“Citizen Kane” Refreshing Entertainment

Timaru Herald, Volume CL, Issue 22043, 16 August 1941, Page 8

“Citizen Kane” Refreshing Entertainment

"Citizen Kane” has arrived in New’ Zealand and was screened in Wellington, privately last week. Considering the short time since it was produced in Hollywood, it has won for itself extraordinary publicity, and it is far from disappointing. Orson Welles, the current prodigy of the American stage and radio (it was he who panicked half American with his radio description of an invasion from Mars), made his screen debut with a film which, to say the least, is stimulating. It is as startling as a surrealist painting, but as easily understood as an advertising hoarding. ■ Its novelty is chiefly ..in the camerawork. This film should give Hollywood a needed jolt out of some of its dull old habits. For instance, there are no “credits.” After the R.K.O. brand, the radio station, comes the film’s title in plain white letters on a black screen, and then the picture starts. It shows the death of Kane, a newspaper millionaire, in his home that is like a castle in a Californian kingdom. A sequence in "March of Time” style follows and gives an outline of Kane’s life, but the editor of the film is dissatisfied and sends a man out to discover more about Kane. It is what they see and hear that constitutes the remainder of the film.

People who take any interest in movie technique have plenty in “Citizen Kane” to hold their attention. It is full of novelties. Great depth of focus is used in some scenes, so that a tumbler on a table near the camera may fill a quarter of the screen in perfect focus while a man advances from a distant, door also: in perfect focus. The sets often have ceilings and the camera looks at the actors from the

floor. Sometimes the principal character in a scene is a silhouette in the centre of it while the others are in full a light about him. Another trick that Welles likes it to change from one sequence to another with a shattering noise. Bv the time the end of the film comes ’one is surprised to find welles attaching the conventional and in this case superflous, “The End” to his work.

“Citizen Kane” is a most refreshing piece of entertainment. It is understood that its release will not be long delayed.