The upcoming movie Mank gives short shrift to Orson Welles, both as a character and co-writer of Citizen Kane, according to veteran film critic Todd McCarthy.
The David Fincher film will bow on Netflix in December, but McCarthy, who wrote for Variety for three decades and another 10 years at The Hollywood Reporter, has already seen the film and penned an illuminating piece for Deadline.
His comments echo concerns voiced by Wellesnet earlier this year after reading a draft script — namely that Mank would revive New Yorker critic Pauline Kael’s now-discredited “Raising Kane” essay from 1971 that Herman J. Mankiewicz was the true author of Citizen Kane and Welles was undeserving of co-writing credit on the Academy Award-winning script.
Although Fincher has said revisions were made to the script before shooting — he described the first draft penned by his father as “kind of a takedown of Welles” — McCarthy’s article indicates the final film still does not give Welles his due.
“Mank, in which Orson Welles as a character barely appears, very clearly takes the Kael and Mankiewicz position, that Welles did virtually no writing on Citizen Kane,” McCarthy wrote. “(It’s) unfortunate that Welles, who started at such heights only to increasingly struggle just to get a few more films made in his life, now will have to suffer a few more slings and arrows flung by those who will automatically buy into the view that he had nothing to do with the writing of Citizen Kane.”
Upon publication of “Raising Kane,” Kael’s shoddy research was quickly questioned by Peter Bogdanovich, Andrew Sarris, Joseph McBride, and others. (McBride has already voiced concerns about Mank to Hollywood Elsewhere and Wellesnet.)
Seven years after “Raising Kane,” scholar Robert L. Carringer debunked Kael’s claims by citing the seven draft scripts, numerous revisions and decades-old notes in his thoroughly researched paper “The Scripts of Citizen Kane.”
“There was constant interchange between (Mankiewicz in) Victorville and Hollywood, with (John) Houseman going in to confer on the script and Welles sending up emissaries and regularly receiving copies of the work in progress,” Carringer wrote. “Welles in turn was working over the draft pages with the assistance of his own secretary, Katherine Trosper, and handing the revised screenplay copy in its rough state over to Amalia Kent, a script supervisor at RKO.”
Carringer concluded Mankiewicz’s “principal contributions were the story frame, a cast of characters, various individual scenes, and a good share of the dialogue. … Welles added the narrative brilliance — the visual and verbal wit, the stylistic fluidity, and such stunningly original strokes as the newspaper montages and the breakfast table sequence. He also transformed Kane from a cardboard fictionalization of (William Randolph) Hearst into a figure of mystery and epic magnificence.”
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