Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [106]
The ultimate fate of both film and director was, she wrote, sealed by the results of the 1941 Academy Awards, which snubbed Kane for both the Best Picture and Best Director prizes, despite the fact that the film had received the year’s most ecstatic reviews. The picture’s sole Oscar went to its screenplay—and Welles had to share that with Mankiewicz. She believed that this wounded Welles so deeply that he had to spend the rest of his life claiming credit for more than his share of the film. “Men cheated of their due,” she wrote, in a strongly judgmental tone, “are notoriously given to claiming more than their due.”
In “Raising Kane” Pauline took repeated, barely disguised swipes at the auteurists. She believed that the worship of directors such as Welles and Fellini approached the ridiculous and that “such worship generally doesn’t help in sorting out what went into the making of good pictures and bad pictures.” What she didn’t do—and what enraged Welles’s many champions, devotees, and apologists—was discuss at any substantial length what Welles did achieve in directing the film. She did praise his acting performance as Kane, going so far as to say that The Magnificent Ambersons, beautiful as it was, suffered because “Welles isn’t in it, and it’s too bland. It feels empty, uninhabited.” She also speculated that Gregg Toland, Kane’s cinematographer, had played a previously unsuspected role in the picture’s overall look. She pointed to an obscure thriller from 1935 called Mad Love, in which Peter Lorre appears onscreen in bald pate, much like the aged Charles Foster Kane. She suggested that Toland might have borrowed the “Gothic atmosphere, and the huge, dark rooms with lighted figures” of Mad Love and put them into Kane. She had no real evidence for any of these theories, and she had purposely avoided interviewing Welles for “Raising Kane,” she explained, because she did not think she could trust anything he might say. “I already know what happened,” she had said to Suber when he asked if she would be trying to get an interview with Welles. “I don’t have to talk to him.”
In fact, the part about Mad Love was basically the same sort of movie detective work she had accused the auteurists of peddling. Interestingly, she did not draw a connecting line to a more recent film that may possibly have influenced Welles—Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. It was released the year before Kane, and the opening—the passing through the front gates of the stately Manderley, the scenes with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine standing in enormous rooms with great fireplaces, and the fiery finale, in which the camera slowly moves in to reveal a pillow with the monogram “R” being consumed in flames, just as “Rosebud” is, may well have influenced the look of Kane.
At the end of “Raising Kane,” Pauline suddenly shifted to a slightly milder, almost apologetic tone. Welles, she wrote, “had been advertised as a one-man show; it was not altogether his own fault when he became one. He was alone, trying to be ‘Orson Welles,’ though ‘Orson Welles’ had stood for the activities of a group. But he needed the family to hold him together on a project and to take over for him when his energies became scattered. With them, he was a prodigy of accomplishments; without them, he flew apart, became disorderly.” She closed by lamenting that Welles “has lived all his life in a cloud of failure because he hasn’t lived up to what was unrealistically expected of him.” This was one point on which Welles could not contradict her: Interviewed in the early 1970s, he characterized his career as “98% hustling and 2% moviemaking—that’s no way to spend a life.”
The New Yorker launched “Raising Kane” in a celebratory manner, with a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, and letters poured in to The New Yorker from enthusiastic readers. The acclaimed screenwriter Nunnally Johnson had had an epistolary acquaintance with Pauline for some time, and Pauline had spoken with him while preparing