Charles Foster Kane’s “empire upon an empire”
Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons were not conceived as sister projects. They were only two of several features developed for production while Orson Welles was under contract to RKO Studios between 1939 and 1942. Nevertheless, while widely divergent in their stylistic approaches, Welles’s first two released films reimagine much of the same sweep of American history. Both are mythical narratives of national decay in the half-century following the Civil War.
The settings are American cities. Kane’s Gilded Age New York is one theatre of the ideological war between unchecked capitalism and progressive reform. The battlefield of the city’s slums and infrastructure is clouded by the interference of a megalomaniac newspaper tycoon who tries to become a politician. In Ambersons, the rise of the automobile at the turn of the century is the catalyst for a shift of wealth and social power from a genteel urban aristocracy to a suburban entrepreneurial class. The Ambersons of Indianapolis humanise the transformation of the near-pastoral ‘midland’ into the grim industrial Midwest. In these films Welles creates American cities in the flux of transformation, cities that situate the characters’ struggles for personal and political power.
Most of Welles’s subsequent cinematic cities were shot on location, as had been the historical New York of Too Much Johnson. This makes the cities of Kane and Ambersons unique within the Welles oeuvre: they were almost totally created at RKO’s facilities in Hollywood, with full access to studio resources, including a brilliant special effects department. They are also the only two feature films Welles was able to make about the history of the United States.
* * *
The title of this section is intended to draw comparison to John Dos Passos’s trilogy of novels – The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) – republished together as U.S.A. in 1938. The author’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) had sought an encompassing view of New York City in the early decades of the twentieth century: its diversity of personalities, sensations, energy, and human subjectivities. U.S.A.’s ambition expanded to chronicle the nation’s growth in the same period.
When Cahiers du cinéma asked Welles in 1958 about Dos Passos’s influence on Kane, he claimed that he had never read the author’s fiction.1 There’s no reason to doubt his word, but in Kane and Ambersons Welles attempted an artistic-historical project that shared U.S.A.’s historical breadth, albeit without its vast extended form.2 What’s more, the two figures were active in the liberal artistic wing of the Popular Front. In 1934 the Soviet Comintern had altered their aggressive policy attacking international socialists and liberals and instead favoured alliances across the left to oppose the fascism that was conquering Europe and spreading throughout the world. The Popular Front found sympathy across the Depression-stricken United States.3
Nevertheless, with the simultaneous official ascendancy of Socialist Realism in the USSR, Dos Passos was already an ideological outcast among the Stalinists. In 1934 he had been denounced by the Soviet Writers’ Congress as a follower of James Joyce, that creator (so they insisted) of “a dunghill swarming with worms seen through a microscope held upside down”.4 Like Welles, Dos Passos lamented an idealised American past. The regressive historical arc he sketched in his work registered poorly with the dogmatic left; John P. Diggins notes that “underlying the eloquent rage and protest of U.S.A. is a conservative desire to restore what contemporary radicals wanted to transcend”.5
Dos Passos’s break from the Popular Front came in 1937 when he was working in Spain as a writer on Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth. His friend José Robles had just been mysteriously executed, possibly under false charges of spying for Franco. For demanding an explanation, Dos Passos was mocked by such ideological tourists as Ernest Hemingway, who had essentially supplanted him as the writer of The Spanish Earth. Dos Passos soon went public in revolt against the Stalinist influence in Spain.6
Welles was never so sidelined by the Popular Front, although he was also excluded from contributing to the final cut of The Spanish Earth in the marginally less tense atmosphere of a New York recording studio. In Welles’s version of the story, the circumstances were not tragic but farcical: Hemingway’s baseless homophobic contempt for the young Welles led to a provocation and a fist fight, and Hemingway subsequently replaced Welles’s narration with his own voice.7 Following Welles’s brave standoff with the Federal Theatre over the attempted censorship of Blitzstein’s Cradle Will Rock, he created several overtly anti-fascist projects. Welles’s theatrical audacity helped make him a celebrity, although the Mercury Theatre did not win over all left-wing critics. The Partisan Review viewed Welles’s aesthetics as middlebrow kitsch, which they deemed representative of the Popular Front.8
Welles is probably best considered a committed progressive of conflicting allegiances. Prone to dogma in his political speeches, his film, radio, and theatre works betray a higher calling than any sort of ideological obedience, even when ostensibly anti-fascist in conception.
