerated no discipline. Final cut was always going to be his, unless someone got to his throat first. Both he and Chaplin were rewarded: their pictures made enormous profits. But Hollywood in that era allowed for this much indulgence and gambling. It was possible to proceed in a resolutely unbusinesslike way—against that, Project 281 was under control and an intriguing bet. In 1939 you could have found people who reckoned Welles was more talented than Selznick.

In the event, Welles's first scheme, to do Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
, was set aside, despite a script and a good deal of preproduction work, just because the studio estimated that it might cost $1 million. There were other false starts (
The Smiler with a Knife
and
Mexican Melodrama
) before Welles and Herman Mankiewicz started working together in February 1940 on the idea of a picture based on the life of some notable American. It was to be a fictional figure, yet based on fact. After that decision, the writing moved ahead significantly, but not according to contract terms: Welles had the assistance of a Hollywood professional who was getting $500 a week.

Years later, in her lengthy essay “Raising Kane,” Pauline Kael argued that Mankiewicz rescued Welles from uncertainty. The boy had not known what to do, he was being made fun of in the town that resented his special opportunity. So the old pro Mankiewicz had come to his aid. This was mischief on Kael's part, her urge to be different, and even an early desire to bring
Kane
to heel, to shake it from its pedestal as the “best film ever made.” It was also the story fed to her by John Houseman.

In the heady New York days of the Mercury Theatre, when it had been doing theatre and radio, “Jack” Houseman was Welles's crucial lieutenant and heartfelt admirer. Houseman was the producer and manager who smoothed the way so the genius could do what he wanted. A great affection prompted that alliance in which Houseman believed in Welles's unique talent and Welles counted on Jack as a forgiving manager. But in Hollywood, in the hiatus as they puzzled over a script, there had been a falling out between the two men at Chasen's restaurant. Then, as Mankiewicz began to work with Welles, and to fill the gap left by Houseman, it was agreed that Mankiewicz would retire to the Antelope Valley Inn in Victorville (in the desert northeast of Los Angeles) to do the work. Since he was inclined to drink, he would have a secretary, and Houseman went with them—to see that the work got done before the sun went down. Houseman agreed to do this last service for Orson—but he had an ulterior motive.

Welles's plan was to make a picture—it was to be called
American
at the outset—based on the idea of a great American press lord. The model of William Randolph Hearst (among others) had been talked about—and just as surely this connection had been withheld from RKO, for they would have shied away from anything as legally dangerous. But our understanding of the film depends on another connection. The most astonishing American in sight for Herman Mankiewicz was George Orson Welles himself, still only twenty-five in 1940 as he worked on the script, and so precocious, so arrogant, so charming, so able, and so infuriating that it was hard to look away from him. That is how Orson was loathed as much as he was revered, for he did not let his talents settle lightly. He bullied, he teased, he patronized, and he outdid everyone in sight in creating, bullshitting, talking, eating, and living up to the ominous warning “There but for the grace of God goes God.”

Moreover, it had been determined in advance that Welles was to play Kane. So if Hearst was one point of reference, out of an adolescent playfulness bound to spell ruin, Orson Welles was the other. And there at the Antelope Inn, ready to steer or help Mankiewicz, was the man who knew Welles better than anyone alive, Jack Houseman. So Mankiewicz wrote a draft (with Houseman feeding him Orson lines and anecdotes), but only after he and Welles had talked, and only in advance of Welles rewriting the Mankiewicz draft with his own.

“Mankiewicz's contribution?” Welles returned the question Peter Bogdanovich had asked him. “It was enormous.” He then goes on to give a full, plausible account of how they knocked the idea back and forth to its great advantage. Conclusion? Just as the credit claims, the two men wrote the script together, not always in the same room, but wrestling with the same problems. Look for anything else like
Kane
in Mankiewicz's erratic career and you will not find it, whereas Welles would be obsessed with the same themes all his life.

More important still, the way Orson talked, breathed, laughed, and lost his temper energized the script. Kane became a great role because it had its essential actor. Nor should we exclude the likelihood that Welles guessed how Houseman would help add those touches—and counted on it. He wanted it to be about him. He knew no other way. Welles made one ugly mistake. At a key moment, he did seek to reduce Mankiewicz's credit, and that may have come out of a regret that he had not done it alone—there was a possessive megalomaniac in Welles (as there is in Kane). 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. Yes, it would prove to be a rare portrait of self-destructive willfulness in the American character, but it had needed two such misfits to get it clever and beautiful.

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. Welles was fulsome in his praise of Toland until the end of his life, and in the joint credit (on-screen together) that they shared at the close of the film: Orson Welles, direction and production; 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. (In some ways it is a very nineteenth-century movie.) It is an immense contribution to the ranks of American character actors and the beginning for Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Erskine Sanford, and Everett Sloane, not forgetting Welles himself, who would be a ham in his time but who fed upon Charles Foster Kane as if it were his last meal. Kael was right in one thing: 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. The film was cut and it came out at 119 minutes for $680,000. RKO honored the overage.

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. Rightly so—whether or not you are tempted by the rumor, passed on adroitly by Gore Vidal, that “Rosebud” was Hearst's private name for Marion Davies's clitoris. We are already at a point where Davies and Hearst (if they had press agents still) might be relying on this wicked film for the survival of their reputations. But Welles did not need to offend Hearst or anyone—beyond in the schoolboy way in which he felt compelled to be naughty or defiant. That is borne out within the movie when Kane dares Boss Jim Gettys to break the love-nest story, instead of biding his time for another election. Like a kid, he cannot muster the patience.

Something like a campaign sprang up in the picture business on behalf of Hearst, led by Louis B. Mayer (a gang leader by instinct and upbringing), to kill the film. I'm not sure how far this is to be believed, but the story goes that Mayer raised a fund among the various studios to pay off RKO's costs and have the negative destroyed. 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. As Welles admitted, Schaefer “was a hero—an absolute hero. He was marvelous with me.” The boss had reason. RKO was screening the picture for Hollywood people and getting very favorable responses. 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. But it did open on May 1, 1941, and it was Orson Welles's final cut—no one has ever denied that. 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. In all the books on him, not one has been able to discover how far he benefited from that—and the contract did hold. That's what deterred Ted Turner from colorizing the film while Welles was still alive.