Precocious Hollywood, the Golden Era of Wonderkinder

Young KANE,
but Orson Welles was never really young.

The Early decades of Hollywood were created by young men inventing and reinventing themselves. They were prodigious rouges, driven, who burned out and died young like Thalberg, or like Wells, who was burned out young, but still had a gleaming attraction like "Rosebud". m/r

Citizen Kane :: SteynOnline

by Mark Steyn Mark at the Movies May 9, 2015

For our Saturday movie date this week, a muted centennial:

Orson Welles was born one hundred years last Wednesday - May 6th 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin - and I thought the anniversary would have been a bigger deal. But I guess the conventional wisdom on the Wunderkind - meteoric rise, then squandered talent - is prevailing posthumously, too. If you're under a certain age, you may find it hard to distinguish between the real Welles and the John Candy version on "Second City", fruitily intoning his way through some or other bit of telly-slumming. The day before he died he'd been on "The Merv GriffinShow", and he'd had a good time, but you expect more of a chap who over half-a-century earlier, on a hike around Ireland, had strolled into the Gate Theatre in Dublin and told Hilton Edwards, in those pre-Google days, that he was a big Broadway star. Edwards didn't believe him but he liked the kid's moxie and put him in the Gate's production of Jew Suss, the tale of the eponymous Suss, a court Jew in the service of Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg. Welles played the Duke. He was 16 years old.

Actor, writer, director, Welles had conquered the three dominant media of the day by the time he was 26: a groundbreaking Broadway adaptation of Julius Caesar in 1937, the hit radio version of War Of The Worlds in 1938, and then in Hollywood Citizen Kane.

Directing-wise, I prefer Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons and A Touch of Evil. And acting-wise, of course, his Harry Lime turn in The Third Man. Yet Citizen Kane is the great film of all great films — the one that from the Sixties on would reliably come in at Number One whenever anyone compiled a Top 100 Films Of All Time list. But, if you were a 25-year-old radio director given carte blanche by a Hollywood studio, what would you do? Orson Welles knew it wouldn't be enough just to hand RKO a nice little movie: he had to make a splash; he had, at the very least, to top his own War of the Worlds for the Mercury Theatre Of The Air. And, in topping himself, he managed to top everyone else, too. And yet, for all that, the more you watch Citizen Kane, the more Welles' sense of it as a great film threatens to overwhelm its greatness.

It's about Charles Foster Kane, who's really William Randolph Hearst, up to a point. Welles planted the thought with his cast, and sure enough, just before Citizen Kane was to open at Radio City Music Hall, Ruth Warrick (who plays Kane's first wife) carelessly gave it away in a publicity interview: "He's a composite of the kind of men that Americans make into heroes, when, really, they are despoilers," she said.

"Like who?" asked the reporter, reasonably enough.

-go to links-