Thursday, September 15, 2011
After 40 years, I have far more than just one thing to say about Columbo
"That's me — I'm paranoid. Every time I see a dead body, I think it's murder.…But that's me. I'd like to see everyone die of old age." — Lt. Columbo, "Étude in Black" (Season 2, Episode 1)
By Edward Copeland
Actually, television audiences met Lt. Columbo three times before his series debut 40 years ago on this date as part of the NBC Mystery Movie — and the first time he wasn't even played by Peter Falk. Though most who are old enough probably remember the series as part of a Sunday night rotation with NBC's other mystery series, McMillan & Wife and McCloud, the "wheel" actually started on Wednesday nights. The troika didn't move to Sunday until the second season. As far as the Columbo character goes, actor Bert Freed first played
the cigar-chomping lieutenant in an episode of NBC's The Chevy Mystery Show , a summer anthology series hosted by Walter Slezak, that aired July 31, 1960, titled "Enough Rope." William Link and Richard Levinson, the creators of the Columbo character, adapted the teleplay from a story "Dear Corpus Delicti" that they published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine with Richard Carlson playing a murderous doctor. Two years later, the writers expanded the story into a stage play called Prescription: Murder which starred legendary Oscar-winning character actor Thomas Mitchell as Columbo with Joseph Cotten as the homicidal physician. By 1968, they decided to return Columbo to television with a movie version of Prescription: Murder. They sought Lee J. Cobb to play Columbo, but he was unavailable, but consider this frightening possibility: Their second choice was Bing Crosby. Fortunately, Bing's golf game proved more important to him than a television series and, though they thought he was too young for the part, Peter Falk
won the role with Gene Barry playing the killer. They did a second TV movie, Ransom for a Dead Man, that aired in early 1971 with Lee Grant as the murderer (for which she received an Emmy nomination), and come that fall Columbo became a regular series as part of that mystery wheel and Falk's portrayal of the scruffy homicide detective with his junky car, tattered raincoat and ever-present cigar became an irreplaceable TV icon. In the first season episode "Lady in Waiting," a socialite mother (Jessie Royce Landis) arrives at her son's mansion after he's been shot to death and doesn't immediately recognize exactly who or what Lt. Columbo is. When he introduces himself as a police detective, she says, "I must say you hardly look the role." That may have been true, but no one but Peter Falk could have played the role any better. I was too young to catch the early years in first run, but I remember how excited Henry Mancini's spooky theme music for The NBC Mystery Movie with the unknown figure waving a flashlight in all directions at whatever shows were in the rotation at the time followed by the announcer's booming voice announcing, "Tonight's episode —" It always punctured my balloon if he finished his statement with McMillan & Wife, McCloud or even Hec Ramsey. Thankfully, in this example, it is Columbo.
If you have never seen an episode of Columbo (and if that's the case, I must ask what the hell you've been doing with your life), you needn't worry that for a mystery series I'm being so carefree in identifying the various killers because what made Link & Levinson's creation (in this case the series, not the detective) so great was that you know from the outset who the murderer is. Spoiler alerts aren't necessary here because Columbo begins by showing the culprit plotting and carrying out his and her crime and Falk's intrepid homicide detective doesn't
show up until later to play cat-and-mouse with the killer. In the first season, the movies (which, in essence, is what they were more than a series) ran 90 minutes with commercials while in later seasons they alternated between 90 minute and two hour installments. Sometimes, Columbo didn't turn up until as late as 30 minutes into the show. In the first episode when Columbo was a regularly scheduled series, "Murder By the Book," Falk's lieutenant first appears as a faint figure at the end of an office hallway as he approaches the wife (Rosemary Forsyth) of apparently kidnapped and possibly dead mystery writer Jim Ferris (Martin Milner), who is getting a drink from a water fountain. It's about 15 minutes into the story and the audience already knows that Ferris' soon-to-be-ex-writing partner Ken Franklin (Jack Cassidy) has lured Jim to his lakeside cabin, killed him and staged the entire kidnapping. Cassidy will be one of the show's favorite actors to cast as a killer: he'll play the villain two more times. Others in this rogues gallery include Robert Culp (three times as a murderer, once as the father of a murderer) and Patrick McGoohan (a killer four times, taking home Emmys for two of them; he also directed five episodes, one of which he wrote). It's also one of several Columbo mysteries that involve writers. Most interesting of all, the series premiere was written by the show's story editor at the time, Steven Bochco, who would go on to co-create Hill Street Blues, and was directed by a 24-year-old kid named Steven Spielberg.Many directors whose names you'd recognize helmed a Columbo, though no one else who'd become a Spielberg. The other director who would probably go on to the most notable career would be Jonathan Demme, who directed an installment in its seventh season. Many known better for their acting gave it a try as well as some whose names might not ring a bell but who did direct some interesting features such as Jack Smight (No Way to Treat a Lady), Boris Sagal (The Omega Man), Richard Quine (My Sister Eileen, The Solid Gold Cadillac), Robert Butler (The Barefoot Executive, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes), Jeannot Szwarc (Somewhere in Time), Ted Post (Hang 'em High, Magnum Force) and James Frawley (The Muppet Movie). Other writers who would pass through included the prolific Stephen J. Cannell, Dean Hargrove, who went on to create or co-create The Father Dowling Mysteries and Matlock, and Larry Cohen who would go on to write and direct such quirky horror films as It's Alive and Q.
While the two previous made-for-TV movies had set the basic mold for what a Columbo mystery would be, it
truly wasn't until it became a regular network fixture that Falk could really cut loose as the lieutenant and the show could become a comedy as much as it was about catching the bad guy. That's really why I think Tony Shalhoub's Monk gets compared to Columbo so often — it's not because Columbo has a mental disorder but because Columbo and Monk both emphasize comedic elements. In fact, Monk tends to be more dramatic than Columbo with Monk's underlying mourning for his murdered wife while Columbo just got funnier the longer it went on. "Murder By the Book" really sets the template for the entire series and even if you have no interest in Columbo, it's fascinating to watch just as one of Spielberg's earliest credits. "Murder By the Book" opens with the sound of typing (sigh…typewriters) while the visual shows a car driving down an L.A. street. We soon see that Milner's Jim Ferris busily types away. On the wall, (Homage to Rear Window or not? You decide.) are plaques, painting and photos charting the partnership of Ferris and Ken Franklin (Cassidy). As the typing continues to be the only sound, the car we're watching pulls into the building's garage and parks on the roof. A hand reaches inside the glove compartment and removes a gun. A man exits
the car and shuts the door and we see it is Franklin whom Spielberg films at a low angle as credits continue. The director throughout the episode uses a lot more adventurous angles and quick cuts than I've seen from him in years, but he was young and trying to gain notice. Upstairs, something only a grammarian or a copy editor would notice — Ferris types a quote but places the period outside the quotation mark. It turns out the gun was a joke — it's not even loaded — and he's not wearing gloves. Franklin was just trying a good-natured ruse to show Ferris that there aren't any hard feelings about severing their partnership and asks him Jim to his lakeside cabin near San Diego to mark the end of a fruitful relationship. Ferris doesn't know that it also will mark the end of his life.It's obvious why they would re-team Falk with an actor such as Jack Cassidy more than once because some performers' chemistry with Falk's Columbo reached a perfection that you expect came from a lab and since the interplay between the lieutenant and the killer drove the show, why not go back to a proven winner as they did with Cassidy, who would return in seasons 3 and 5. He might have appeared again if he hadn't fallen
asleep with a lit cigarette and died in 1976, 10 months after his third Columbo aired. Cassidy excelled at what was the most common Columbo scenario — a villain who's not only a killer, but a snob. In most cases, class comes into play with the murderer always assuming he or she is smarter and better than that rumpled lieutenant, but no one plays dumb on purpose better than this detective so when he makes the case on the cultured killer, they inevitably are surprised that this little man in the tattered raincoat, always seeming to be forgetful and driving that Peugeot 403 convertible that looks as if it could crumble into a million pieces at any moment beat them. In "Murder By the Book," it takes 35 minutes for Columbo to say his first, "There is one more thing." The comic highlight, harbinger of many to come in the series, occurs as Ken Franklin is being interviewed by a magazine writer and her photographer tries to take photos of him while in the background Falk does some great slapstick as Columbo, juggles an armful of books, cigar stuck in his mouth, looking for a place to put the books down.The second episode of its first season had another three-time killer, Robert Culp, as Brimmer, the head of a big private investigation agency hired by Ray Milland to find out if his much younger wife (Patricia Crowley) is
cheating on him in "Death Lends a Hand," which won Columbo creators Levinson & Link the Emmy for outstanding writing in a drama series, the only writing Emmy the series ever received though it earned a lot of nominations in that category. Brimmer proves she did, but lies (with the wife in a nearby room) and says she's faithful. She asks why he would do such a thing. "Oddly enough, I'm a moralist," he tells her. So moral that he lied to her husband to hold the truth over her head so she can feed him information about her husband's powerful friends and business interests. She balks, saying she'll expose the private eye instead and he kills her in a rage — the cleanup and coverup of which gets wonderfully filmed as reflections in the lenses of Culp's glasses. He stages her death to look like she was
robbed and dumped in a vacant lot. Some interesting facts about L.A. life in 1971: 187 already was the police code for a homicide and when Brimmer tries to woo Columbo to take a job at his agency, Columbo learns a top position there can pull in $30,000 a year. That doesn't seem like much and in the first episode of season two, Columbo says his salary is $11,000 a year, which is the start of the poverty line for a single person today and the oft-mentioned Mrs. Columbo is a housewife. When they tried to spin her off in the form of Kate Mulgrew when Columbo ended the first time in 1978, she had a part-time job writing for a weekly neighborhood newspaper, until they decided to change her name to Callahan and forget that she was supposed to be related to Columbo at all (though at the start of Mrs. Columbo she even took their unnamed basset hound Dog with her). 
