Customer Reviews

The Making of "Citizen Kane"

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Who could resist the behind the scenes making of the greatest movie of all time. This book is excellent it covers every thing you need or would want to know about the film. It is very well told and crafted. If you loved the movie you'll be fascinated by this book.

Carringer's exhaustive tome on the making of Orson Welles' signature film covers all the bases: from its rocky road to inception (covering Welles' fascinating attempt to adapt Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS into a movie) to every conceivable aspect of the production and post-production. This is required reading for any Welles fan and an invaluable tool for anybody who has to write an essay on CITIZEN KANE.

Carringer's writing style is engaging and eloquent without being too academic. He doesn't bombard the reader with a million esoteric film terms but instead instills his prose with an infectious passion for his subject. Reading this book will make you want to re-discover KANE all over again -- which is what a good film book should do!

This is a great companion book with the awesome two-DVD set of KANE that was release a little while ago.

This is certainly a must-read for anybody interested in the film; rather than a day-by-day, action-by-action accounting of the filming process (which would make for a vastly longer book, and a very tedious one for all but the most die-hard), Carringer has produced a very readable yet reasonably technical overview of how Orson Welles came to the project in the first place and how the collaborations between the then 25-year-old cinema neophyte and several much more experienced collaborators (chiefly composer Bernard Herrmann, cinematographer Gregg Toland, screenwriter Herman J Manckiewicz and art director Perry Ferguson) helped to result in one of the greatest of all Hollywood films.

This is no simple accounting of what these talents contributed, though; Carringer has a thesis, that Welles produced his greatest work while in collaboration with a cadre of equals -- that in fact, far from the product of an all-seeing auteur, CK is a summation of the Hollywood studio system, and the most completely successful of the director's films as a result. His short discussion of the problems with the director's second film, "The Magnificent Ambersons" shows his opinion even more blatantly; it's one I happen to disagree with, as I value Welles' later independent productions just as highly as Kane, but he does make his points with some conviction, and in any case given that his focus is here is otherwise almost entirely on "Kane" and the discarded projects that came before it, not worth getting into. At any rate, worth the read for anyone interested in the director or in how big studio productions developed in the "Golden Age."