Word: kanes
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Callow draws telling word pictures of Welles' early years. But to evoke a film, it helps to have moving pictures, and The Battle over Citizen Kane, which runs the lives of Welles and Hearst on parallel tracks until they collide in 1941, is a two-hour tornado of a documentary, with rare clips of the 1936 Macbeth, some quaint home movies of Hearst's costume parties, reminiscences by such Welles colleagues as lighting designer Abe Feder (still jazzy after all these years) and William Alland (who played the reporter in Kane). Best is the cogent narration, written by Lennon...
...were the famous liaisons with actresses: Welles wed three, Hearst one. For decades, while his papers denounced Hollywood morals, the old man lived openly with Davies, a comedian he foolishly tried to remake as Garbo. She stayed with him, good times and bad, in San Simeon (the "Xanadu" of Kane), his Spanish-Moorish-Italian "ranch" crammed with four millenniums' worth of trophies. It was your crazy uncle's attic, half the size of Rhode Island...
...star Welles as Marlow and Kurtz--was deemed too pricey. Now, with Mank's unbilled help (the deal specified no screen credit for his script), Welles hoped to turn a jolly plutocrat into a tragic figure, swathe the San Simeon Sun King in the menacing shadows of movie melodrama. Kane would be Welles' Hearst of Darkness...
...putting so many facets of his young boss into Kane--the inhuman vigor, the using of others, the sled he loved as a boy--Mank effectively wrote Welles' autobiography for him in screenplay form. There was a lot of the sour old writer too in the dark vitality of the newspaper scenes, the habit of looking down on men in high places, the name of young Herman's bicycle: Rosebud. The two men privately insisted it was Hearst's pet name for Marion's sex. But that could be an impish trick, just as the whole Rosebud plot is--since...
...goaded his newcomer cast and ace cinematographer Gregg Toland into playing the script's long scenes with few cuts; the audience, he figured, would be smart enough to find the drama without the nudging of montage. He kept the film secret from studio brass. But he couldn't keep Kane from Hearst. Mank couldn't, anyway. He handed the script to Charles Lederer, who was both Davies' nephew and the new husband of Welles' ex-wife. It came back annotated by Hearst's lawyers. And that was just a hello. Soon the old man was promising scandal and lawsuits against...