The French director-critic François Truffaut called CITIZEN KANE
"the film of films." He wrote in 1959 that KANE "consecrated a great
many of us to the vocation of cinéaste. . . . We loved this film because it was
complete: psychological, social, poetic, dramatic, comic, baroque, strict, and demanding.
It is a demonstration of the force of power and an attack on the force of power, it is a hymn
to youth and a meditation on old age, an essay on the vanity of all material ambition and at the
same time a poem on old age and the solitude of exceptional human beings, genius or monster
or monstrous genius. It is at the same time a 'first' film by virtue of its quality of catch-call
experimentation and a 'last' film by its comprehensive picture of the world. . . . To shoot CITIZEN
KANE at twenty-five years of age, is this not the dream of all the young habitués of the cinematheques?"
KANE changed my life, as it did so many others' lives. It is remarkable too -- and less often
discussed -- how bold Welles was politically in taking on Hearst and the reactionary American
power structure. For that he paid a heavy price, losing his Hollywood directing career, having
the FBI follow him from 1941 until 1956, being blacklisted and having to move to Europe, and being maligned
by much of the media on false premises, a process that continues today. And yet
he managed to make other great films (I consider his 1966 Shakespeare film CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT his masterpiece) and to keep making films continuously
until he died in 1985. Some of those films have yet to be completed -- notably the ambitious features
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND and DON QUIXOTE. Welles was a radical artist in every
sense of the word, which is his glory and also was the source of his many problems.
Welles also left behind
numerous unfilmed screenplays, including ASSASSIN, aka THE SAFE HOUSE, written in 1975-76, about the CIA brainwashing
of Sirhan Sirhan to serve as a patsy in the RFK shooting. Welles would
have played Sirhan's programmer, a character evidently based on Dr. William Joseph Bryan Jr.,
who William Turner and Jonn Christian, in their book on the RFK assassination, suggest did Sirhan's programming for the CIA. As I write,"The script identifies the FBI as the agency behind the plot, which is delegated to a paramilitary group, some of whose members evoke real-life characters who later surfaced in the Watergate
scandal." This is a powerful script based on an earlier
version by Donald Freed. I write about Welles's many unfinished and unfilmed works
at length in my book WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO ORSON WELLES?: A PORTRAIT OF AN INDEPENDENT CAREER,
which also gives my firsthand account of the filming of OTHER WIND as a cast member-historian.
I would note that while KANE is Welles's first feature, it was not his first film.
I discovered his 1934 short film THE HEARTS OF AGE in 1970 with the help of my
film professor Russell Merritt. It can be watched on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9EbQj3cgIc
Welles also filmed the dress rehearsal of a Todd School
stage production of TWELFTH NIGHT in 1933 (that film apparently is lost). And his unfinished 1938
film TOO MUCH JOHNSON recently has been rediscovered. You can watch the
workprint of that film online as well as a version edited by Scott Simmon:
http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserve...work-print
http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserve...reimagined
I wrote about TOO MUCH JOHNSON earlier this year:
http://brightlightsfilm.com/too-much-joh...E1L7BaD8yE
