Scenes cut from Citizen Kane

[Glenn Anders]

You know, Orson & Jazz, when it gets right down to it, the picture we have is what counts. CITIZEN KANE is the film Welles wanted to make, and the one we have. I have brought up what I consider several fascinating sidebars on what might have been included in the film, but they would have made the picture too long, certainly for 1941.

In particular, I consider the scene with Kane and Raymond at the crypt a great piece of writing, a summing up of the meaning of CITIZEN KANE. It's the only excised scene, if indeed shot [some contention here], that I would have liked in the finished picture. But to have included it might have come across heavy handed, and would have required a more elaborate explanation of what had happened to Kane's son, and where he had been for all those years.

Like many of our discussions, this material is what an old colleague used to call "nice to knows."

Glenn

[David N]

Going back to the inscription on the wall (epitaph?), do you know what the source of the saying is? It's beautiful. Dave

[Glenn Anders]

David N: The lines are beautiful, are they not?

And so very true.

Seems to me, at one time, I did come across a source for them, came across some lines very like them, but my memory fails me.

My guess is either Mesopotamian or Ancient Indian.

But several movie references come to me, too. The borrowed material and music from GUNGADIN in "The Newsreel" sequence, combined with the quotation from Coleridge, might have been planned to foreshadow this quote. And the spider imagery reminds me of the temple scene in Korda's THE THIEF OF BAGDAD. It would make sense that such an imaginative film, finished in Hollywood because of the War, could have influenced either (or both) Welles and Mankiewicz, setting up such a connection.

Does anyone else have a clue to the source?

Glenn