* * *
For Kane’s audacity in reimagining the life of proto-fascist William Randolph Hearst, the Hearst empire declared war on the film even before its release. There was an attempt, in the name of rival studio executive Louis B. Mayer, to buy the negative from RKO in order to destroy it. George Schaefer at RKO persisted with Kane. Hearst newspapers refused to advertise the film and some cinema chains were too intimidated to book it.
A month before Kane’s premiere, editorials smeared Welles’s patriotic radio play His Honor, the Mayor as pro-communist. In this atmosphere, and possibly through the influence of Hearst, the FBI began investigating Welles for his communist associations and ridiculously deemed Kane “nothing more than an extension of the Communist Party’s campaign to smear one of its most effective and consistent opponents in the United States”.9 Welles was not a communist, but the League of American Writers, an organ of the Communist Party, campaigned for the film’s release.10 The film failed to make a profit.11
J. E. Smyth has persuasively argued that the effort to downplay the Hearst biographical connection, as well as Kane’s innovations in cinematography, have distracted from the film’s serious critical engagement with post-Civil War history and how that history had been depicted on screen.12 Kane is indeed a serious historical fiction, although Welles’s critical reimagining of America’s past is neither scrupulous nor warped by ideology: it is personal and mythical.
The Magnificent Ambersons is difficult to read as any sort of politically radical film. In his adaptation, Welles acquiesces to Booth Tarkington’s middle-class lament over the decline of a short-lived Midwestern aristocracy, albeit with a little more affectionate irony and some judicious cuts. By almost any standards the Ambersons are a parasitic, socially worthless bunch – lacking creative energy and imagination, condescending and shallow in their judgments of the other townsfolk, and oblivious to change – but their passing into death, poverty, and obscurity is the film’s melodramatic tragedy, an inevitable but lamentable shame. Welles pulls it off by his tender evocation of the vanished, purer American culture the Ambersons represented at their peak of influence.
Fascism was the era’s present danger, and most of Welles’s ideologically driven anti-fascist projects were set in the contemporary Americas. The past, by contrast, was Welles’s playground, the irresistible opportunity to create a mythical ‘Merrie England’ out of the America as it existed before his birth, and in doing so he focused mainly on the upper middle class and aristocratic milieu of his own family. Welles later said that he had deep sympathy for Kane’s Jedediah Leland, the impoverished, drunken southern aristocrat whose sense of honour and noblesse oblige leads him to break with Charles Foster Kane.13 The only significant working-class character in either film is the salesgirl Susan Alexander, who becomes the second Mrs Kane – and perhaps Kane’s parents in rural Little Salem, Colorado. In Kane the working masses are mostly invisible. The newsreel includes some stock footage of a workers’ rally in San Francisco, which is combined with an original shot of a rabble-rouser denouncing Kane as a fascist. On the other hand, the crowds in Kane’s Madison Square Garden political rally are matte art and inevitably appear as an abstraction, even when given some clever animation by the use of lights flickering through pinholes in the painting.14
There are other factors which limit the political radicalism of Welles’s early historical films. Firstly, there is Welles’s consistently humanist enactment of his villainous characters, often those whose politics he most despised. In the 1930s he evoked Uncle Tom’s Cabin when disdaining “the error of left-wing melodrama, wherein the villains are cardboard Simon Legrees”.15 He also remarked later that “an actor is not a devil’s advocate: he is a lover”.16
There is also Welles’s status as an adaptor, his formidable skill as a writer. He did not create the scripts of Kane and Ambersons from scratch. Welles’s priorities were to transform source texts into innovatively cinematic material as well as to elevate melodrama into moving human drama. Herman J. Mankiewicz’s early muckraking drafts of Kane were commissioned as raw material for Welles’s extensive rewrites, so there was never a question of faithfulness to a source text.17 For Ambersons, a popular Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Welles liberally reworked the material but, apart from some specific departures and omissions, remained essentially faithful to the author’s world-view. In fact, if Welles had shed Tarkington’s conservative historical myth of decline, the story would have lost its raison d’être.