Falk won the first of his four Emmys (out of 11 nominations) for playing Columbo for that first season. The sole time the show won an Emmy for best series, it actually was shared ith the other NBC Mystery Movie members for outstanding limited series. Throughout its two runs (the original NBC run from 1971-78 and the ABC return from 1989-2003), it earned 38 Emmy nominations and won 11 awards. Because of the shared time
slot, it also meant shorter seasons than a regular series. Where a normal network show would be producing around 26 episodes a year at that time, Columbo only had seven installments in season one. Some of the other actors who played killers that year were Eddie Albert, Ross Martin, Susan Clark (in "Lady in Waiting" which featured Leslie Nielsen when he could still play it straight and was directed by veteran actor Norman Lloyd, who fell off the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock's Saboteur and would play Dr. Auschlander on St. Elsewhere), Patrick O'Neal, who played a homicidal architect in "Blueprint for Murder," the only Columbo episode that Falk directed himself, and perhaps most fun of all, Roddy McDowall in an episode titled "Short Fuse." Did you hear the one about the exploding cigar? You will in "Short Fuse," where we also learn aboute Columbo's famous fear of heights. Because McDowall's character Roger Stanford is a playboy and a prankster (oh — and there is that murder), he does fool around with things such as those cans that spray strings of sticky colored plastic. When Columbo snoops around his darkroom, he accidentally sets it off on himself and an entire scene consists of McDowall picking the goo out of Falk's hair. As I mentioned when I sadly had to write my appreciation of Peter Falk when he passed away in late June, there was much more to the actor than just Lt. Columbo, as great and iconic as Columbo is. Between the time he made his first Columbo movie Prescription: Murder and prior to filming his second Ransom for a Dead Man and beginning the series, Falk began another important creative relationship — with John Cassavetes. The two actually had worked as actors in 1969 first in the Italian gangster flick Machine Gun McCain, which also featured Gena Rowlands but didn't open in the U.S. until October 1970. The important film they made together though was Husbands (subtitled A Comedy About Life, Death and Freedom) that was written and directed by Cassavetes and co-starred Ben Gazzara. Falk became a vital part of Cassavetes' unofficial repertory company appearing in A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night (as himself) and Big Trouble. The two also co-starred in Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky. The Cassavetes troupe all played with Falk on Columbo in some capacity. Rowlands appeared as the wife of a killer, Gazzara directed two episodes and Cassavetes starred as the killer in the second season premiere, "Étude in Black," one of the series' best episodes thanks to chemistry these two fine actors already had with one another.
Cassavetes plays gifted conductor and composer Alex Benedict who kills his pianist mistress (Anjanette Comer) after she threatens to tell his wife Janice (Blythe Danner) about their affair if he doesn't leave her. Benedict
tries to make it look like a suicide, but Columbo sees through the ruse rather quickly. He and Mrs. Columbo also are big fans of Benedict, who is prepping a big concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The scenes between Cassavetes and Falk prove positively electric as their relationship switches from a killer who thinks Columbo's swooning will save him until he figures out that the lieutenant actually has more on the ball than he ever suspected and he starts challenging the cop to find the evidence. The episode has time for laughs as well as Benedict stumbles upon Columbo waiting for him on stage at the Hollywood Bowl playing "Chopsticks" on a concert piano. The cast also includes Myrna Loy as his mother-in-law and patron of the orchestra, concerned over the P.R. when another member of the orchestra who was the murdered woman's ex-boyfriend turns out to have a criminal past. Benedict defends the musician, telling the woman who played Nora Charles that it's not like she didn't drink gin during Prohibition. This excellent episode was written by Bochco from a story by Levinson & Link and was directed by none other Nicholas Colasanto, best known as Coach on Cheers. This also is the episode where Columbo gets the basset hound that he never bothers to give a name.For a network series to have more good episodes than bad, especially when it involves a set formula that they didn't tinker with much, Columbo truly stands as a monumental television achievement. Of course, I refer only to NBC years from 1971-1978. In a way, they had the luxury that cable series have now by not having to deliver so many episodes a year. While they call it seven seasons, it only adds up to 45 episodes. The sixth season only produced three episodes and no season made more than eight. In a way, it was the Curb Your Enthusiasm of mystery shows: A formula and a limited number of shows per season. When ABC revived Columbo in 1989, they tried originally to pair it with other mysteries, but they all eventually flopped and it just turned into occasional movies. Some were OK, but they had a hard time getting worthy killers except for the two appearances by McGoohan and had some silly outing where Columbo went undercover in disguise with accents and one where there wasn't even a murder but a kidnapping. Faye Dunaway won a guest actress Emmy for what really was a controversial one, "It's All in the Game," because Columbo purposely lets the killer get away because of the victim's loathsomeness. They had two seasons where they were regularly scheduled between 1989 and 1991 and then just TV movies. They made 24 in all.
However, those first 45, I could go on about them all. While it wasn't unusual in the NBC version to have killers who turned out to be more sympathetic than their victims, Columbo still took them to jail. Donald Pleasence's wine maker in "Any Old Port in a Storm" may be the best example. His playboy half-brother plans to sell the vineyards to another wine company, taking away his pride and joy and he kills him in a rage. He also was one of the few cultured characters who didn't look down on Columbo. When his longtime secretary (Julie Harris) figures out his guilt, she proposes he marry her to keep her quiet. Columbo solves the crime first and he gratefully confesses — finding prison preferable to marriage. "Freedom is purely relative," he tells Columbo, who brings out a special bottle of wine when he arrests him, which his high tastes approve. "You learn very well, lieutenant," he says.
