Agree that she has a pleasant little voice that is too weak and thin for opera, and it takes every bit of energy and concentration for her to get through the vocals, leaving nothing for acting.
And then there’s that wonderful burlesque walk she does across the stage in a shot just showing her show-girl legs. A great bit of humor added to a scene that is otherwise painful to watch.
Re. th comparison to Marion Davies, I think that as is often in movies, there was an obvious parallel with MD and SA, but it was just a framework that Welles started with. He then took creative license to build a more extreme character for the purpose of showing us more about who Kane was than who Susan was. As far as comparisons to Hearst and Davies, I don’t think Welles ever intended to imply that Davies was talentless, but that Hearst was selfish and deluded about the limits of his own power.
When my friend Rick and I watched this on the big screen (it was part of the opening festivities for a local “art-house” theater, now gone partially mainstream), he said that Susan’s voice would have been fine for a decent musical comedy, but didn’t have anywhere near the power and projection needed for grand opera. Much as (as I later came to realize) Marion Davies’ natural talent was for comedy, not the great big serious DRAMA that Hearst tried to set her up in.
It’s interesting for me to think about Kane’s motives in trying to set Susan up as this grand opera singer. You might conclude that by trying to make her into this Great Artiste in the public’s eyes, it cancels out the sordidness of his affair with her and his divorce from Emily. She’s no longer some uncouth young chippie that he dumped the President’s niece to marry…she’s a creature of art, a being above ordinary mortals, and their love story almost becomes grand opera in itself. Unfortunately, Kane couldn’t fool the public as he fooled himself.
According to Wikipedia, the big theater area that Susan attempts to sing was written for the movie by Bernard Herrman. Listening to it again (thanks L’Ministre for the Kiri te Kanawa link, the other one no longer works) I can believe it. That three note opening theme (starts at 1:39 on the video) reminds me very strongly of some movie score that he wrote, but I can’t place it.
Anyone know what movie score I’m talking about?
Roddy
I’m Jean Forward’s granddaughter. She was indeed the voice behind Susan Alexander’s take on Marion Davies in the film and Orson Welles had personally told her to sing poorly on purpose after her initial recorded takes.She wasn’t supposed to sound polished or even pleasing for that matter.
Sounds like a crock, to me.
“Yeah, our Indian sidekick was named Ronto, so people wouldn’t get the mistaken impression that we were making fun of the Lone Ranger.”
This is, I hope, not off topic. If it is ignore it. A review I read when it was a new film (no cite) of the film Cabaret criticized the excellence of Liza Minelli’s singing because the character was supposed to be a small talent. I’ve wondered if the Broadway shows have less than stellar singing on purpose <really?> like Susan Alexander? Or was that just asinine review?
It doesn’t strike me as off-topic (welcome to the SDMB) but it does strike me as an asinine review.
I have only seen the movie, but Sally’s performances are so big a part of the show that I cannot imagine anyone deliberately making it worse than stellar in order to make a dramatic point about her talent. Whether or not she is a great talent in the context of the show makes no difference - she thinks of herself as a great performer, and her musical numbers drive the plot to a great degree.
She’s a star in the context of the Kittikat Club, and much of the point of the musical is to contrast the smaller context of the club and the lives of the performers against the larger and more significant backdrop of pre-war Berlin.
I can’t imagine a Broadway musical with a mediocre singer as the star just to make a dramatic point. Citizen Kane isn’t a musical, so they can get away with it to make a dramatic point about the subject of the film.
Nobody is going to watch a movie which is all bad singing. Nobody would attend a Broadway musical with all bad singing either. I think it was just a bad review.
Maybe I am biased, since Cabaret is one of my favorite musicals, but so it appears to me.
I cite The Citizen Kane Book by Pauline Kael. Mankiewicz was a former friend of Hearst’s and created the characters for the movie,* and wanted to make sure that Davies would not feel the character was meant to be her.
Welles himself insisted that Susan Alexander Kane was based on Ganna Walska, an aspiring opera singer whose millionaire husband spent millions pushing her career even though her voice wasn’t up to it (from the reviews, she was unable to sing on key; Susan was portrayed as just not being able to hit the harder notes). That’s far closer to what was shown in the movie than Hearst and Davies.
*There are disputes as to who wrote what, but all agree on this point.
Marion Davies was more successful and apparently more talented than Susan Alexander (I say apparently only because I haven’t seen any of her movies), but it’s worth pointing out that Citizen Kane is based on Hearst but it not a biopic and doesn’t try to be one. Building an opera house for an unwilling, in-over-her-head singer tells a story about Kane that fits into the movie, and a lot of posters have offered great insight into why that works. If they’d used something closer to the actual Hearst-Davies relationship, the story wouldn’t have been so powerful.
This refers to the revival of Cabaret with Alan Cumming and Michelle Williams. It’s fairly accurate and I think Williams’ performance has been divisive for that reason. She’s playing Sally as woman who is desperate to forget her troubles and be a bon vivant but who is short on talent. She plays Sally as a (briefly) popular attraction at a hole-in-the-wall strip club but not a great singer, and that’s pretty well justified by the script: Sally admits she got her job by sleeping with the owner of the club and she loses her job after she gets together with Cliff. None of that suggests she’s any kind of great performer. She’s not horrible, but you don’t see a lot of missed notes and things on Broadway or Off-Broadway anymore. I thought this made a lot of sense as a performance, but you can see where it’s a tough comparison to, say, Liza Minelli or that it’s maybe not what people enjoy listening do. Williams also does a “bad” British accent. To my ears, she’s playing Sally as a girl from a lower social class who is pretending to be more posh and sophisticated that she really is- something that might work in a foreign country but wouldn’t fly at home. Again, Sally isn’t supposed to be a great actress. She’s a woman desperately trying to escape a life that has always been pretty awful. Whether the audience enjoys it or not, I think it makes sense.
I can see how it could make sense dramatically, but it doesn’t sound like as much fun as the jar I encountered when the delicious decadence of “Money Makes the World Go Around” is interrupted by a Hitler Jugend singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”. IYSWIM.
I’ve seen the movie and the first or second revival (Joel Grey was in it) and it struck me that the Liza Sally was a lot more successful than the stage Sally, who was not seen as a big star. Same basic material, different takes.
Like I say, I have only seen the movie, but Sally did not strike me as a big success when Liza Minelli played her - she had to pawn her coat to pay for the abortion, and she was whoring herself out to Baron Max in search of the good life. Plus she was living in the crappy little boarding house.
She certainly dreamed of being a major star, but I did not get the impression that the KittiKat Club was it.
But in the movie, the KittiKat Club was sort of a fantasy background to parody and play off the events in the “real” world. In the KittiKat Club, as the MoC says, “Everyzing is beautiful”. And in the outside world, Sally and Brian are scraping by sponging off a rich guy and translating pornography, and the Nazis are taking over.
