Going ringside

The 25-year-old Orson Welles who took on the movies in 1941 in Citizen Kane -- and took on the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for Charles Foster Kane -- was like the daring young man on the flying trapeze. It never occurred to him that he could fall. He'd conquered New York with his innovative Shakespeare productions, he'd conquered radio with his Mercury Theatre shows, and he came to Hollywood in a flutter of excited anticipation, bearing an RKO contract that promised him almost-unheard-of directorial control. But after Hearst's Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons saw a preview of Kane, the two launched a full-scale campaign against it, against Welles, and against RKO, and they nearly succeeded in blockading the opening. The spectacle of this self-confident prodigy spearing one of the most powerful celebrities of the century while the great man still lived, ensconced in his gargantuan estate at San Simeon, is a peerless tale. Pauline Kael did it full justice in her 1971 essay "Raising Kane" (reprinted in The Citizen Kane Book) -- still the most exhilarating and soundly judged piece of Hollywood reportage I know.

The Welles-Hearst clash is the official subject of this week's edition of The American Experience, a documentary called The Battle over Citizen Kane. As it works out, though, their encounter is really the climax of the two-hour program -- the final third. The premise of the documentary is that these two men were somehow mirror images, so in playing Kane, Welles was playing a version of himself. And on some level that's true; Kane's furniture-smashing fit after his second wife, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), walks out on him was modeled on Welles's own displays of temper. (The documentary mentions one in particular, at Chasen's Restaurant.) The Battle over Citizen Kane argues convincingly that both men, willful, pampered children brought up to believe they were geniuses, approached their professions with a kind of playful despotism, assuming they could bring off any coup and make everyone do what they wanted. The parallel breaks down, however, when we hear Welles spoken of as a kind of power broker, like Hearst, steamrolling over anyone who got in his way. Hearst incited the Spanish-American War and wrecked the career of the silent comedian Fatty Arbuckle when he was accused (and then acquitted) of rape; who, exactly, did Orson Welles ruin? The idea that Welles was a kind of mini-Hearst is backed up by nothing more substantial than a statement from William Herz and Max Leve, Welles's collaborators on the Mercury Theatre, that you needed a strong stomach to work with him.

The Battle over Citizen Kane also presents the tragic-romantic view (which has astonishingly wide currency) that the combination of Hearst's vendetta against Welles, the unholy build-up he received on his emigration to Hollywood, and his own self-destructiveness prevented his ever doing anything again of the caliber of Kane. This is the clinch in the program's analogy between Kane and Hearst, whose youthful promise faded in a disastrous political career, and who was rescued financially by his mistress, the actress Marion Davies. The documentary mentions The Magnificent Ambersons -- a masterpiece, and a more complex and moving film than Kane -- only fleetingly, as the follow-up picture RKO took out of Welles's control. If you'd never heard of Touch of Evil or his Shakespeare movies, if you'd never seen his performances under other directors in The Third Man and Three Cases of Murder, you'd think all Welles did for the rest of his life was Paul Masson ads.

The documentary recycles some of the most entertaining stories from "Raising Kane," and a few I'd never heard before. The coverage of Welles's New York period, the late '30s, is very evocative. (I'd love to know where the archivists located the fascinating footage from his voodoo Macbeth.) And the program propounds an attractive theory that what truly enraged Hearst about Citizen Kane was the mean trick it played on Marion Davies, turning the gifted comedienne, who was devoted to Hearst, into the embittered, untalented Susan Alexander -- and leaving in just enough touchstone details to connect them for everyone in Hollywood. The problem is, this is just a theory, which the documentary presents as fact, without offering a shred of evidence. The Battle over Citizen Kane makes for lively viewing, but as journalism it's shoddy stuff.