"Thank you, sir. That's about the nicest thing anyone has said to me," Columbo responds. All the Jack Cassidy episodes are great, but in the second outing, "Publish or Perish," it's neat to see him play a book publisher losing his biggest author and that they cast Mickey Spillane in the part. The episode also sends Columbo to Chasen's to interview some people and has the high-scale eatery whip him up some chili. Director Robert Butler also includes an imaginative triple split screen that shows Spillane's character at work dictating his book while the hired killer approaches down a hall and Cassidy is elsewhere, establishing his alibi. "Swan Song" from the third season proves to be another favorite of mine with probably the most unusual casting choice for a killer ever — Johnny Cash. He plays a gospel singer blackmailed by his controlling shrew of a wife (Ida Lupino) and turns in a solid acting performance. Cash's character drugs Lupino and a young girl singer that he had sex with when she was
underage so he drugs the two of them when they are flying to the next concert site and bails out of the plane, making it look like a simple plane crash. As Columbo investigates, an air crash investigator asks Columbo if he flies. "My ears pop in an elevator. In fact, I don't even like being this tall," he replies. I can't leave out Patrick McGoohan, always great, but of his four I think his first episode, the one that got him the first Emmy, "By Dawn's Early Light," ranks first. His strict commandant at a boys' military academy would be a great performance on any series. Some of the best guest killers whose episodes I didn't have time or space to mention in detail (original 45 only): Anne Baxter, Leonard Nimoy, Laurence Harvey, Martin Landau (as twins), Vera Miles, Jackie Cooper, José Ferrer, Richard Kiley, Robert Conrad, Robert Vaughn, Janet Leigh, Hector Elizondo, Ricardo Montalban, William Shatner, Theodore Bikel, Ruth Gordon, Louis Jourdan and Nicol Williamson.If I had to pick, the fourth season episode "Negative Reaction" might be my favorite Columbo of them all. Written by Peter S. Fischer, who would later create Murder, She Wrote and directed by Alf Kjelllin, it cast Dick Van Dyke against type as an asshole and a killer — even if what little we saw of his wife (Antoinette Bower) made it appear as if she had it coming. Van Dyke plays Paul Gallesko, an acclaimed photographer
reduced to shooting portraits because he's under the thumb of his wife. He fakes her kidnapping and gets a recently released ex-con named Alvin Deschler (Don Gordon) he met while chronicling San Quentin to photograph possible houses for him to buy, unaware that Gallesko is setting him up to be the fall guy and eventually kills him and shoots himself in a faked ransom exchange gone awry. What makes "Negative Reaction" so great in addition to Van Dyke being a bad guy is that it also may be the funniest Columbo as well. When the lieutenant arrives in the beat-up Peugot at the junkyard where it was staged, he passes a sign that says "WE BUY JUNK CARS." It seems that Gallesko had an unexpected witness — a drunk bum played by character actor Vito Scotti who appeared in six episodes in vastly different parts. (In "Swan Song," he was a funeral director trying to sell Columbo on post-life planning.) After he gets sobered up and gives his statement, the police let him slip away and Columbo has to track him
down at a Catholic mission where a nun (Joyce Van Patten, who will return in a later episode as a killer) mistakes Columbo as a homeless person and tries to find him a new coat and gets him a bowl of stew. Columbo keeps trying to explain that he's not homeless, but the nun replies, "No false pride between friends." When he finally finds the bum and talks with him, the nun returns with a coat and tries to take his and Columbo finally says, "I appreciate what you're doing ma'am, but I've had this coat for seven years and I'm very fond of it" and shows her his badge. The nun assumes he's undercover and compliments his disguise and promises not to blow his cover. Gallesko certainly isn't as friendly as the nun every time Columbo pops up to dig. "You're like a little shaggy-haired terrier. You've got a grip on my trousers and you won't let go. I can't turn around without you looking up at me with that blank innocent expression on your face," Gallesko growls. One of the other things that bothers Columbo is that Deschler was taking cabs everywhere until the
last day, the day of the supposed ransom exchange, when he suddenly rented a car. It would have been a lot less expensive to rent a car earlier than taking all these cab rides, but then it dawns on the detective: He didn't have a driver's license yet. Columbo goes to the DMV to check it out and it turns out the man who gave him the driving test that day, Mr. Weekly (Larry Storch), is stuck out on a street because a car broke down. Columbo goes and picks him up to see if he can identify Deschler, but Mr. Weekly keeps being distracted over worries about the safety of Columbo's car and his reckless driving. It's a hysterical scene — and they chose to break for this bit of comedy with only 14 minutes left. On top of everything else, "Negative Reaction" contains one of those classic endings where Columbo tricks the killer by using his own arrogance against him to give himself away. That's why this YouTube clip of conductor Alex Benedict's parting words to Lt. Columbo sum him and his series up.Tweet
Labels: Bochco, Cassavetes, Demme, Dunaway, Falk, Ferrer, Hitchcock, Joseph Cotten, Landau, Lee J. Cobb, Loy, Lupino, Nielsen, Nimoy, Pleasence, Ruth Gordon, Shatner, Spielberg, T. Mitchell, TV Tribute
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Monday, July 18, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Hume Cronyn Part I
By Edward Copeland
When I planned to do a tribute to Hume Cronyn on what would be his 100th birthday, I never imagined that I'd have to break it into two parts, but the more I delved into his history, the more I realized the piece would be a long one because Cronyn's career was not only a long one, it was multifaceted. Believe it or not, I'm omitting a lot of what he did, just to make this salute as short as it is. In fairness, this tribute to the actor-screenwriter-playwright-author-director-producer-lyricist
should ideally have led with a solo photo of the man, but his life and career was so inexorably linked with that of his second wife Jessica Tandy, it would be just as wrong not to include her since she figures so prominently in his story. Cronyn and Tandy met in 1940, wed in 1942 and stayed together until her death in 1994. In that time, the two of them collaborated in their first film together in 1944 and would go on to make a total of nine feature films, one feature documentary, appear in 10 plays shown on TV in the 1950s (one of which he directed), co-star in a short-lived 1954 sitcom (which he produced and began life as a radio show they did together), make five TV movies together, appear on countless talk shows and TV specials as a couple and, of course, teamed on the same Broadway productions 14 times, earning them the title of The First Couple of the American Theater. Cronyn did do plenty on his own though, not just as an actor, but as I mentioned earlier as a writer, not only of plays but of TV movies as well as two screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock, who directed Cronyn in his film debut in 1943, as well as his autobiography.While Hume Cronyn, born on this date in 1911 in London, Ontario, Canada, certainly left his imprint on all entertainment mediums and in most of the possible roles associated with that industry, that almost wasn't going to be the course of his life's career. His father, also named Hume, was a banker and prominent member of the Canadian Parliament in Ontario and insisted his son go to law school so Cronyn studied law at McGill University in Montreal even though young Hume already had his sights set on a career in the theater. While at McGill, he also took an interest in boxing and developed skills good enough that he nearly landed a spot on Canada's 1932 Olympic boxing team as a featherweight, except he dropped out of McGill after the 1930-31 term and headed over the border to the United States. He made his professional stage debut in 1931 in the play Up Pops the Devil
at The National Theatre in Washington. He played a paperboy for a salary of $15 a week. Cronyn began attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts under Max Reinhardt where he graduated in 1934. He took acting jobs wherever he could find them, including working with The Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Va., outside Richmond. The city of Richmond reprints an article about the theater which still exists, from the Richmond Times-Dispatch about their production of a play called Mountain Ivy in summer 1934 as well as their unusual experiment where patrons could swap pigs, chickens, jellies and other assorted foods in exchange for a seat during the hard economic times. The article lists Cronyn as both a member of the cast and its production designer. He made his Broadway debut later that same year in the play Hippers' Holiday in the role of a janitor where he also served as understudy in the comedy whose cast also included Burgess Meredith. The next year, he replaced Garson Kanin (who would gain more fame later in his career as a writer) in the role of Green in George Abbott's production of the comedy Boy Meets Girl whose cast also included Everett Sloane, probably best known as Bernstein in Citizen Kane. Sometime in this time period, Cronyn wed for the first time, but no two sites agree on either the beginning or end dates of his marriage to Emily Woodruff or provides much information about her. They were either married in 1934 or 1935 and divorced in 1936 or 1941, the year after he met Jessica Tandy, but I was having no luck finding a definitive answer until I discovered that Cronyn and Tandy donated a treasure trove of their personal papers to The Library of Congress along with copies of divorce decrees, marriage licenses, etc. So I'll take their words as the final authority and Cronyn wed Emily Woodruff wed in 1934 and were divorced in 1936. Tandy, who actually was two years older than Cronyn and English born, ended her first marriage to the actor Jack Hawkins in 1942 after 10 years of marriage.In January 1937, Cronyn landed the role of Elkus in the original production of Maxwell Anderson's fantasy High Tor, which won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for show and whose cast included Meredith again as well as Peggy Ashcroft. He continued making Broadway appearances but 1939 became notable for two reasons. One: Cronyn made his first appearance on the fledgling medium of television on a program called Her Master's Voice. In October 1939, he made his biggest impression on The Great White Way to date in the role
