James Naremore

Context  The work of the young Orson Welles  Proto-Fascist demagogues  After the whispered “Rosebud,” is “Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio.”  Against one of America’s most wealthy media moguls  Mrs. Kane sits at the right foreground, her face the very image of stern puritanical sacrifice  The mise-en-scène under fairly rigid control

Scene

Analysis  Two snow sleds  The first is named “Rosebud” & is given to Kane by his mother  The second is a Christmas present from Kane’s guardian, Thatcher  Which is called “Crusader,” is presented fully to the camera  The title character has not only two sleds but t & two friends  In its last moment, the film shifts from intellectual irony to dramatic irony, from apparent skepticism to apparent revelation

Analysis  Voyeurism inherent in the medium, Y each leaves Kane an enigma  In the first shot, we see a “No Trespassing” sign that the camera promptly ignores  All the while encountering a bizarre montage: monkeys in a cage, gondolas in a stream, a golf course  As voyeuristic as anything in a Hitchcock movie  Like Kane’s own newspapers, the camera is an “inquirer,” are like teasing affronts to our curiosity  Aligning himself first with the progressives & then with the Fascists

Analysis  As a mythical character like Noah or Kubla Khan  Everybody is involved in a dubious pursuit  It’s a film about complexity, not about relativity  Once again the search for “Rosebud” seems tawdry  She never heard of Rosebud  With a mild shock or a witty image at the beginning & a joke or an ironic twist at the end

Analysis  In a charmingly exuberant & altogether antirealistic montage, he constantly turns to face the camera, muttering in disgust as the young Kane grows up, founds a newspaper, & then attacks Wall Street  Capital, it seems, is always in charge of Kane’s life  The inquirer offices  He always places personal loyalty above principle  Bernstein’s reminiscences are chiefly about adventure & male camaraderie

Analysis  As the doggedly loyal Bernstein  Hinting that his involvement with Kane has sexual implications  Where Kane unsuccessfully tries to interest Leland in a woman, but even without that scene he seems to have no active sex life  It is Leland, not Emily Kane, who behaves like a jilted lover

Analysis  The comic toothache scene is Susan Alexander’s apartment  The closing line of Susan’s song concerns the theme of power; it comes from The Barber of Seville, & roughly translates “I have sworn it, I will conquer.”  Large-scale effects with a modest budget  Painted, Expressionistic image suggesting Kane’s delusions of grandeur & the crowd’s lack of individuality. Everything is dominated by Kane’s ego: the initial “K” he wears as a stickpin, the huge blowup of his jowly face on a poster, & the incessant ”I” in his public speech  Occasionally we see Kane’s supporters isolated in contrasting close-ups; but his political rival stands high above the action, dominating the frame like a sinister power

Analysis  Just at the moment when Kane’s political ambitions are wrecked, the film shifts into its examination of his sexual life  His tyranny is his treatment of Susan  An absurd plagiarism case against Welles & Mankiewicz  She represents for Kane a “cross-section of the American public.” when Kane meets her she is a working girl, undereducated & relatively innocent, & his relationship with her is comparable to his relationship with the masses who read his papers  “you talk about the people as though you owned them,” Leland says. Kane’s treatment of Susan illustrates the truth of his charge  Susan is reduced from a pleasant, attractive girl to a near suicide

Analysis  Begin the arduous, comically inappropriate series of music lessons  She attempts to quit the opera, but Kane orders her to continue because “I don’t propose to have myself made ridiculous.” In a scene remarkable for the way it shows the pain of both people, his shadow falls over her face – just as he will later tower over her in the “party” scene, when a woman’s ambiguous scream is heard distantly on the sound track  Personal concerns, how the public & the personal are interrelated

Analysis  Throughout, Kane is presented with a mixture of awe, satiric invective, & sympathy  The surreal picnic, with a stream of black cars driving morosely down a beach toward a swampy encampment, where a jazz band plays  Both shots are impressive uses of optical printing. In response, Kane blindly destroys her room & remembers his childhood loss  Thompson becomes a slightly troubled onlooker  Here it might be noted that Welles was uneasy about the whole snow-sled idea

Analysis  A child-man, he spends all his energies rebelling against anyone who asserts quthority over his will  Imprisoned by his childhood ego, Kane treats everything as a toy: first the sled, then the newspaper, then the Spanish-American War  Ultimately settling on the “No Trespassing” sign outside the gate. We are back where we began. Even the film’s title has been a contradiction in terms

Conclusion  Richard Nixon, the “Hotel Xanadu”  In translating Hearst into a creature of fiction, he & Mankiewicz borrowed freely from the lives of other American capitalists (among them Samuel Insull & John McCormack). They salted the story with references to Welles’s own biography, & at several junctures they departed from well-known facts about Hearst  The Hearst press, this in contrast to the Hearst- Davies relationship  Most of these changes tend to create sympathy for Kane  By showing Kane as a tragicomic failure

Conclusion  Kane clearly does satirize Hearst’s public life  Kane’s manipulative interest in the Spanish- American War  In the election scenes it depicts the corruption of machine politics with the force of a great editorial cartoon  The film is explicit in its denunciation, showing his supposed democratic aspirations as in reality a desire for power. We even see him on a balcony conferring with Hitler  Kane suggests that the process of discovery is more important than any pat conclusion  Watching a movie rather than reality itself

Conclusion  Because of the power he wielded in Hollywood  The paradox is that Welles had no desire to wreck the motion-picture industry. Kane was held to a relatively modest A-picture budget  Industry bosses perceived Welles as an “artist” & a left-wing ideologue who might bring trouble  He would never again be allowed such freedom at a major studio