The script behind Citizen Kane, and the Oscar it received, are up for auction...but is it worth the money?
Still searching for the perfect gift for the Classic Film buff on your Christmas list?
Forget the countless DVD box sets, the vintage movie poster calendars, and this year's slate of celebrity biographies. The gift of choice this season is the original screenplay of Citizen Kane, bundled with the Oscar it received in 1941, available through Sotheby's auction house for the Walmart-like price of 1.5 million dollars.
A Great Screenplay?
Caveat emptor, though; what, exactly, are you getting? Kane is, inarguably, a great film (the greatest, it's still maintained, though the pasta sauced breath of The Godfather is currently on its neck) but - pardon the heresy - is it a great screenplay?
Strip Kane of its technical bravura - its obtuse angles, its light and shadow play, its grandiose sets - and what have you got? A diasporic biography in film noire guise. Cherchez, willy-nilly, not la femme, but le plus grand des hommes.
Welles and Mank
In searching for the essence of the Hearst-like Charles Foster Kane, the script's progenitors - Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz - were looking for two other things: Welles a star vehicle and Mankiewicz revenge.
It's been sport for years to try and divine what came from Welles and what from Mankiewiecz, but it's likely that the film's engine - the P.I.-like device of the investigative reporter - came from Mank, the old newspaperman. As one who once toiled for a Hearst paper, and attended the odd evening at Hearst's San Simeon besides, it's a safe bet, too, that the scenes depicting the machinations of the newspaper industry, as well as life at Xanadu, share the same source: a soured ex-employee looking to kick his old boss in the pants.
Welles, on the other hand, likely spent a lot of time refining the central character. His concern was a choice role, one that would display his full range, as this was his coming-out-party from radio. There is also a series of touches - Kane's snow shrouded upbringing, his relationship to comrade-in-arms Jed Leland, his Democratic sermonizing - one can clearly trace to Welles: his early life in Wisconsin, his longstanding friendship with co-star Joseph Cotten, his oft expressed political views.
It's probably a fair fight when it comes to the memorable lines, and who knows which of the pair had the talent for idiosyncratic monologue, nor which one wrote the two best moments of interplay: the drunken duologue between Cotten and Welles after Kane's failure to make governor, and the firecracker of an ensemble piece in which Ray Collins i.e. Jim Getties confronts Susan Alexander and the Kanes (though the latter is awfully radio-like.)
Rosebud
It's well recorded that the much talked about Rosebud is Mank's. Welles made a habit of dismissing ithe device, calling it "dollar book Freud," but that's giving Mank short shrift, for it is Rosebud that gives the script its momentum and its poetry. Without it, the story is seriously deprived of pace and heart.
The Director Made It Great
For all of these contributions from both writers, however, Kane the screenplay (one can find it in a dog eared copy of Pauline Kael's controversial The Citizen Kane Book) does not come off the page as sparkling and as readable as, say, All About Eve or one of Preston Sturges' scripts. Nor is it as obviously film friendly as The Third Man or North By Northwest. It's ultimate value is that it makes clear that it was Welles the director, with his sensorial mix of brash American showmanship and arty German expressionism, that made the film great.
My advice? Go with the calendar, and save yourself a little money.