of Andrei Prozorov in a production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. He continued working regularly on Broadway though 1940 proved more significant as the year he met Jessica Tandy. They wed two years later, though they didn't collaborate on the stage until six years later. In fact, Cronyn and Tandy shared the screen together first. When Cronyn and Tandy did make their first trip to Hollywood, it wasn't long before film roles came their way, especially for Cronyn who lucked out with his film debut. Though only 32 at the time, Cronyn was cast as the much older Herbie Hawkins, neighbor friend of Henry Travers in Alfred Hitchcock's great 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt starring Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright. Travers played Wright's father and he and Cronyn's characters were obsessed with mysteries and scenarios for the perfect murder while completely unaware that Cotten's Uncle Charlie who is staying with Travers actually is a notorious serial killer. Cronyn and Travers' scenes are a hoot. The same year, Cronyn landed a small role in Claude Rains' rendering of The Phantom of the Opera and the war drama The Cross of Lorraine starring Jean-Pierre Aumont and Gene Kelly. Cronyn and Tandy also welcomed the birth of their first child, a son, Christopher. Cronyn also kept busy during those war years by staging and performing in many USO productions to entertain the troops.His first working relationship with Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt would begin a professional relationship between the two that would persist and in many areas. The director cast Cronyn again as part of the ensemble in his next full-length feature, 1944's Lifeboat, for which YouTube provides a clip.
The same year also placed him in his first film with his wife, The Seventh Cross directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Spencer Tracy. This war-time drama, which I've never managed to see, tells of seven men who
escape a Nazi concentration camp. The camp's commandant orders that as each escapee is recaptured by the Gestapo, he be returned to the camp and put to death on one of the seven crosses he's erected. Tracy's character is the last of the seven still on the run, trying to flee to Holland. Cronyn and Tandy play a married couple who take Tracy in, unaware of who he is at first, though their own son is in the SS and Cronyn's character is tempted by a large reward. It earned Cronyn his first and only Oscar nomination as best supporting actor. It was the first film Tandy made in Hollywood. In 1945, Cronyn's major films took a lighter and, in one instance, a more domestic turn, as did he and Tandy's life with the birth of their second child, daughter Tandy. Filmwise, he co-starred with Robert Walker and June Allyson in The Sailor Takes a Wife and appeared in the all-star cast that included Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly and many, many more in the mix of music and comedy skits in Ziegfeld Follies. Cronyn acted in the sketch "Sweepstakes Ticket" with William Frawley and Fanny Brice. Again, YouTube actually has the clip and how often do you get to see the real Fanny Brice? The year 1946 proved especially busy for Cronyn on several fronts. In Los Angeles, he directed his wife for the first time on stage in a production of Tennessee Williams' Portrait of a Madonna at the Actors' Laboratory Theatre. Cronyn also was named a director of the Screen Actors Guild. He worked with director Jules Dassin for the first time in A Letter for Evie, teamed with his wife on screen for the second time in The Green
Years, did uncredited voice work in The Secret Heart and co-starred as the smarmy defense attorney representing Lana Turner (or is he?) in the murder of Turner's husband in the film noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice. Finally, on a personal note, Cronyn adopted Tandy's daughter, Susan, (from Tandy's marriage to Jack Hawkins) on the girl's 12th birthday and Susan changed her last name to Cronyn. In 1947, Cronyn became the first person to portray scientist Robert Oppenheimer in a film about the making of the atomic bomb The Beginning or the End. Tandy was making a mark on the East Coast creating one of the landmark characters in theatrical history — Blanche Du Bois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. In movies, Cronyn gave what may be the best performance I've ever seen him give — the tyrannical leader of the prison guards, Captain Munsey, locked in a battle of wills with Burt Lancaster in Dassin's Brute Force. This clip doesn't show Munsey at his cruelest or most terrifying and it has foreign subtitles, but you'll get the idea.With 1948, Cronyn definitely indulged in the multi-faceted nature of his work in the arts. He only acted in one film that year: the comedy The Bride Goes Wild co-starring Van Johnson and June Allyson. Before he headed back east, he took his first crack at screenwriting. With Hitchcock's uncredited help, the two wrote
the adaptation of Arthur Laurents' screenplay for Hitchcock's gem Rope, which was based on the play Rope's End by Patrick Hamilton. Rope not only was notable for the way Hitchcock filmed it in long takes that ran until the camera ran out of film, it also was the director's first film made in color. Cronyn then went back to New York where Jessica Tandy continued to play Blanche on Broadway. Cronyn returned to the stage for the first time in seven years in The Survivors whose cast included Louis Calhern, E.G. Marshall, Kevin McCarthy and Ray Walston. He also became a producer on the New York-based theater TV show that started on the fledgling ABC network called Actor's Studio, renamed The Play's the Thing in its final season when, by then, it aired on CBS. He directed an installment that broadcast Portrait of a Madonna and Tandy was even able on a night off to re-create the role she played in the L.A. production in which Cronyn directed her. The series attracted lots of big names and introduced viewers to many great works but sadly no copies of the program exist, including Marlon Brando's first appearance in a role on television in 1949, something he wouldn't do again until 1979.As the 1940s ended, Cronyn was all over the map — literally. He only acted in one feature film — and it was a musical. Cronyn put on a brogue to play the assistant to an Irish town's police sergeant (Barry Fitzgerald) who calls on a singing insurance investigator from America (Bing Crosby) to help solve the mystery of the whereabouts of their missing Blarney Stone. That was the least of Cronyn's accomplishments that year. He still served as a producer on the series Actor's Studio, though he didn't have time to appear or direct on that program because he was so busy on other TV series. He worked again with Burgess Meredith as well as Pat Harrington Jr. in the "One Sunday Afternoon" installment of The Ford Theatre Hour in May; acted opposite Fay Bainter in "The Uncertain Hour" on The Chevrolet Tele-Theatre a week later; and played the title character in "Dr. Violet" on Suspense, a series that presented live plays with characters in dangerous situations. Cronyn would repeat the role in two more installments the following year.
He also found time to play the title role in a national tour of Shakespeare's Hamlet put on by The American National Theatre and Academy. Cronyn also repeated the job he had on Hitchcock's Rope on Hitch's next project Under Capricorn, the only movie by the director I couldn't even finish. It wasn't his usual suspenser, but a big costume drama set in 1831 Australia and starring Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten. I'm far from alone in my criticism of it — Hitchcock himself regretted making it in the book-length interview he did with Francois Truffaut. Cronyn had a helluva task. First, it was a novel, then a play, then a screenplay and then he got his hands on it to try to turn it into something worth watching. Hitchcock admitted he only took the movie for the chance to work with Bergman and to return to England — and the big paycheck didn't hurt either. He also admitted that Cronyn was out of his element. "I wanted (Cronyn) because he's a very articulate man who knows how to voice his ideas, but as a scriptwriter he hadn't really sufficient experience," Hitchcock told Truffaut while taking the ultimate blame.
