From Simon Callow's "The Road To Xanadu":
"Welles was news now, whatever he did. He had started rehearsing another play: "Ten Million Ghosts" by thirty-year-old whiz kid Sydney Kingsley, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning "Men in White" and the enormous hit "Dead End", which inspired the Bowery Boys. The new play, based on documentary material, was an attack on the munitions industry. Welles was to play the hero, a radical poet who reveals that the German and French munitions manufacturers were in collusion during the First World War, conspiring together to prevent bombing of their plant, thus prolonging the war.
For Welles, the part of Andre Pequot was the sort of role a young leading actor should be playing: romantically doomed and passionate...A further reason for accepting the part was that it was a major production on Broadway of an eagerly awaited new play.
Opening night was shifted several times, giving rise to rumors that the federal government was going to ban it. In fact, the delays were due to the complexities of the design...elaborate effects like having a midget upstage to suggest depth...and a panoply of mixed-media techniques: 'a flashing screen of headlines, bulletins, newspaper clippings, photographs, cemetery crosses, and so on.'
The reviews were poor: 'the characters are placard stencils and the drama is a cumbersome snarl of a story', said one reviewer...One scene that did strike reviewers as effective, though, was commented on by Welles in "The Fabulous Orson Welles" by Peter Noble (1956):
'At the end of the second act, the munitions makers are in a private theatre, watching newsreels from the battlefields showing wholesale slaughter. as the newsreels show innocent young men being needlessly butchered. I, as the idealistic youngster, rose to my feet and protested against the whole bloody affair. the munitions makers also rose to their feet and, silhouetted against the scene of butchery, they retorted, "But this is our business!"
The suggestion is that this scene may have had some influence on the celebrated scene in "Citizen Kane" when the reporters watch newsreels of Kane, something Welles himself dismissed as "schweinerei" when asked about it years later by Peter Bogdanovich. Welles also claimed to Bogdanovich that he fell asleep during the opening night.
