After watching CItizen Kane with Roger Ebert's commentary, Lou and I decided to do a Kane series and cued up The Battle Over Citizen Kane. It was a good choice to follow the Ebert commentary because, while Ebert focuses on technical aspects of the film, Epstein and Lennon fill in more of the historical context.
Done mostly in a Ken Burns style, Battle uses photos and film clips, though it splices in a few talking heads, too. It will satisfy people looking for a way to situate the many popular stories and claims around Citizen Kane. For example, we've heard Welles was wildly popular as a high-profile, creative genius, but Battle fills out that cliche with details about Welles' WPA theatrical work, his racing around Manhattan in an ambulance, the publicity surrounding him after his War of the Worlds escapade, and his appearance on the cover of Time. Details like that give some grounding to the claim we're familiar with, and they give some context for the power that RKO ceded to him in his movie contract.
Ditto for William Randolph Hearst. It's known that he was a powerful media magnate, but the scale of his wealth and power become clearer in this documentary. He not only covered the nation with his media empire, but his ego was so big that he presumed to create news -- like having a Hearst employee fake an accident to test government services -- and even manipulated issues of war and peace, as he did in Cuba, in order to sell his papers. So entitled did he feel that he ran for president, became a target of Franklin Roosevelt and created an estate in California that was half the size of Rhode Island. And filled it with whatever art and architectural elements he could buy. His power and influence extended to Hollywood, where he bullied all the major studio heads into an effort to suppress Citizen Kane. The photos and documentary footage of Hearst in Battle show the extent of Hearst's power.
It there's a fault with Battle over Citizen Kane, it's that Epstein and Lennon don't demonstrate their central dramatic thesis: That Hearst and Welle's destroyed each other in this titanic clash. Hearst was already failing by the time Citizen Kane was released; the fact that it was released at all shows that. Hearst had far more problems with cash flow and debt than he did with Welles. As for Welles, despite the fact that Hearst had slung every type of moral and political smear he could, including the ever-useful "communist" epithet, Battle never shows that this campaign had a lasting impact on Welles' career. The fact that Welles' popularity declined after he went to Hollywood doesn't mean that Hearst was responsible for the decline. In fact, Battle doesn't explain what it means when it says Welles' career was destroyed.
But although The Battle Over Citizen Kane fails to portray an epic struggle between two titans that results in their mutual demise, the film still provides excellent social context for Welles' movie. That's a valuable enough service.
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