SOURCES: Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy: A Register of Their Papers in the Library of Congress, Fandango, biography.com, film reference.com, Encyclopedia of World Biography, Internet Accuracy Project, Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut, Wikipedia, The Internet Broadway Database and the Internet Movie Database.
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Labels: Burgess Meredith, Dassin, E.G. Marshall, Garland, Gene Kelly, Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Lancaster, Rains, Tandy, Tennessee Williams, Tracy, Truffaut, Zinnemann
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Sunday, July 03, 2011
He certainly admires people who do things
By Edward Copeland
Saying that Alfred Hitchcock created great sequences certainly isn't a particularly profound or original statement for someone who writes about film to make, but each time you re-visit one of his classics, it's hard not to repeat that kind of statement because it washes over you, especially when you look again at
Strangers on a Train, which was released 60 years ago today in New York, though some sources have its U.S. premiere elsewhere on June 30, 1951. The great director's masterful set pieces especially took hold of my thoughts when I watched it this time because of its marvelous opening. We see a man get out of a cab with luggage, but only from below the waist, concentrating on his shoes as he heads to catch a train. Then, we see a second man get out of another cab, identical company, and we only notice the difference because of the style of his shoes as he hurries to catch his train. We follow the shoes as they go through the turnstiles and board the train, even get a shot of the train pulling away and switching tracks. The one pair of shoes keeps moving within the train car finally taking a seat by a table in a lounge car when those two pairs of shoes brush one another, giving us our first meeting between tennis pro Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker). YouTube has the clip, but you can't embed it, so click here to see one of the best starts to one of Hitchcock's greatest films. The novel Strangers of a Train was the first thriller published by Patricia Highsmith, who would go on to write the successful series of books on serial killer Tom Ripley that have been adapted into films starring actors as diverse as Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, Matt Damon, John Malkovich and Barry Pepper by directors as disparate in style as Rene Clement, Wim Wenders, Anthony Minghella and Roger Spottiswoode. As good as some of those films are and as fascinating as Ripley is as a character, for my money, none match Walker's creation of the sociopathic, psychopathic and just plain crazy Bruno in Strangers on a Train,
especially under Hitchcock's direction and working from a screenplay whose co-writers included none other than Raymond Chandler. Walker's performance as Bruno functions as the key to Strangers on a Train really unlike an actor in any other Hitchcock film. For a director who liked to joke that actors should be treated like cattle, Strangers wouldn't be the classic that it is without the brilliance of Walker's performance. Walker's work borders on genius and, to me, may well be the best ever given in any Hitchcock film. His Bruno can evoke chills and a general feeling of creepiness, but Walker doesn't play him as an over-the-top villain, working overtime to scare the audience at every turn. He creates a three-dimensional, troubled individual that at times you might even feel a twinge of sympathy for — until he commits his next horrifying act. When I planned to write this tribute, I found myself less interested in recounting a lot of the plot or describing the highlights as I did honoring Walker's work. It gets boring after awhile to whine about the performances that Oscar didn't nominate, but how they missed Walker is an outrage. It's even sadder considering that about a month and a half after the film's release, the actor died because of a bad reaction to prescription drugs. All things considered, performers in Hitchcock films didn't get as many nominations through the years as they probably deserved. The only ones who did get nominated were Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson in Rebecca; Albert Basserman in Foreign Correspondent; Joan Fontaine in Suspicion; Claude Rains in Notorious; Ethel Barrymore in The Paradine Case; and Janet Leigh in Psycho. Only Fontaine's performance in Suspicion took home the prize. No Anthony Perkins. No Jimmy Stewart for Vertigo or Rear Window. No Joseph Cotten for Shadow of a Doubt. All those nominated and unnominated pale though next to the omission of Robert Walker's Bruno. If for some inexcusable reason you've never seen Strangers on a Train, what the hell have you been doing with your life?Some plot synopsis and I'll try to be brief. Once their footwear bump, Bruno recognizes Guy Haines immediately and slides over to make conversation. The men may be strangers, but Bruno knows a lot about Guy from newspapers. Not just about his
tennis career, but from the society and gossip pages as well, so Bruno brings up Guy's marriage to Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), daughter of Sen. Morton (Hitchcock favorite Leo G. Carroll), when he spots Guy's cigarette lighter engraved A to G. "Perhaps you read too much," Guy tells Bruno as he grows
annoyed. Besides, Guy adds, he hasn't married Anne, unless they've changed the laws against bigamy and he hadn't heard about it. Haines remains legally married to Miriam Joyce Haines (Laura Elliott), who has delayed their divorce even though she's openly playing around. Bruno starts to suggest something, but holds back instead just saying, "Right now, I suppose divorce is the simplest option." Bruno invites Guy to dine with him in his compartment, but Haines wants no part of that, hoping to rid himself of the pest. He asks the train's waiter if there are any empty seats in the dining car, but the waiter says no and there probably wouldn't be for another 30 minutes at least. Bruno takes that as his cue and a sign. Guy simply must dine with him now and Haines reluctantly agrees. Walker perfectly blends the charming side of Bruno with the annoying without giving away hints of the darkness inside.
When the two are alone and Guy gets some liquor in him, he's a bit too open about his life, admitting how Miriam played him for a fool. Bruno admits he has someone he hates too — his father. Bruno's father is a rich man, but he expects Bruno to earn a living and won't just let him have what's "rightfully his." Bruno says that some people just deserve to die, doesn't Guy agree? "I may be old-fashioned, but I thought murder was against the law," Guy says. "Some people may be better off dead, like my father or your wife for instance," Bruno suggests
before he tells Guy of his plan for the perfect murder. Two strangers — much like Guy and himself — with no connection to one another meet and agree to swap murders. For instance, while Guy has an airtight alibi, Bruno would kill Miriam. Then, Guy would do the same for Bruno and murder his father. "Criss-cross," Bruno says. The train nears Guy's stop where he's going to try to talk to Miriam again. In the meantime, realizing he's trapped in a compartment with a loon, Guy just tries to humor Bruno. As he's leaving, Bruno tries to confirm that they've made a deal and Guy sort of laughs him off, just eager to get out of there. Guy also fails to notice that Bruno managed to swipe his engraved lighter from him. To Bruno's ears though, it sounds as if Guy has agreed to swap murders with him. For those always on the lookout for where Hitchcock might appear, when Guy exits the train in his hometown, Alfred can be seen climbing aboard carrying a bass.
Things do not go well when Guy meets with Miriam at the music store where she works about the divorce. His wife turns out to be a real shrew. She tells him that she was prepared to give him a divorce but thought he was dragging his feet. She demands he cough up money for her lawyer which Guy does, though he grumbles about her carrying another man's child. Then Miriam springs it on him — she has no plans to give him a divorce. She tells him that she wouldn't have started playing around if he hadn't been gone playing tennis all the time. Guy practically throttles her in the store, until the manager breaks it up. A steamed Guy calls Anne from a phone booth and relays the latest development. "I wanted to strangle her," he tells Anne.
Later that night, Miriam decides to head to the amusement park with not one, but two men. Unbeknownst to her, a third man will be tagging along. From this point on, Strangers on a Train exists
almost entirely of Hitchcock set pieces and creepy moments provided by Walker. The actor and director work together on the very first as Bruno stalks Miriam through the amusement park, always seeming to appear beside her from out of nowhere, impressing her with the ability to hit the bell when he strikes the game with the hammer, keeping a constant devilish grin on his face. Has a smile ever looked more malevolent to the moviegoer while a passer-by wouldn't notice that anything's amiss. When Miriam and her boy toys get a boat to sail through the Tunnel of Love, Bruno gets one as well, munching on popcorn as he drives. In the cave, ambiguous shadows appear on the wall followed soon by Miriam's scream. That turns out to be a fakeout. Miriam comes out the other side just fine. When the boats dock at a little island, her men head off somewhere, but Bruno stops her to light her cigarette. She flirts with the madman who goes from gentleman to killer, knocking off her glasses as he begins to strangle her, her murder viewed as a reflection in the eyewear.
