Word: kanes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Perched in his San Simeon splendor, Mr. Hearst was supposed to be hopping mad. This young Orson Welles had made for RKO an insulting movie about his life called Citizen Kane. Led by his official ministress to the movie capital, Columnist Lolly Parsons, many a Hearst favor-seeker sent word to The Chief that they could fix everything. Soon the machinery of Hollywood pressure began to throttle Citizen Kane...
First approach was to M. G. M. Headman Louis B. Mayer, an old Hearst friend and spiritual shepherd of Hollywood's producers. Mr. Mayer was warned that the release of Kane would mean a good, old-fashioned Hearstian attack on Hollywood-lots of stories on the intimate facts of the intimate lives of the movie colony. Hearst's gossip-dishing Adela Rogers St. Johns was placed on the firing line...
...show its films, was reminded of its reliance on the theatres of the other major companies. There were warnings that the Hearst attack would harm the whole industry. There was even guarded talk that other studios would chip in to defray the $800,000 RKO had spent on Citizen Kane...
Producer Cornell has gathered a cast of veterans who act like it-Raymond Massey (Sir Colenso), Bramwell Fletcher (the painter), Clarence Derwent, Whitford Kane, Ralph Forbes, Colin Keith-Johnston. Cecil Humphreys is sidesplitting as the pompous Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, who explains that he finds it necessary to live in the style to which his rich patients are accustomed...
Orson Welles treats the audience like a jury, calling up the witnesses, letting them offer the evidence, injecting no opinions of his own. He merely sees that their stories are told with absorbing clarity. Unforgettable are such scenes as the spanning of Kane's first marriage in a single conversation, the silly immensity of the castle halls which echo the flat whines of Susan...