I can see why so many in Hollywood were annoyed by Orson Welles’ arrival, that golden boy from the New York stage and radio celebrity bringing his Mercury troupe to California with a three-picture deal from RKO. Citizen Kane (1941) builds and builds, through newsreels and recollections, painting a many-sided portrait of a monumental American who had a massive fortune just to squander it in lonely hubris. It takes almost 25 minutes before the 25=year-old presents himself as is: cocky, headstrong, sipping tea. “Is that your idea of how to run a newspaper?” “I don’t know how to run a newspaper, I just try everything I can.” One could as quickly say this is a declaration from Welles himself about his newfound artistic home in the cinema as much as it is Kane talking about his foolish venture into yellow journalism. Any doubts about Welles’ genuine prowess as filmmaker—a debut filmmaker—is out of the question; Welles has already shown a complete command of camera, editing, sound, light, and movement. When his young demeanor appears brazenly on screen for the first real time, he has every reason to be headstrong: he’s proved his point, now he can just have fun with it.
And the next 20 minutes of the film are some of the most fun—the rapid rise of The Inquirer from a deadbeat daily into the biggest newspaper in New York reporting the “gossip of housewives.” Kane’s fashioning his paper away from a stodgy, stuffy publication into something that engages readers through its sheer vitality, not unlike Welles’ own directing, busting down the formalities of Sound-Era Hollywood in favor of spontaneity and inventiveness. The sequence culminates in a celebration for Kane (or Welles, I’m starting to forget which) where bands play and girls dance and the best newspapermen in America laugh with joy, all singing together his name: Charlie Kane! Welles is smiling, slapping his feet, kissing girls. He’s young and happy and on top of the world. But off in the corner is Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane) and Mr. Leland (Joseph Cotton), Kane’s manager and best friend, respectively. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Mr. Bernstein says, “Such a party.” “Yes,” Leland responds, coldly puffing from his cigar as both look off-screen at Charlie. “What’s the matter?” Bernstein asks Leland, but he doesn’t respond.
This is my favorite shot from the film—one chalked full of dazzling cinematography, incredible camera movements, and vibrant mise en scene—this simple two-shot is everything. In Cotton’s eyes, what Leland is seeing, isn’t the Kane or the Welles of the present, but the future. He sees betrayal. In the narrative of the film, this is the betrayal of Kane’s declaration of principles he set out in the previous scene, principles with aspirations for truth and honesty and the defense of the working man. As we’ll soon see and as Leland will drunkenly lay out to Kane, Kane never cared about the working man, but he cared about being their savior. The betrayal of principles is also Kane’s betrayal of Leland, the poor and principled man. It’s Shakespearean, something concocted by a boy who had been editing the Henriad into one grand play since he was a young teenager. This five-second shot foreshadows Prince Hal’s soliloquy in Welles’ masterpiece Chimes at Midnight (1965), where Welles frames himself as Falstaff in the background, as if Hal knows he needs to tell of his future betrayal of his youthful mentor because of his future-kingly duties, but can’t face the man while doing so.
In Welles’ own career, the betrayal was by everyone—from those jealous of his golden boy status, to RKO canceling his three-picture contract, and even Joe Cotton, who colluded with the studio to reshoot The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and give it back the lackluster, farcical ending from Booth Tarkington’s novel and destroy forever Welles’ brilliantly devastating conclusion. In helping to steal Ambersons, Cotton helped to steal away Welles’ future, leaving him toiling for pennies for the rest of his brilliant and busted career.
While there’s a moment of golden-boy convergence in Kane and Welles’ own life, the direct similarities end there, but still too many think of Kane as Welles when, in fact, Kane was everything Welles wasn’t, he was Welles’ worst fear of what he could become. Kane was a man who was lifted out of his rural youth and raised in the best schools with the best money, Welles had something similar in his upbringing, although without the god-like fortune. Kane was interested in power and position, although deep down inside the only thing that filled the void left in his heart from being ripped from his youth was human connection—the most content he seems in the whole movie is that first night when he meets and starts an affair with Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore). Welles, the artist, knows this, and spent his entire career in meaningful collaboration, whether that’t the early Mercury days or his late-life partnership with Oja Kodar.
Welles’ downfall came partially from this: Welles knew he was a genius, and his gift often manifested itself as pomp and abrasion. Especially late in his career, he was a hard man to get along with, bitter with the resentment of career stolen from him when he proved himself time and time again. Welles' life had a narrative arc that wasn’t quite Shakespearean but, perhaps, Wellesian. There’s the dramatic and cosmically ironic downfall, but a knowing one, one he’s smart enough to see from the beginning, those original sins and the cards stacked in just a way that there’s only one way for them to fall. Welles can see it, Leland can see it. All that’s left is to wait for the dramatically inevitable.