As they say, the best laid plans…Nothing goes the way Bruno planned and since Guy didn't take him seriously in the first place, events don't go his way either. When Guy arrives at Sen. Norton's home, they inform him of Miriam's murder, but Guy has already been told — Bruno met him at the gate and showed him Miriam's smashed glasses and wanted to make plans for when Guy will kill Bruno's father. Unfortunately, Guy hadn't planned an alibi. He has one: He was on a train back to Washington and spoke with a professor. Unfortunately, the professor had imbibed a bit too much and when the police bring him to meet Guy, he doesn't remember him. The senator asks if everything's fine now that his alibi has been verified. "When an alibi is full of bourbon, sir,
it can't stand up," Guy tells him. Because Guy had a motive, the police are even keeping him under surveillance, keeping detectives tailing him at all times. It doesn't help that an impatient Bruno keeps spying on Guy in a variety of settings creating some really spooky moments as when he's the sole figure on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial or the true masterpiece: When he attends one of Guy's tennis matches and all the spectators' head move side-to-side, following the serves but Bruno sits perfectly still among keeping his focus on Guy. He gets more daring, insinuating himself among Guy and the Mortons' circle of friends. "You're spoiling everything. You made me come out in the open," Bruno tells Guy at one point. Guy explains that the police are watching him, so he can't easily slip away and kill his father from him. I love Strangers on a Train and Robert Walker as Bruno so much that I could probably write endlessly about it, detailing every plot point, sharing all the great lines of dialogue, describing all of Hitchcock's magnificent touches, but part of me thinks if you have seen Strangers on a Train, you already know all this and if you haven't, you shouldn't be reading what I'm writing about it, you should be watching it — as soon as possible.
Therefore, I'm resisting the urge to expound on all I wanted to such as mentioning Marion Lorne (Aunt Clara on Bewitched) and her two scenes as Bruno's mother and quoting some of her lines. It means not going into detail about Patricia Hitchcock as Anne's sister Barbara or Bruno's party game when he crashes the senator's party. He has so many lines that I'm tempted to repeat but if you haven't heard them, you need to hear them from Walker first, not me. I do have to briefly refer to the amazing suspense Hitchcock builds with activities happening in two different spots: Guy trying to hurry and win a tennis match so he can get back to the amusement park to prevent Bruno from planting his lighter and framing him while in the town where that park is, Bruno tries to retrieve the lighter he accidentally dropped down a storm drain. The throwaway line of the rich old woman when police commandeer her car, telling her they are in pursuit of a criminal. "Really? How exciting."
Finally, there's the climax on the merry-go-round, one of the most exciting Hitchcock filmed, but there's a moment many might miss. There's a little boy still on the ride and even though it's spinning wildly out of control, he's having a blast. When the fighting Bruno and Guy come near him, the tyke stars hitting on Bruno — and Bruno hits the kid back. Strangers on a Train, simply put, is just a great fucking movie with Robert Walker giving one of the best portrayals of an on-screen psycho in film history. As Guy says about Bruno toward the end, "He was a very clever man" and Walker was just as clever an actor to deliver this brilliant a performance.
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Labels: 50s, Fiction, Fontaine, Hitchcock, Hopper, J. Stewart, Joseph Cotten, Malkovich, Matt Damon, Movie Tributes, Olivier, Oscars, Rains
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Sunday, May 01, 2011
The Magician & The Media Baron
Kate Cameron, New York Daily News (1941)
“Perhaps the one American talking picture that seems to be as fresh now as the day it opened.
It may seem even fresher.”
Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1971)
"Staggering and belongs at once among the greatest screen achievements."
William Boehnel, New World Telegram (1941)
"The boldest free-hand stroke in major screen production since Griffith and Bitzer were running wild
to unshackle the camera."
Otis Ferguson, The New Republic (1941)
“Probably the one film that has started the largest number of filmmakers on their careers.”
François Truffaut
By John Cochrane
What can you say about Citizen Kane (1941) that hasn’t already been said many times before? Orson Welles’ landmark first feature — which received its American premiere 70 years ago today — has routinely been called by general consensus "The Greatest Movie Ever Made" by countless filmmakers, critics and movie buffs — topping lists such as AFI’s Greatest Films Of The Century, Cahiers du Cinema’s 100 Greatest Films Ever Made and every Sight & Sound Critics and Directors poll since 1962. Despite almost universal acclaim, even from the beginning, the movie was blacklisted on its initial release — and almost literally destroyed by a nervous industry that resented its precocious and talented creator and didn’t want to offend the then-still powerful publisher on which it was largely based. The film miraculously survived though, and many critics say that if D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) was a watershed moment for the silent period, Citizen Kane was a brilliant summation of the sound era up to that point in time — forever changing how movies could be photographed and edited, and how stories could be told.
Citizen Kane is a fictional biography of an enigmatic newspaper tycoon named Charles Foster Kane — a character largely inspired by William Randolph Hearst, but also borrowing details from real life figures such as Samuel Insull, Harold Fowler McCormick, Howard Hughes and, some would argue, even Orson Welles himself. The film begins with Kane’s death as an old man, and is made up mostly of flashbacks — which are shown in a circular, rather than linear fashion. We watch an almost completed newsreel of his life — which deftly gives a quick summary of the story we’re about to see. We then listen to
interviews or diary entries from five different people — Kane’s guardian, his business manager, his closest friend, his second wife and his butler — who all tell overlapping anecdotes and opinions of him, in an attempt to fill in the gaps of who Charles Foster Kane really was. Kane inherited an enormous mining fortune from his mother — who sent him away from home as a child to be raised and groomed to be one of the world’s richest and most influential men. He took over a foundering newspaper at 25; created a publishing empire based on sensational journalism; was derailed from becoming governor of New York due to an extramarital affair; failed to mold his mistress-turned-second wife into an opera star and died alone when she left him. Kane’s last word was “Rosebud” — which has become the most famous single word in the history of cinema — and the quest of News on The March reporter Mr. Thompson is to determine what Rosebud is. He never does, though the audience learns what it means in the closing shots of the film. 
Citizen Kane is remembered as Orson Welles’ masterpiece, and no one is more responsible for its greatness than Welles himself — who was heavily involved at practically all levels of the production. But the picture also was a coming together of a group of gifted craftsmen and actors, all working together at the top of their game. The first thing that comes to mind when most people think of Citizen Kane, is Gregg Toland’s amazing cinematography. By 1940, Toland already was one of the industry’s top cameramen — having worked with Hollywood heavyweights John Ford and William Wyler. He lobbied hard to be on Welles’ first picture, and the two made a terrific team. Welles later recalled how he believed that a film director was responsible for lighting a set — as a theatrical director would be. For the first few days of shooting, Toland would quietly shadow Welles — fixing his ideas so that they would work and telling everyone else to keep their mouths shut. When a crew member informed an embarrassed Welles that setting the lights was the cinematographer’s job, Toland was frustrated that his cover had been blown. He explained to Orson, “The only way you learn anything new is from someone who doesn’t know what can’t be done.”
