Pop Culture - CITIZEN KANE (1941)
When Pauline Kael annotated the similarities between Citizen Kane and Mad Love (1935) in a 1971 New Yorker article on the Welles classic, curious moviegoers made a point to seek out the Peter Lorre horror film. Welles' deployment of certain visual elements (whether intended or not) from Mad Love cannot be denied, from the makeup to the use of a white cockatoo. It's also more than a coincidence that cinematographer Gregg Toland worked on both films.
What set Mad Love apart from other Hollywood horror films of the thirties was the disturbing Expressionist style of director Karl W. Freund. A key German Expressionist cinematographer who had shot The Last Laugh (1924), Metropolis (1927), and Dracula (1931), Freund made his directorial debut with the classic chiller, The Mummy (1932).
As expected from a director who apprenticed at the feet of masters like F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, Freund applied many of Expressionism's stylistic trademarks, including chiaroscuro lighting, surreal set design, and extreme camera angles. The film's look was a remarkable achievement, given Freund's conflicts with his two different cinematographers, Chester A. Lyons and Gregg Toland. Film critic Pauline Kael attributed much of Toland's later brilliance in Citizen Kane (1941) to the influence of his earlier work on Mad Love.
A documentary about the battle between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst over the production and release of Citizen Kane was the subject of The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1996), an Oscar®-nominated film for Best Documentary. And the fictionalized story of RKO 281 (the production number assigned to Citizen Kane), a 1999 cable television film, was at one time slated as a feature film that was to be directed by Ridley Scott. As it turned out, Ridley and brother Tony Scott's Free Productions produced the film for HBO. In February 2001, Turner Classic Movies premiered Captured on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies (2001). This original documentary sets the record straight about Ms. Davies' considerable talent and the vast differences separating her from the fictional Susan Alexander Kane.
Of course, Citizen Kane has not escaped the lampooning eye of prime-time television's longest-running satire, The Simpsons. In the March 18, 1993 episode (#1F01) entitled "Rosebud," misanthropic billionaire Montgomery Burns is severely depressed on his birthday and longs for his lost childhood teddy bear, Bobo, an allusion to Kane's Rosebud. The opening shot of Burns Manor parodies Citizen Kane's opening of the "no trespassing" sign by adding a few new signs: "Warning, Keep Out," "Danger, Electrified Fence," "Trespassers Will Be Shot," and "Free Kittens, Inquire Within." The scene in which Burns breaks snow globes riffs on Citizen Kane, as well.
Director Steven Spielberg paid homage to the famous ending of Citizen Kane with the epilogue to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). After a full two hours of watching Indiana Jones pursue the elusive Lost Ark of the Covenant, the priceless artifact is ignominiously and unceremoniously crated and buried in a vast warehouse, much like the fate of "Rosebud" at the end of Citizen Kane.
by Scott McGee
