Watch The Battle Over Citizen Kane For Free

the audience applauded

Strong and Moving!

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Blistering performances.

This episode of "The American Experience" was included as a DVD extra for the film "Citizen Kane". It's an exceptional film that is not just about the making of "Citizen Kane" but is also a film about two men--William Randolph Hearst and Orson Welles. Welles made the film and it was a veiled life story of Hearst--though with many fictional elements. This installment of the exceptional PBS series digs deeper--looking for parallels in both their lives--such as their huge egos as well as the way Welles' life mirrored that of Charles Foster Kane in many ways. Using various interviews, photos and film footage, they assembled a very compelling and interesting documentary--particularly for those who love old films. I could easily say more about the film and all that I learned about the personal lives, the production and Hearst's campaign to stop the film--but I'll leave all this to you to learn when you see it.

This is a feature-length documentary found on the DVD of Citizen Kane(not to be confused with the actual TV picture of a few years later, RKO 281, in spite of the latter sharing the title and evidently at least some of the premise). It's well-produced throughout and leaves little to be desired. It is more about the life and accomplishments of Hearst than Welles, but that can be argued as fitting, as that was whom the film in question was intended to be a biography of(if it turned out to be a bit of a misunderstood attempt at so, masterful effort though it is, and in the end actually is closer to the real persona, past and then-future of its maker). We are given a lot of insight into both of them, who they were, what drove them, their triumphs and defeat. It's all told rather well, with clips of the movie itself(as well as others, where it fits), interviews, past as well as current, with those who worked with them(and even one of Orson himself, from '82), footage from behind the scenes, stills and narration. A number of the many shocks the two caused, including the (in)famous War of the Worlds broadcast, are detailed, with witness accounts where possible. It's well-written and put together with expertise. This alone ought to be a strong point in favor of owning a copy of the piece itself. I recommend this to anyone who wants to know about one and/or the other of the mighty people, the controversy and their clash. 8/10

The American Experience is an unusually intelligent TV show. The episode concerning the 1918 flu outbreak comes to mind as a typical, interesting piece. But here it presents the usual near-hagiography of Welles. And unsure of whether the story is dramatic enough, they exaggerate plenty, and find witnesses to do the same. They give nearly the whole narrative over to bombast, at one point calling Citizen Kane "the movie that ruined both Welles and Hearst." That's just um... hyperbole.It's at least the third time this material has been given the run-through after The Citizen Kane Book, RKO-187, and Citizen Kane itself, an dthat's not counting "The Cat's Meow" about William R Hearst. One smirks noting that there isn't much difference between this and the cheesy techniques in Kane's "News on the March" featurette.Thespian-witness Norman Lloyd who was flown out for 6 weeks of tennis on RKO's dime for a canceled Welles production, finds his own story fascinating; that is, when he's not overacting for the interview, delivering unremarkable memories that he finds remarkable, and obviously bullshitting to make himself seem more interesting.But nothing will prepare you for Sam Leve... no more annoying person has ever existed. He's a comically over-the-top stereotype, who resembles a bushy frog, and insists to viewers that the things actually happened in his now-unremarkable anecdotes. ("I was THERE. I'm NOT TELLING ANY STORIES!") He gesticulates. He shouts. He's impresses himself. He's a self-parody of everything bad in bio-pix; some utter jackass pulled out of mothballs, whose every word comes off as horseshit. This guy applauds himself for forming a sentence, and he's supposed to offer insight? He wears out his welcome in about ten seconds. Really folks.... give Uncle Morty his meds and put him back in the asylum. He's not helping your movie.But mostly the problems are those that afflict the "Behind the Music" series. Anything unique or extraordinary is crushed under the wheels of the unrelenting, typical bio-doc format.

The conflict between William Randolph Hearst, the press magnate, and Orson Welles, the greatest filmmaker of all time, over the latter's supposedly Hearst-bashing Citizen Kane is a relatively fascinating story (in the sense that real life is rarely as interesting as art), but there is very little new about it in this documentary.American arts documentaries are generally inferior to British ones, favouring simplistic generalisations over thoughtful analysis. This film consists of footage and interviews that have mostly been seen before, and offers trite comparisons between Hearst's and Welles' life stories to give their clash a false sense of inevitablity and fatedness, when, as with everything, Welles used the bare bones of Hearst's life (it was Herman Mankiewicz's idea to satirise it in the first place) to film his own tragedy.If you don't know the story, then this is, I suppose, as good a place as any to start. We get biographical sketches of Hearst and Welles, paralells between their notorious careers, and then the facts of the film's creation and reception. Although you can get all this in any popular encyclopaedia, there is much cherishable footage - e.g. Welles' voodoo Macbeth, the celebrity home movies of San Simeon, Welles' silly beard on arriving in Hollywood - and some splendid eye-witness accounts from William Alland (Thompson in Kane), Ruth Warwick (Mrs. Kane) and Norman Lloyd (a Mercury actor).The range of interviewees in general, though, is very weak, generally plumping for the obvious (Wise, Bogdanovitch), neglecting contributions from Welles scholars, who might have added some complexity or artistic context to the story. There is little analysis of Kane itself within this biographical context - for this you must turn to David Thomson's exemplary, personality-charged biography, Rosebud.The film also neglects to ask why, if Kane is such a hack-job on Hearst, why is Charles Foster Kane, monstrous flaws and all, such a rich, sympathetic, frequently awe-inspiring, tragic character, while his model was a despicable, mean-minded fascist? The film's only real insight - that Hearst's sole claim to posterity is his connection with Kane - has been proffered before.Anyone still intrigued by this story after the film, but looking for something meatier, should check out both the Thomson book, and Welles' extraordinary 1982 BBC interview, several moving chunks of which are interspersed here.