Welles and Toland shot the film in deep focus — an extremely difficult process even today — which keeps the entire visual picture in absolute clarity, just like the human eye. (Toland had previously experimented with the process while making Ford’s The Long Voyage Home in 1940.) Working with special effects by Vernon L. Walker and optical printer effects by Linwood Dunn, Welles and Toland created impressive sets and crowd scenes out of miniatures, dissolves and creative shadows and lighting — most noticeably in photographing Kane’s vast, almost gothic estate of Xanadu — his campaign for governor and Susan Alexander’s opera house performances. Sometimes Welles and Toland double exposed the film to create two simultaneous images in focus — as in when Kane discovers Susan after she’s tried to commit suicide by an overdose of pills. Sometimes they simply spliced two images together, or put the camera in an odd place to get an unusual shot, such as cutting a hole in the floor to get an incredibly low shot of Kane and Leland after Kane loses the election making the characters appear bigger than life. Before Citizen Kane, you rarely saw ceilings in films. Toland and Welles used low cloth ceilings throughout the picture (which looked real in black and white) and concealed microphones to record the sound. Soon afterward, many other American filmmakers began to use this technique as well.
In the News on the March sequence — which wickedly satirizes Time magazine’s then-popular The March of Time newsreels — Welles and Toland dragged the film stock on the floor to make it look old and worn and used more camera effects to seemingly place Kane in historical places with famous figures. Orson once said, “A long playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make a picture with a pair of scissors and a two inch lens.” In that respect, Citizen Kane also has a number of long scenes that are played with very few cuts. In the sequence in which Kane’s mother signs away guardianship of him to Mr. Thatcher, the camera starts at a window that looks out at Charles playing in the snow, and then backs up over seemingly invisible furniture that is quietly moved into place beneath the moving camera. As Mary Kane sits down at a table to sign the document, a still-wobbling hat inadvertently shows how the shot was achieved. The scene then continues in one take — until Mrs. Kane returns to the window to call for her son — and the camera follows the Kanes and Mr. Thatcher outside, in the second of three shots for the entire sequence. Welles praised his cinematographer, saying that he would constantly ask for miracles and Gregg would perform them without fanfare, like it was no big deal. Orson would show his gratitude by sharing his director’s title card with Toland — an almost unheard of gesture in motion pictures. (Ford did the same thing on The Long Voyage Home, the previous year.) “He was the greatest cameraman who ever lived,” Welles would say. “He deserved it, didn’t he?”
Another key collaborator on Kane was Herman J. Mankiewicz, who co-wrote the script. A veteran screenwriter since the silent era, Mankiewicz worked — often uncredited — on dozens of Hollywood pictures such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and comedies by the Marx Brothers. He also was part of the social circle of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies until he was banned from their parties due to his heavy alcoholism and gambling. Mankiewicz was nursing a broken leg in the hospital in 1939 when he met Welles, who was a big fan of Mank’s talent and sharp, cynical humor. After many brainstorming sessions together, Citizen Kane — under the working title The American — was born.
The actual credit for the screenplay has been the subject of debate for decades, with some people such as Pauline Kael and John Houseman suggesting that Mankiewicz was Kane’s sole screenwriter, with Welles usurping a co-writing credit. But these suggestions largely have been discredited by other vocal critics such as Robert Carringer, Jonathan Rosenbaum and filmmaker/writer Peter Bogdanovich. Various Welles’ collaborators on the film also vouched for his screenplay input — including Welles’ own secretary Katherine Trosper, who typed his manuscripts and notes. Welles’ own plausible explanation to Bogdanovich was that he and Mankiewicz discussed the story and characters for a long time and then, in the interest of efficiency, separated to write their own versions. When it came time to make the picture, Orson simply took what he liked from both scripts and improvised and rewrote as needed during the filming process — methods he used on practically every film he ever made — causing Mankiewicz to complain vocally about his many changes.
“Rosebud” was Mankiewicz’s invention. Telling a story from different viewpoints — an idea that was explored more fully by Akira Kurosawa in his great film Rashomon (1950) — was largely Welles’ idea. The breakfast montage between Kane and his first wife showing the disintegration of their marriage also was Welles. Bernstein’s speech about noticing the girl on the ferry for a split second and never forgetting her, was all Mank. It was Welles’ favorite moment in the picture. Despite accusations that likely damaged Welles’ career and that some argue brought a case brought before the Screenwriters Guild, Orson loved Mankiewicz. When the screenplay matter was settled with credit bestowed on both of them, Welles gave Mank top billing and continued to praise him for years afterward, calling his contribution to Citizen Kane “enormous.”
A third essential contribution was from composer Bernard Herrmann, a veteran of Welles’ radio days who was working on his first picture. Herrmann would go on to become synonymous with Alfred Hitchcock, but his score for Citizen Kane is wonderful and varied — sometimes mysterious, grim, tragic and mournful, at others, joyous, energetic or even romantic. Herrmann even created the opera pieces that Susan Alexander sings in her theatrical debut. The music consistently punctuates Kane’s pictures and words perfectly, heightening the emotional impact of the story. Even though Citizen Kane is in many ways a dark film, Herrmann’s score seems to celebrate its artistic quality and achievement and, by the movie’s end, you feel exhilarated. In at least one instance, Welles said that 50 percent of the film’s success was due to Bernard Herrmann. Kane also was a showcase for editor and future Oscar-winning director Robert Wise, who worked closely with Welles on the film’s perfectly cut flash-forward sequences and beautiful dissolves.
The fact that Citizen Kane largely is thought of as a technical masterpiece probably unfairly overshadows the many wonderful performances in the film. Welles used many of his Mercury Theater players in the film, with the idea that he wanted to present fresh faces that never appeared in movies before. He had an ability to bring out the best in his actors — encouraging their creativity, and making them feel like they could accomplish anything. The cast is terrific and their wonderful moments include Joseph Cotten as Kane’s friend and drama critic Jedediah Leland — absent-mindedly tearing up his program to shreds as he watches Susan Alexander perform on stage; Ruth Warrick as Kane’s first wife Emily Norton, arguing with her husband over breakfast; Everett Sloane as Kane’s loyal business manager Mr. Bernstein talking about the girl on the ferry who made a lifelong impression; Agnes Moorehead as Kane’s mother, Mary, calling her son to meet his new guardian and revealing that he’s to leave home and George Coulouris as Kane’s guardian and banker Walter Parks Thatcher, arguing with Kane about using his newspapers to attack companies with which Kane personally has stock in.
Best of all are Dorothy Comingore as Kane’s second wife, Susan Alexander, and Welles himself in the title role. Some people may argue that Charlie Kane isn’t a likable character, but Welles does make him sympathetic — particularly in his scenes with Comingore, which are among the most moving in the picture. Closeups reveal Kane’s insecurity and when he meets Susan Alexander for the first time, you can see how much he values being in the presence of someone who doesn’t realize his stature and likes him for who he is. A comment later in the same scene reveals a subtle feeling of wistfulness for his mother (who at this
point in the story has died a long time ago). When Susan tries to kill herself with an overdose of pills, Kane looks genuinely fearful for her well-being and tries to cover up the embarrassment of her suicide attempt to the estate’s staff. When Susan finally leaves him, Charles Foster Kane looks sad and lonely. He is a defeated man, close to tears — walking through his castle in a daze, with a snow globe in his pocket — after tearing Susan’s room apart in a rage. As his wife, Dorothy Comingore gives Susan an often tacky and loud quality, but her quiet moments as an older alcoholic reflecting on her ex-husband are beautiful. Looking at him when she awakens in bed from her overdose, she appears like a frightened and vulnerable child. She is apologetic, but unable to endure the harsh notices from her singing career any longer. “The audience doesn’t want you,” she says. “That’s when you’ve got to fight them,” a visibly shaken Kane tells her. “You won’t have to fight them anymore. It’s their loss.”
