: Herman Mankiewicz, A.B. Miss Kael deserves her byline because she has shaped her material, much of it unoriginal, into an article with a polemical thrust all her own. (He later commented that he found the whole episode distressing that he just wanted to put it behind him.) This conflict is between a newspaper culture centered in New York and the emergent alternative culture of Hollywood. (#2 in the 2002 Book Challenge) This is the reprint in book form of Pauline Kael's 1971 New Yorker piece entitled Raising Kane. Several versions of the story have also been filmed, the most famous of them—rightly—being His Girl Friday, which appeared the year before Kane and stated Cary Grant as Burns and Rosalind Russell as Hildy (Hildegard rather than Hildebrand, and transformed into Burns’s ex-wife). In this one crucial regard—its inextricable braiding of image and narrative—Citizen Kane was like a comic book. Kael, Pauline. Raising Cane’s Prepares to Bring Its ONE LOVE® to Denver’s Hampden Neighborhood Popular brand known for unrelenting focus on Crew, Culture and quality chicken finger meals to hire more than 100 Crewmembers for February op He was also a drunkard, and Kael claims that his alcoholism made his employment precarious. At one point in the film Kane jokingly, or not jokingly, calls Leland a “stuffed shirt” and a “New England schoolmarm”—taunts from a boy born and raised in the wilderness. Snow, the sciences and the humanities but rather the Gutenberg world and the post-Gutenberg world. In addition to the thefts from Suber, there are also a number of factual errors in the essays, which suggests that William Shawn allowed the entire 50,000 words to bypass the fact-checking for which the New Yorker was then so famous. Since it sold very well, Welles’s silence proved to be quite lucrative for him.). Try. “Raising Kane” itself bears the by-line of Pauline Kael and of Pauline Kael alone. If you really understood it you’d condemn it. Yet thousands of words are directly quoted from other writers, and thousands more are paraphrased without credit. She takes the point too far, of course: Kane is greatly indebted to those earlier comedies but it would be a perverse viewer indeed who walked out of the theater after seeing Charles Foster Kane’s demise thinking “What a charming comedy.”. “Orson Welles wrote ‘not one word’ of Citizen Kane,” insists a posthumous memoir by a son of the man who shared a Best Original Screenplay with the director of the 1941 classic. Raising Kane and other Essays offers the best of Pauline Kaels more.ship with Pauline Kaela writer I had admired and learned from, in spite of the. Much the same is true of Kane, which is why it is both shallow and a great, great film. The Two Cultures—not, with apologies to C.P. It was a sensational essay that asserted Welles stole credit from Mank, who had dictated the original drafts of the script to his secretary, Rita Alexander, while Welles was not present. RAISING KANE REVISITED: Herman Mankiewicz, Pauline Kael, and the Battle Over “Citizen Kane.”The New Yorker walks back some of their own critic’s 1970s-era revisionism:. And if you had Ben Hecht or Herman Mankiewicz or Charles Lederer—who wrote the screenplay for both the original film of The Front Page in 1931 and for His Girl Friday, in the latter case with help from Hecht—you were basically all set. She celebrated Citizen Kane on just these grounds: thus her insistence that Welles is not the auteur of Kane but rather the primus inter pares, the first among equals in its making. When young Charles’s mother comes unexpectedly into a great fortune, Thatcher handles the paperwork, and then, at Mrs. Kane’s request, becomes her son’s guardian. Raising Kane by Pauline Kael found a ton of success with movie buffs and casual readers alike. When she started her work on Kane she was living temporarily in Los Angeles, and drew heavily on the work of a film professor at UCLA named Howard Suber, but that research bore witness to a much more complex story than the one Kael would end up telling. Then he fires Leland—but does he fire him for speaking ill of Susan‘s singing? “Welles’ many biographers have disputed her conclusions, [which were] drawn largely from interviews with John Houseman and Rita Alexander, who helped Mankiewicz edit his overlong script. He has written only a few sentences, the first of which begins, “Miss Susan Alexander, a pretty but hopelessly incompetent amateur….”, And there his former friend Charles Foster Kane finds him. It published Major Writers, and its nonfiction especially (think of John Hersey’s Hiroshima or Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, both first published in the magazine) was notable for its dry, often colorless, I-am-a-camera objectivity. She just ignored everything that didn’t fit. But Kael noticed that the film doesn’t actually stop there. She saw very clearly something that almost all other critics—bedazzled by the circular structure of the film, the outrageously innovative cinematography of Gregg Toland, the strange geometries of Welles’s compositions—failed to notice: that Kane was at the time of its release just the latest in a long series of movies about newspaper people. He decides to finish the review himself, but not to correct it. Thatcher reads from a letter written to him by Kane: he says “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” He looks up and repeats the sentence in tones of incredulity: “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” And those are the final words of Citizen Kane. But it’s called Mank and not Orson…I felt like [this] was okay in context.”, From a 2.28.16 Lou Lumenick N.Y. Post story, titled “My dad wrote Citizen Kane — not Orson Welles.”. Perhaps that is one reason why, when the Library of America recently published a collection of Kael’s writing on film, they omitted the single most famous piece she ever wrote. in The Citizen Kane Book (Boston, 1971), p. 38. The more staid and responsible papers are likely to get the Hollywood treatment only when they stumble on something obviously dramatic: see, for example, the 2015 film Spotlight. Rather, “something has spoken in place of the director.” Something that arises from the reunion of the clichés, something that the makers of the film had the shrewd wisdom not to keep out or even control. Most viewers of Kane will remember that the film concludes in Kane’s great mansion Xanadu, stuffed with a lifetime’s hoarding of what the fake newsreel from the start of the film calls “the world’s loot”: paintings, sculptures, furniture, jigsaw puzzles—and a child’s sled with the word “Rosebud” stenciled across it. Kael was known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, her opinions often contrary to those of her contemporaries. But one of the central claims of her essays is that, while Orson Welles did indeed direct the film, he wrote almost none of it. And you’d be wrong to do so—just as you’re wrong now.”, In Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Joe Kavalier—a young Jewish refugee from Prague living in New York City and beginning a career as an illustrator of comics—goes to the theater to see Citizen Kane. Instead, it was written by Herman Mankiewicz, who had been credited merely as co-author. Apparently this is the work that blasted convention on how film critics and historians had viewed Citizen Kane up to that time (since then it's become the conventional way to view Citizen Kane). (For those who want to know how Kane was actually written, and filmed, Robert Carringer’s The Making of Citizen Kane remains the definitive account.). All Hello, Sign in. Every aspect of this debate is interesting, I think: the extent to which Welles simply filmed what Mankiewicz had written, the validity of the claim that “cinema is the work of a single person.” (NB: It isn’t. 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