MANK, ORSON and ROSEBUD

I saw two films this weekend:

                     ROTTEN TOMATOES                       

                       Reviewers  Audiences  My Grade

Mank                   88               72               B

Citizen Kane      100               91              B-

Mank, premiered on Netflix Friday, while CK was released just around the time Pearl Harbor was attacked today, 79 years ago.  The two films are similar in various ways.  First, one led to the other.  Second, both are in black and white.  Third, it is entirely possible that, like Orson Welles gaining an Academy nomination for Best Actor, so will Gary Oldman.  It was three years ago that he transformed into Winston Churchill in the Darkest Hour, and won the Oscar.  Among his past portrayals include Beethoven, Dracula and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Mank was as much the life of Herman Mankiewicz as the writing of Citizen Kane.  He got his start in Hollywood in the 1920's after an earlier life with newspapers.  Known to be a functional alcoholic and inveterate gambler, he was involved with scores of films, including The Wizard of Oz, where his ideas resulted in the Kansas portion being in black and white to set off the technicolor of Oz.  However, like in many other of his contributions, he was not credited for his work on this film, as he almost also didn't for CK.  Part of this omission was also that Joseph Goebbels from 1935 banned anything written by Mank to be shown in Nazi Germany.  He was Jewish, but it was more than that.  Mank died of uremic poisoning at the age of 56.

The wit of Mank got him weekend stays at the San Simeon mansion of William Randolph Hearst.  You can visit the Hearst Castle today, although the last time I checked, you needed to reserve a spot two months in advance.  Nice general location to spend a couple of days after the pandemic if you enjoy wine tasting.  

Paso Robles is close by, known by aficionados as the steeple of excellence for BIG red wines.  Try to find a cheap bottle from this region.  There was a period when I drove by this then dusty village several times annually.  Never stopped once.  However, that was nearly 60 years ago. Today, home to more than 200 wineries.

Back to Mank, at the table were Hearst, his live-in mistress, actress Marion Davis, Louis Mayer and the whose who of entertainment.  These discussions led to the fictional creation of Citizen Charles Foster Kane, or WR Hearst, (but denied so by Welles) and Xanadu (which for the film, was in Florida), now known as Hearst Castle.

I can say a lot more about Mank, but you can watch it yourself.  So on to Citizen Kane.  Wow!  100% from Rotten Tomatoes.  Said reviewers:  

Way ahead of its time, Citizen Kane might probably be the greatest movie ever made. What young Orson Welles accomplishes in mere 2 hours is mind-blowing.

The question of whether twenty-six-year-old Orson Welles is a genius or an accident seems to be settled for all time by his very first screen effort, written, produced, directed and acted by Welles himself.

So the movie is all about Orson Welles?  Yes it was.  He won that Oscar with Mank for the writing, and also got nominated as Best Actor and Director.  He came as a 24-year old genius.  At 18 he had already bamboozled the nation with his War of the Worlds a radio broadcast from H.G. Wells, although he said that he had no idea that any panic would be created.

This was my second viewing.  I was not impressed the first time.  I'm less so now.  The best movie ever made?  I wouldn't place it in my top 100.  If these critics say what they have, and RT gave it 100, then the problem must be me.  

Maybe I don't appreciate satire.  Or, perhaps I was looking for perfection and found flaws.  Orson Scott Card agrees with me.  He is a famous author of books like Ender's Game, has won numerous awards, and is the great-great-grandson of Brigham Young.

Citizen Kane was a commercial failure.  I can't believe this, but the BBC reported that all his films lost money.  He made 76 of them.  Ah, I get it, he lost money only on those productions which he ran.  He was subliminal in The Third Man, but only as an actor.  Maybe he was a perfectionist, for here is a list of some of his unfinished films I would like to see:  Heart of Darkness (1939), The Life of Christ (1940),  Lady Killer (1941), Cyrano de Bergerac (1948), Moby Dick (1955) and Don Quixote (1955-1985, when he passed away at the age of 70).  There is one which Netflix re-created in 2018:  The Other Side of the Wind (RT: 84/59).

So what was Rosebud all about?  This is the final mouthing of Citizen Kane at his deathbed after glancing at a small snow globe that slips out of his hand.  Sure, there is that innuendo about it being Marion Davis' clitoris, but the answer is rather prosaic.  The day he was separated from his parents, the youthful Charles happened to be holding his sled in the snow, which had a trade name...Rosebud.  

Yet another link between these two films is Benjamin Mankiewicz.  He is the grandson of Herman and began to appear on TCM as a part-time host in 2003.  When Robert Osborn passed away three years ago, Benjamin became the second full-time host for this channel.  So anyway, he introduced Citizen Kane, with some interesting information.

I should mention that there is a third leg to Mank and Citizen Kane.  R-rated RKO 281 is a 1999 film with quite a cast, and John Malkovich playing Mank.  However, unlike Mank, RKO 281 was all about Orson Welles, played by Liev Schreiber.  You might say this was the Welles version of how Citizen Kane came together.  The background music was the best of Big Band tunes, beginning with my favorite song #56, a rather long version of I'm Getting Sentimental Over You.

Rotten Tomatoes gave RKO 281 93/76 ratings.  In fact, after finding it on You Tube, I was astonished that this was the full film, so actually watched it on my computer last night, for someone from Europe snuck it into this channel.  The closed caption was in Portuguese.   As I think about it now, this is the first full movie I've ever seen on a computer.  Not as impressive as in a theater with Dolby Sounds, or an 80" TV, but for free, not bad.  Also peculiar, but on that page, in the right column, was a whole bunch of other free films, like From Russian With Love, which, by the way, got excellent 96/84 scores from RT, In particular, I noticed that the picture clarity and sound quality for this James Bond flick were particularly superb.

If I had to re-title those films, I would have kept Mank, but changed RKO 218 to Orson and Citizen Kane to Rosebud.  I would also recommend that the sequence should be Orson first, then Mank, ending with Rosebud.

Favorite song #21 is Blue Hawaii, mainly because when I'm in Japan I tend to sing this song at karaoke bars.  Why?  They always want me to sing something from Hawaii.  Usually the Elvis version.  Written by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger for the 1937 Waikiki Wedding, starring Bing Crosby and Shirley Ross, Blue Hawaii reached #5 on the charts.

Actually, the flip side, Sweet Leilani, also from that film, became one of the biggest hits that year and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.  This tune was written by Harry Owens in 1934 for his daughter Leilani, who was born the previous day.  It was performed by Harry Owens and his Royal Hawaiians in the 1938 film, Cocoanut Grove, starring Fred MacMurray.

You might recall that this same Shirley Ross sang Thanks for the Memory in The Big Broadcast of 1938 (this is the whole 1.5 hour film) with Bob Hope.  For all the hits that Bing had, this song helped in the ego battle.  The flick starred WC Fields, and Dorothy Lamour was Hope's girlfriend.  There was a follow-up movie for Hope called Thanks for the Memory, which created another hit, Two Sleepy People.

The movie Blue Hawaii with Elvis was released in 1961 and  filmed on Kauai, particularly at the Coco Palms Hotel.  I spent most of 1963 working in the sugar industry on that island two years later, and the nightspot of the island was there.

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