James Naremore identifies Tarkington’s Ambersons as “less interesting as a recreation of historical truth than as a projection of political and psychological attitudes back upon an imaginary past”.18 In adapting the book, Welles takes on board the author’s political and psychological history without the imposition of too much historiographic criticism.
* * *
The jigsaw-puzzle structure of Citizen Kane, while extending in historical scope from 1871 to 1941, focuses most of its many flashbacks on two key periods: 1893–1900, the tail end of the ‘Gilded Age’, and 1916–1919. The bulk of the chronologically structured Ambersons slots into 1904–1912, an era mostly skipped over by Kane.
Chronologically tabling the main events of each film illustrates their historical comprehensiveness, the way they complement each other as narratives of the post-Civil War era.
| Year |
The Magnificent Ambersons (131 minute version)19 |
Citizen Kane20 |
American History |
| 1864/5 |
|
Charles Foster Kane born. |
End of Civil War. |
| 1868 |
|
Colorado Lode deeded to Mrs. Kane. |
|
| 1871 |
|
Kane leaves Colorado with Walter P. Thatcher. |
|
| 1873 |
Major Amberson’s fortune and the beginning of “the magnificence of the Ambersons”. |
|
The Great Panic. |
| 1885 |
Eugene Morgan’s botched serenade. Isabel Amberson marries Wilbur Minafer. George Amberson Minafer born soon after. |
|
|
| circa 1890 |
|
Kane takes over NY Inquirer and publishes his ‘Declaration of Principles’. Fights traction trusts, copper swindles, slum lords (to 1898). |
|
| 1895 |
George (ten) fights with other boy in street. |
|
|
| 1898 |
|
Kane propagandises for war with Spain and wins circulation war. Goes to Europe and romances Emily Norton. |
Spanish-American War. |
| 1900 |
|
Marries Emily on White House lawn. |
|
| 1901 |
|
Breakfast with Emily (1). |
|
| 1902 |
George (seventeen) home from school. |
Breakfast with Emily (2). |
|
| 1904 |
Ball in honour of George. The Ambersons and Morgans drive through snow. Wilbur dies. |
Breakfast with Emily (3). |
|
| 1905 |
Excavations for subdivision on the Amberson property. George insults Eugene. Isabel spurns Eugene’s proposal on George’s insistence. George and Isabel abroad. |
Breakfast with Emily (4). |
|
| 1906 |
|
Breakfast with Emily (5). |
|
| 1909 |
|
Breakfast with Emily (6). |
|
| 1910 |
Isabel returns to Indianapolis and dies; Major Amberson dies. The family finances in disarray. |
|
|
| 1911 |
Jack Amberson leaves Indianapolis. George and Aunt Fanny leave the mansion. George begins work with explosives. |
|
|
| 1912 |
George’s accident. Eugene visits Fanny in the boarding house. [END] |
|
|
| 1915 |
|
Kane meets Susan Alexander. |
|
| 1916 |
|
Kane’s failed political campaign for NY state governor. |
|
| 1917 |
|
Divorces Emily, marries Susan. |
US enters WWI. |
| 1918 |
|
Death of Emily and their son, Charles Jr. |
|
| 1919 |
|
Susan’s opera debut in Chicago and tour. |
|
| 1920 |
|
Susan’s suicide attempt. |
|
| 1929 |
|
|
Market crash. |
| 1932 |
|
Kane loses control of his empire to Thatcher. Susan leaves Kane. |
|
| 1941 |
|
Kane dies. The quest for Rosebud. [END] |
|
In Kane and Ambersons, American history in the fifty years after the Civil War, at least in the Midwest and on the East Coast, is represented by wealthy and influential people. The lives of Charles Forster Kane, Walter Parks Thatcher, the Amberson family, and Eugene Morgan are entangled with what contemporary audiences would have seen as moments of irrevocable urban transformation. Kane’s success in yellow journalism is specific to the conditions of fin-de-siècle New York City: a large and dense urban population, mass literacy, and the technologies of newspaper production. Ambersons is more explicitly technologically determinist. Indianapolis’s economy, its social hierarchy, its whimsical customs, and its very material form are permanently altered by a revolution in transportation. While technology is driven by the entrepreneurial spirit of innovators, once set in motion it is unstoppable.
