(4 of 4)
The anti-Kane forces achieved their goal: the movie flopped. In the long run, of course, Hearst lost. What people know of him today is what they remember from the movie; the definitive biography, by W.A. Swanberg, is titled Citizen Hearst. But Welles lost too. His next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, is a magnificent shard in its surviving form; RKO pulled Welles off the film, cut it by a third, hired a hack to shoot a new ending. He was now "Hollywood's youngest has-been," condemned to haunt Hollywood and other film capitals till he died looking for work. People knew him only as the fat man, a butt of lame jokes. Unable to finance his dream projects (including a film about the making of The Cradle Will Rock), Welles earned eating money as a narrator and pitchman. He ended as he began. The Voice. The Shadow.
Callow has all that to consider in his second volume: how the seductive boy became the self-destructive man; why Hollywood blackballed a director who loved film so recklessly and, in his first pass at the mechanical muse, conquered her. But Welles left a monument no one can chip away. As the documentary notes, "There is only one winner in the story of Citizen Kane, and that's the film...In its 55th year, the movie is still a marvel, a circus of camera wizardry enlivening the story of a failure: a powerful man who loses it all. The young Welles did more than anticipate, somehow, his disappointment and decline. Through Kane he revealed how we all, as we age, become smudged parodies of ourselves--more comfortable in our weaknesses, less sure of our strengths...with little more to treasure than one image from a frosty childhood."
A movie of such profundity, and so much fun, was an anomaly even in 1941. Now we can hardly imagine a filmmaker, let alone a film industry, capable of creating it. That impulse is lost in the snows of time. Citizen Kane is our Rosebud.