The Making of "Citizen Kane" (review)

reviews 157 tough-talking irony and the vulnerable idealism of advocacy—of the stories ofGrace Paley. We can look forward to more of this intelligent and refreshing talk in Hall's future poetry. CAROLYNE WRIGHT The Making of "Citizen Kane" by Robert L. Carringer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. xiv + 180 pp. $22.50 (cloth). In a 1965 interview with Cahiers du Cinema, Orson Welles waxed philosophical on the subject of Citizen Kane: "I had luck as no one had; afterwards I had the worst bad luck in the history of the cinema. Never has a man been given so much power in the Hollywood system. An absolute power. And artistic control.'" Welles, ever the egocentric, autobiographical filmmaker went from the Hearstian fallen demigod of Charles Foster Kane to the exploited noir Irish adventurer Michael O'Hara in Lady From Shanghai (1946) to the jealousy-wrought Moor in Othello (1955), to the grotesque McCarthyite cop in Touch ofEvil (1958), finally to be carried out in a gigantic coffin as the pitiful fat buffoon Falstaff in Chimes At Midnight ( 1967). His own history, his film legacy, is a testimony to the auteur theory—the study of a director's work as a body of texts cohering in terms of a distinct artistic signature. When, in his 1946 biography of Welles, Roy Fowler observed, "Citizen Kane is above all the creation of one man," the statement seemed obvious to the point of irrelevance. But in response to the extensive literature on Welles and his celebrated first film, Robert Carringer's The Making of Citizen Kane takes a distinctly different tack: "this study attempts to show that the collaborative process provides the best framework for understanding the remarkable achievement this film represents" (ix). Such a critical method does attend to Carrianger's "new" historical approach to the film, which involves an exhaustive examination and regurgitation of studio correspondences, used and unused story boards, stills, preliminary, continuity and shooting scripts, set sketches and various contracts and agreements made available to him by the Mercury Theater and the Archives at RKO Studios. Because of the litigious nature of the film business, such paraphernalia was kept long after the film's release. To Carringer's credit, he is expert at documentation and organization. With his collaboration theory, Carringer presents an introduction to the production process . He patiently tracks Citizen Kane through pre-production, production, post-production and distribution, attending to the specific contributions of: (I) RKO studio head George J. Schaefer (who lured Welles to Hollywood, defended him through two scrapped projects— Heart ofDarkness and Smiler With A Knife—and Citizen Kane, and then lost his job over Welles' erractic behaviour during the production of The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942); (2) screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (who shared the best screenplay Oscar with WeUes for the film, and later, through Pauline Kael's idiotic attack on Welles, "Raising Kane," received some short-lived credit as the "real genius" behind the film); (3) set designer Perry Ferguson (who was able to fashion the elaborate, muslin-ceilinged sets to cooperate with both Welles' cinematic vision and RKO's pre-war budgetary restrictions); (4) John "the fastest cameraman alive" Toland (fresh off an Academy Award for Wuthering Heights—a rebel who was well able to live up to Welles' revolutionary visual sense and who shares a place of honor along with Welles in the film's final title credit shot); (5) RKO optical printerinventor -practitioner Linwood Dunn (who used post-production trickery to maintain Welles' cinematic realism); (6) film music great Bernard Hermann; (7) master sound dubbber (and like Hermann, a veteran of Welles' beloved radio) Bailey Fesler; and (8) the two principal editors of the film, Robert Wise (who went on to direct The Day the Earth Stood Still, Somebody Up There Likes Me, West Side Story, and Sound ofMusic), and Mark Robson (who directed the Val Lewton classic Isle of the Dead, Bedlam, and the brilliant Susan Hayward melodrama. My Foolish Heart). Overall, Carringer's collaboration theory does bear up fairly well as a method of investigation into the many hands involved in the produc- 158 the minnesota review tion of the film. And in The Making ofCitizen...