65. Empires: “Citizen Kane” and “Mank” at the Paris, reviewed by Cheryl S.
An email from Liane Beach has just reassured us that she is safely sheltered back in Yakutsk after various exploratory Siberian adventures with scientific aims and possibly balletic ends. What a relief! Liane writes that she journeyed last month to famed Mount Shoria, site of ancient giant megaliths, in search of the Snow Man (the Russian term for the local Yeti, or Big Foot). Experts had assured her that the latest evidence seems to link the mysterious creature to newly found Denisovan remains uncovered by anthropologists. (The Denisovan species, like the Neanderthal, has its homininal relation to ours.) Liane writes that there had been talk of DNA samples taken and (especially if a Snow Man can be captured alive) the possibility of controlled interbreeding toward a laboratory-produced specimen. Liane has often spoken of “breeding” ballerinas, so here she is -- on site and very likely on the job! Would she volunteer to sponsor offspring, perhaps by using one of the ballerinas from her Parisian troupe as a female partner? As in today’s advanced genetic engineering, the possibilities are beyond exciting.
Here in New York, the Paris Theater has reopened as a boutique showcase for Netflix, and last week Sandy and I caught a double feature, under new pandemic regulations on spacing and audience capacity. The Paris is now the only single-screen movie theater in Manhattan. All the others are multiplexes. The two of us sat together and wore our masks through a Sunday screening of Citizen Kane and Mank. The Welles film is about a super-magnate who forged a newspaper empire. And Hollywood itself was an entertainment empire when its studios flourished. Therefore, Kane and Mank are about Big Subjects. Welles and his screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz had the witty idea of contrasting their mega-tycoon’s career with the youthful memory that sustains him toward the end of his life. David Fincher, the director of Mank, and Jack Fincher, author of its screenplay (and the director’s father), have reduced their alcoholic protagonist, H. Mankiewicz, to a bratty, bedridden scourge of the Hollywood studio scene in the 1930s and 1940s. Throughout the first half of Mank, I looked for someone, anyone, to engage me, but every character was not only unpleasant but actively off-putting, including Gary Oldman’s titular protagonist and Amanda Seyfried’s bland version of that skilled comedienne, Marion Davies. The real test came in an ensemble scene toward the beginning in which famed writers are called to David O. Selznick’s office for a story conference and we see various notables (Mank, Perelman, Kaufmann, MacArthur, and Mank’s brother, Joe) pitching ideas to little effect. Also on the carpet is one Ben Hecht, the man who basically created (with his Underworld and Scarface) the template for the Hollywood sound film. Do we hear trumpets at his appearance? No. Jack Fincher merely folds him into the mix, just one of the boys. I found this to be seriously depressing.
I have enjoyed certain films by Jack’s son, but David Fincher’s decision to use Netflix money to realize his late father’s dream-film unfortunately depends on the “Raising Kane” broadside of Pauline Kael, and no “controversy” could be less interesting at this point. It is now clear from the relevant scholarship that Mankiewicz and Welles jointly birthed their film’s initial conception, Mank produced two drafts of the screenplay on his own, and Welles did the shooting script revision as well as further changes, small and large, during production. Many directorial choices in the finished film having to do with tone, rhythm, emphasis, and detail are due to the director, not Mank. This arrangement is not uncommon in motion picture production. Kael’s essay played to her own literary strengths in claiming primary authorship for Mankiewicz. Discussion of film style and form and the specifics of film direction were, as usual, beyond her. As various writers have pointed out, the screenplay of Mank makes too much of the California political challenge of Upton Sinclair to the Studios in order to generate some tension in the film’s second half. It’s too little, too late.
David Fincher’s movies range in subject and quality. He has made one or two that go beyond technique into real substance (Zodiac, especially), but I found Mank to be weakly imagined in its creation of a period and a milieu. Perhaps a new George Cukor was called for. Fincher may be too dependent upon sensational or violent dramatic situations to generate a dynamism across two-and-a-half hours of running time. He seems permanently callow in his thematic choices. As for Mankiewicz in real life, I admire his contribution to Laughter, the 1930 Nancy Carroll film directed by Harry d'Abbadie d’Arrast. Of course, there he was aided by writers Douglas Z. Doty, Donald Ogden Stewart, and the director. Is it possible that Kael did not know how such things were regularly accomplished within the genius of the system? Or is hers a faux-naïveté?
Speaking of youthful taste: Welles left little to chance in his direction of Kane. The speed with which the narrative pushes incident and characterization forward is little short of amazing. And, as Sandy puts it, exhausting. The visual style is throat-grabbing throughout. Sandy turned to me at one point and whispered, “It’s so in-your-face!” Yes, the deep-focus Greg Toland cinematography is eager to leap right off the screen and into your lap. Perhaps this is one reason the film was claimed to be the best ever in Sight and Sound for many decades. It is possibly a movie for people who have just discovered film art and pant to be impressed. Like those young admirers of Cocteau’s classic Beauty and the Beast. Or, oh my, The Red Shoes.