The old order – for all its corruption, backwardness, and social unfairness – does not vanish without tender lament. Remembrance of things past furnishes Welles’s characters with emotional logic. In fact, the agitators for change tend to wind up the most regretful. Kane, who more successfully than anybody disrespects tradition and imposes his personality on American society via the technology of the news business, aches for his interrupted childhood. Automobile entrepreneur Eugene Morgan is ambivalent about automobiles, conceding that “with all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization”.
Both films locate their Merrie England in the decades immediately following the Civil War: pastorals to contrast with the dirty cities of the twentieth century. In Kane it is the wintry Colorado of 1871. In Ambersons it is Indianapolis as the “midland town” of the 1880s, with its quaint bygone fashions, unhurried horse-drawn street cars, and moonlit serenades. Those customs barely linger on into the new century. Around Christmas 1904, we witness a spectacular “pageant of the tenantry” in honour of spoilt brat George Amberson Minafer. It is “the last of the great, long-remembered dances that everybody talked about”; the following day George topples his horse-drawn sleigh and Eugene’s primitive horseless buggy comes to the rescue. The characters observe that the town is getting dirtier, more industrial. The Ambersons and the Morgans chug through the snow singing ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. The final shot of this sequence does not fade to black but is masked out by an iris, another of Welles’s quotes from the language of silent film to roughly, if anachronistically, suggest old times.21 The sequence signifies not only the town’s inescapable descent into modernity, but also the last moment of harmony between the two families.
Here and elsewhere Welles puts a personal spin on winter as the age-old symbol of death. In Kane, snow is associated with childhood from the vantage of old age. It works as a Proustian memory trigger: flakes swirling through a snow globe twice prompt the tycoon to mutter “Rosebud”, the name of his old snow sled – the last utterance on his deathbed.22 In Welles’s later films Mr. Arkadin and Chimes at Midnight, snow coincides respectively with dying Jakob Zouk’s nostalgic desire for a Christmas goose liver and Master Shallow’s happy reflection on “the days that we have seen!”
The western had mythically reimagined the country’s violent post-Civil War frontier history for modern American audiences, usually as a triumphalist narrative. Kane is only a western for a few minutes, but the vanished frontier seems central to the character’s sense of self. Kane is suddenly ejected from his childhood in Colorado and, as heir to a fortune, sent east to be educated. The purely accidental beneficiary of a gold mine, he is thereafter geographically isolated from the engine of his wealth, the fortune wrestled from the frontier. Upon assuming his inheritance, Kane tells Thatcher, “I’m not interested in gold mines, oil wells, shipping, or real estate.” Sixty years later, still in rebellion against his former banker-guardian, he reflects: “If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.” A few years later he dies thinking of Rosebud.
Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893) had argued that in the process of westward expansion the United States had founded its uniquely democratic institutions and way of life, but by then the frontier had been finally conquered. In 1898 Kane, the frontier exile, champions the Spanish-American War as a patriotic cause through ludicrous fabricated news stories. This aspect of Kane’s history is faithfully based on Hearst’s press campaign.23 Smyth argues that this shift from American expansionism to empire seems to represent the beginning of “national decay, a betrayal of [Kane’s] western frontier ‘childhood’ and the Lincoln Republic”.24
Kane in Colorado, 1871; the Ambersons and the Morgans in Indianapolis, 1904
NOTES