Orson Welles was able to keep the subject matter of Citizen Kane secret for a long time, thanks to a closed set, very few rushes being seen and by carefully controlling the press. When word got out that Charles Foster Kane closely resembled William Randolph Hearst, Hollywood erupted in turmoil. It didn’t matter that there were many differences between Welles’ fictional character and the actual publisher. (McCormick built the opera house for his wife, not Hearst, for example.) But there were too many similarities, which deep down Welles and Mankiewicz wanted to exploit on some level to attract attention for their film. Hearst may have been 78 years old at the time, but he was still feisty and had a loyal staff that was ready to punish Welles, RKO and even the whole film industry in print for what they perceived to be a harsh portrayal of their employer and his mistress, Marion Davies, who was well-liked in Hollywood. Davies was in fact considered a talented comedienne — though Hearst inadvertently hampered her career by using his influence to miscast her as a starlet in romantic epics. Welles for the record personally liked and admired her, and he would later agree that Hearst had a right to be upset for how she was unfairly caricatured.
Led by Louis B. Mayer, the other Hollywood studios offered to reimburse RKO for all expenses if they burned the film’s negative and all prints. The film escaped that fate by the skin of its teeth but Hearst newspapers still managed to blacklist RKO's movies for two weeks. That ban was lifted, but any mention of Citizen Kane either in articles or advertising still was strictly forbidden. The film also was denied exhibition by most major movie chains — largely owned by the movie studios at that time — as a safety precaution to avoid repercussions from Hearst’s empire, which was more than ready to expose the private, dirty laundry of any Hollywood insider that it didn’t like. Despite rave reviews and good business in big cities — mostly from independent movie theaters that weren’t afraid to show the film — Citizen Kane died in the heartland of America and lost money on its initial run.
Going into the Academy Awards, Kane had nine nominations including best picture, best director, best actor, best black-and-white cinematography and best music score of a dramatic picture, but it only won one Oscar for best original screenplay, which most people acknowledged was really for well-liked Hollywood pro Mankiewicz and not Orson Welles. Nominated editor Robert Wise recalled that every time Citizen Kane was mentioned during the ceremony, the booing became louder. The big winner that year was How Green Was My Valley (1941), a beautiful elegiac story of a Welsh coal mining family by legendary director and industry favorite John Ford — whose classic western Stagecoach (1939) Welles had screened almost 40 times in preparation as a textbook for making his own film. Valley has an unfair reputation today as the film that beat Citizen Kane, but the movie is one of Ford’s masterworks — the finest movie to ever win best picture, according to Bogdanovich — though he was quick to add that Kane was the movie of the decade.
After its disappointing performance at the Oscars, RKO retired the film from distribution, keeping it out of circulation in America until 1956 — five years after Hearst’s death. During this time, the movie’s reputation as an unseen masterpiece began to take shape. Citizen Kane belatedly received its first release in Europe in 1946 after World War II, where it was immediately embraced by the French. The founding members of the New Wave would immediately hail Welles as one of the great American film auteurs, with Jean Luc Godard later exclaiming “Everyone will always owe him everything.”
So what did Orson Welles ever do after Citizen Kane? It was an unfair question that bothered Welles for the rest of his life. Orson was lured to Hollywood in 1939, as a 24-year-old prodigy who seemed to be able to do it all. He had created groundbreaking theatrical productions in New York — including radical re-workings of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (staged in Harlem with an all African-American cast) and Julius Caesar (updating the play with a modern Fascist Rome as its setting). He also had a vastly influential radio career with his company the Mercury Theater, whose countless programs culminated with the notorious broadcast of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds in 1938, sending much of the country into hysterics with the idea that aliens were landing in New Jersey. Desperate to bring potential hits and prominence to their movie studio, RKO offered Orson a two-picture deal — with complete creative control as writer, director, producer and star. It even included final cut — a deal that even today few Hollywood filmmakers receive and many would kill for. To give this to an untested, brash 24-year-old rubbed many studio system veterans the wrong way and the town quietly watched with anticipation, waiting for Welles to be taken down. When Kane didn’t live up to box office expectations and only won one Oscar, many in the industry felt a sense of smug satisfaction.
Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests the theory that depending on whether you view Kane as a supreme example of the studio system or as an independent feature made in Hollywood, Orson Welles is either a failed artistic genius who burned bridges, couldn’t complete films and never lived up to his potential or he is a brilliant independent filmmaker who made the most of his opportunity to make one film in Hollywood with a good budget, top talent and complete creative freedom. Welles’ history and legacy is complicated, and there are a lot of conflicting facts and opinions, but Orson Welles was a lot more than just a one trick pony and his standing as a one of the cinema’s greatest directors has only grown since his death in 1985. It’s true that he never had final cut on any of the subsequent motion pictures he would make in Hollywood. His independent features from the '50s through the '70s also would be delayed and hampered by legal issues and a lack of funds which Welles would often raise himself through his many acting jobs, the most famous of these being Orson’s appearance as Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s immortal film noir The Third Man (1949) — arguably the greatest extended movie cameo in history.
Welles was a true renaissance man whose talents also included being an accomplished magician and painter. He was a maverick who never would have really thrived in the strict and careful confines of the Hollywood studio system. He also was a contradiction, exuding bigger than life confidence, but also deeply hurt by much of the criticism leveled at him over the years. He strongly disliked talking about his movies as art, but took his work very seriously and would freely admit that he was not a popular artist. Despite a number of setbacks and unfinished projects, Orson Welles would go on to complete 12 more films in his career, including at least three more masterpieces — The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Touch of Evil (1958) and Chimes at Midnight (1965).
The Magnificent Ambersons — a darkly beautiful and disturbing film that depicts the decline of a prominent family, as America ends one era and enters into the age of the automobile — may have even been a better film than Citizen Kane, according to Orson himself
and others who saw the original version. But the film was butchered and re-edited by the studio after a disastrous preview during Welles' absence on another project in Brazil, something that Kane never had to endure. Roughly an hour of Ambersons was removed, a happier ending shot by others was tacked on and the discarded footage destroyed. Welles’ cut (with its devastating finale) remains the Holy Grail of lost cinema. Chimes at Midnight (also known as Falstaff) draws from parts of five Shakespeare plays to create a new work about one of the Bard’s most beloved characters. Chimes has been widely unavailable in the United States for decades, but it was Welles’ personal choice for his best film — an opinion that a number of Welles historians and critics might agree with. Two Welles films — Touch of Evil and The Lady from Shanghai (1948) — also are considered classic films noir, a genre almost unthinkable without the visual influence of Citizen Kane. Welles never stopped being an artist and he never repeated himself. His flair for striking visuals and inventive editing always were a constant in his work. If you love the art of cinema, anything he directed is worth seeing. 
As the life of William Randolph Hearst faded into history, he became largely remembered through the character and movie that he and his company tried to suppress. Welles himself resented being largely remembered only for Citizen Kane, but the picture’s quality and history captured the public imagination. The legend of a brilliant 25-year-old shaking up Hollywood and redefining the art of filmmaking to everyone’s astonishment was too much to resist. Pauline Kael called the film a shallow masterpiece, but that’s not really true. Everyone remembers Rosebud. (If you don’t know what it is, you deserve to find out for yourself.) What the picture really seems to say is that it is impossible to completely know
someone. People are too complicated and mysterious and you can never truly know the secrets of their heart. Sometimes you might not even truly know the secrets of your own heart. We are many people in different situations — as the mirror sequence showing multiple Charles Foster Kanes walking down the hallway so beautifully exemplifies. As filmmaker Ernest R. Dickerson said in Sight & Sound magazine, “One word can't explain a man's life. But the final two words in this film can: "No Trespassing." It’s that mystery, along with the enigmatic genius of Orson Welles that makes Citizen Kane not only a great cinematic work of art, but a terrific entertainment that deserves to be seen and enjoyed. 
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Labels: 40s, Agnes M., Bogdanovich, Carol Reed, Godard, Hitchcock, Howard Hughes, John Ford, Joseph Cotten, Kael, Kurosawa, Marx Brothers, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Shakespeare, Truffaut, Welles, Wise, Wyler
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