But I would argue that Kane’s extravagant visuals have a thematic justification, at least to some extent. Has anyone suggested that Jeb Leland (played by Joseph Cotton) appears to be in love with Charles Foster Kane (as acted by Welles)? Sandy insists that what period prudery may have intended was at most a romantic male friendship from Leland’s point of view, but I wonder. For example, that first virtuoso scene of Susan Alexander’s debut as an opera singer (seen from Leland’s program-shredding perspective) has a large element of grotesque camp humor. (Camp is always with us.) Later, when the scene is played from Susan’s p.o.v., the livid details communicate the woman’s helpless stage terror. And isn’t there something of a jilted lover’s revenge in the sequence where Leland begins his newspaper review of Susan’s performance with sledgehammer dismissiveness? Those two men know each other so well that Kane fires Leland and then finishes writing the pan himself under Leland’s by-line. Those guys were close.
Then, too, there is the tumescent sequence of the Enquirer banquet in which Kane celebrates his newspaper’s circulation growth, complete with brass band and a line of chorus girls led by a Broadway song-and-dance man in choruses of “Good Old Charlie Kane!” Leland and Bernstein sit to one side and watch the youthful publisher join the dance. The impression created by the film’s choreography and editing is that Kane is performing primarily for his friends, and perhaps especially for Jeb. At one point, Kane removes his jacket and throws it to them as a token. The visual effect is a translation of the stage passerelle, a theater’s jutting runway where a star performer parades out and around the orchestra pit in order to grant an audience some further proximity, delivering the presence to an adoring public. (There is a thesis to be written about Welles’ adaptation of such stage techniques toward their cinematic equivalents.) Welles’ Kane here is an accomplished flirt. And the tycoon’s principle object of affection is Jeb Leland. The evidence is all there in Welles’ mise-en-scène.
This would suggest that Welles began his film career with a portrait of a thwarted affectional relationship between two men and that he ended his career (The Other Side of the Wind) with the same motif.
The failure of such a love is further documented in Kane with the sections that visualize the testimony of Susan Alexander and the Xanadu butler, Raymond. When Kane retires his mistress to his Florida pile, the visual style becomes Max Ernst-like. I’m thinking of that painter’s depiction of overgrown jungles and embalmed imperial cities. (Is it possible that the famous screeching white cockatoo is named Loplop?) And the convex face of the jazz singer during the Florida picnic (“It can’t be love!”) looms off the screen, while in the far distance strange avians patrol the skies and an unseen woman screams persistently beyond the pitched tents, clearly in flight from some form of primal violence.
It’s as though the camera is searching for some detail, some stable point, amid the chaos Kane has made of his life, like that kitsch glass ball filled with swirling snow, oddly located on a shelf in Susan’s demolished bedroom. The narrative arc has dictated the movie’s visual stylization: as the extrovert politico becomes a retreative megalomaniac, we move from extreme close-up to the visual depths, suggesting that Kane’s world is now everywhere and nowhere. Welles’ cinematic mode was always the elegy. Loss and betrayal represent life’s fraying edge.
If you wish to watch a film which undoubtedly comes closer to the situation of a Hollywood screenwriter than Mank, I recommend In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. The film (currently streaming on the Internet) comes dressed in a murder mystery plot, but the characterization of its Hollywood denizens renders the milieu fascinating. All their professional quandaries ring true. I also recommend an essay by V. F. Perkins on the film, happily available as part of a recent anthology of his writings (V. F. Perkins on Movies, Wayne State University Press, 2020). Throughout the collection, this author is especially insightful on the films of Ray who, at the time of directing Place was going through a divorce with his wife and leading lady, Grahame. Ray and Mankiewicz knew each other and even took a cross-country motor trip together. Some of what Ray knew about Mank undoubtedly ended up in the characterization of Dixon Steele, played brilliantly by Bogart. Interestingly, Bogart did not like the resulting film. Never trust an actor.
Perkins is also illuminating on Citizen Kane. Here, he is writing about the ability of a director like Welles to create a “world” through effects only available to a motion picture director:
“The movie draws on our ingrained awareness that the things we treasure and the things that haunt us may be odd or unfathomable to our fellows. Reciprocally it invokes the knowledge, born of experience, that our access to the thoughts and feelings of others is uncertain and necessarily partial. None of us can legislate the distinction between the trivial and the momentous for the secret places of another’s heart. . . . The world as inhabited space and the world as communities of understanding come together to underwrite the formal achievement of Citizen Kane’s finale. Welles is able to build a grand rhetoric of ruination by emphasizing the distance you have to travel to encompass treasure-hoarding on the Xanadu scale, pitched at the outer limit of what’s conceivable in relation to a wealth born real and – for most of us – unimaginable. Within this enormity he can then bring us to a littleness, a trinket not made to endure, remarkable for its survival rather than its fragility. So he can clash the huge against the tiny, the emphatic against the negligible, by sustaining the expansive rhetoric for the burning of a sled. A grand spectacle: flames in a furnace. A climax: smoke from a chimney.”
You recognize writing that, unlike Kael’s, is sensitive to the way a movie constructs itself. (Perkins is the author of a textbook, Film as Film, a title possibly stolen from the American filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos.) Seeing Kane at the Paris, you also realize that the effects of a Welles are meant to be seen in a movie theater, not on a home television screen. It’s a film made for reception in a public forum, not a peep-show.
The relation of a written scenario to its finished realization on stage or screen is always one of revision of the literary text toward the truths of spectacle, whether dramatic or lyric. Kael’s inability to honor this difference was a major critical failing. “Raising Kane” documented her limitations.
Mankiewicz and Welles deserve better than an inept Kael and the duped Finchers. Artistic misprision takes many forms.
C.S.
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