It was a machine for surprising and delighting the audience, regularly, logically, insanely, but accountably. It comes out of a different tradition-the same commercial-comedy tradition that Walter Kerr analyzed so beautifully in his review of the 1969 Broadway revival of “The Front Page,” the 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, when he said, “A play was held to be something of a machine in those days. . . . It would be high-toned to call this method of keeping the audience aware “Brechtian,” and it would be wrong. The formal elements themselves produce elation we are kept aware of how marvellously worked out the ideas are. “Kane” does something so well, and with such spirit, that the fullness and completeness of it continue to satisfy us. So a miracle did come about, though it was not the kind of miracle R.K.O. Then Welles brought out to Hollywood from New York his own production unit-the Mercury Theatre company, a group of actors and associates he could count on-and, because he was inexperienced in movies and was smart and had freedom, he was able to find in Hollywood people who had been waiting all their lives to try out new ideas. But Welles, who was committed to the theatre and wasn’t especially enthusiastic about making movies, rejected the first offer he held out until Schaefer offered him complete control over his productions. late in 1938, when it was struggling to avert bankruptcy, needed a miracle to save the company, and after the national uproar over Orson Welles’ “The War of the Worlds” broadcast Rockefeller apparently thought that Welles-“the wonder boy”-might come up with one, and urged Schaefer to get him. Schaefer, who, with the help of Nelson Rockefeller, had become president of R.K.O. It is one of the few films ever made inside a major studio in the United States in freedom-not merely in freedom from interference but in freedom from the routine methods of experienced directors. “Citizen Kane,” the film that, as Truffaut said, is “probably the one that has started the largest number of filmmakers on their careers,” was not an ordinary assignment. And to the particular kinds of people who shaped this enterprise the dangers involved made the subject irresistible. Hearst’s career and his power provided a dangerous subject that stimulated and energized all those connected with the picture-they felt they were doing something instead of just working on one more cooked-up story that didn’t relate to anything that mattered. Though the political ironies are not clear to young audiences, and though young audiences don’t know much about the subject-William Randolph Hearst, the master jingo journalist, being to them a stock villain, like Joe McCarthy that is, a villain without the contours of his particular villainy-they nevertheless respond to the effrontery, the audacity, and the risks. When Welles was young-he was twenty-five when the film opened-he used to be accused of “excessive showmanship,” but the same young audiences who now reject “theatre” respond innocently and wholeheartedly to the most unabashed tricks of theatre-and of early radio plays-in “Citizen Kane.” At some campus showings, they react so gullibly that when Kane makes a demagogic speech about “the underprivileged,” stray students will applaud enthusiastically, and a shout of “Right on!” may be heard. New audiences may enjoy Orson Welles’ theatrical flamboyance even more than earlier generations did, because they’re so unfamiliar with the traditions it came out of.
#Magix fastcut stuck on sorting list movie#
A great deal in the movie that was conventional and almost banal in 1941 is so far in the past as to have been forgotten and become new, and the Pop characterizations look modern, and rather better than they did at the time. “Citizen Kane” is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened.
0 kommentar(er)
