Climax and Harbinger A Life as a Common Cause
Climax and Harbinger A Life as a Common Cause
This chapter focuses on Orson Welles's 1932 play The Marching Song, the direction of which described “a great unearthly light fall[ing] full upon” the “transfigured” protagonist. The play investigates one man's life through conflicting recollections to explore how myth can permanently obscure the truth. While Welles used an almost identical method in Citizen Kane, his 1941 cinematic masterpiece, the script explains that the unearthly light falls not on Charles Foster Kane but on “THE SWORD OF THE LORD AND OF GIDEON!”: the abolitionist John Brown. While the enigmatic Kane will forever be his greatest creation, Welles first explored the creation of conflicting and contradictory myths through Brown. As many film historians and biographers have noted, The Marching Song articulated one of Welles's “lifelong obsessions,” the distortion of memory and myth.
Keywords: Orson Welles, The Marching Song, Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane, John Brown
North Carolina Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
