Ironically, the famous face that gets most lost in the shuffle belongs to the character of Orson Welles himself. Angus MacFadyen plays Welles with buoyancy and aplomb, but he doesn’t stand out enough in the Altmanesque tableaux. Welles’s relationship with his colleague and later nemesis John Houseman, who, like Welles, ripened into a florid actor (The Paper Chase) and sage TV pitchman (“They make money the old-fashioned way,” he pronounced on behalf of Smith Barney, “—they earn it”), is reduced to a flurry of bitchy spats, and Welles seems more of a fancy cog in the machinery than a prime mover. Perhaps this downsizing of Welles to normal scale reflects Robbins’s own left-wing perspective—a belief that Welles was as much a product of his times as any other notable, that it isn’t men who make history but history that makes men. Whatever the explanation, it leaves a slight blur on the screen where a major pulse point should be, and devalues the power of personality. A magnate such as Nelson Rockefeller may have straddled the globe, but it is Orson Welles whose nocturnes continue to resonate. As a director and broadcaster, he seemed to occupy a skull-cavern, equally at home with literary melodrama and pulp suspense. (His was the most famous voice of the radio serial The Shadow.) Even when Welles was young and all-conquering, his hearty spirits were darkened at the edges by the early deaths of his mother and alcoholic father. His refusal to shy away from the prospects of death and ruin is so singular, it’s practically un-American.

Welles’s first and best film, Citizen Kane (1941) is a memory play and gothic psychodrama enacted largely inside a lavish crypt—a furniture-showroom wing of Coleridge’s Xanadu. The snow globe that rolls out of Kane’s hand on his deathbed might as well be his brain slipping its master’s leash. Few would deny the film’s place at the pinnacle of American cinema, but how much of Citizen Kane was truly Welles’s wizardry? In a revisionist essay called “Raising Kane,” which appeared first as a two-parter in The New Yorker in 1971 and later as the introduction to the shooting script for Citizen Kane (The Citizen Kane Book, 1971), Pauline Kael tilted the spotlight from Welles to screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Dinner at Eight; Pride of the Yankees), whose contribution, she argued, had been short-sheeted by the credit-hogging Welles. Mankiewicz, a sour-pickle wit in the Algonquin Round Table manner (it was he who said of Welles, “There, but for the grace of God, goes God”), did a draft of the newspaper-mogul saga called simply American. Many of the gems ascribed to Welles’s protean genius were Mankiewicz’s ideas. “If one asks how it is that Herman J. Mankiewicz, who wrote the film that many people think is the greatest film they’ve ever seen, is almost unknown, the answer must surely be not just that he died too soon but that he outsmarted himself. As a result of his wicked sense of humor in drawing upon Welles’s character for Kane’s, his own authorship was obscured. Sensing the unity of Kane and Welles, audiences assume that Kane is Welles’s creation,” Kael wrote. “Herman Mankiewicz died, and his share faded from knowledge, but Welles carries on in a baronial style that always reminds us of Kane.”

Kael’s essay may have been conceived as an attempt to retrieve Mankiewicz’s reputation from neglect and reaffirm Citizen Kane as a collaborative triumph rather than a one-man circus (she also elaborated on the cinematographer Gregg Toland’s invaluable contribution to the film), but it wasn’t taken that way by Welles’s friends and auteurist followers. They were sizzling mad. Welles loyalists saw “Raising Kane” as a torpedo job intended to tarnish his greatest achievement. Leading the defense was the director Peter Bogdanovich, who wrote a lengthy riposte (with Welles’s guidance) for Esquire called “The Kane Mutiny.” Bogdanovich poked a number of cannonball-size holes in Kael’s piece, quoting from an affidavit offered in 1941 which contained sworn testimony as to how much heavy revision Welles had done on Mankiewicz’s script; mocking her speculation that one of the most meticulously rehearsed and lit sequences in Citizen Kane was caught by accident by the film crew monkeying around on the set (which he later derided as “a wildly naïve fantasy of the filmmaking process”); and, in his most effective rhetorical steam eruption, telling the jury: “To believe that Welles—who notoriously had absolutely no compunction in blue-penciling Shakespeare, Marlowe, Shaw, or any classic he touched, and reshaping them as well, and who rewrote and reworked every single radio script or movie acting role he got, would sanctify the deathless prose of Herman J. Mankiewicz is an impossible character-switch to buy.” Even Mankiewicz’s admirers conceded that he never wrote anything afterward which approached Citizen Kane in richness or scope (whereas Welles’s next directorial effort was that subversive curio of small-town life The Magnificent Ambersons). But the damage was done. “Cleaning up after Miss Kael is going to take a lot of scrubbing,” Welles wrote Bogdanovich. Kael’s essay entered the critical canon, leaving a taint on Welles’s reputation that no amount of elbow grease could remove.