>In her 1971 essay, “Raising Kane,” Pauline Kael made the case for Kane not as a brazen, important directorial statement but the high-point of a rich 1930s trad

>In her 1971 essay, “Raising Kane,” Pauline Kael made the case for Kane not as a brazen, important directorial statement but the high-point of a rich 1930s tradition of tough-minded, satirical newspaper pictures, some of which Mankiewicz, himself a former newspaper man, had worked on. “Raising Kane” is a phenomenal work of criticism: Except "Raising Kane" is a long-discredited hatchet job, having been thoroughly debunked by Peter Bogdanovich (or, if rumors are to be believed, Welles himself) in the 1972 Esquire article "The Kane Mutiny", film scholars such as Robert L. Carringer in "The Making of Citizen Kane" or Jonathan Rosenbaum in various books and articles, and even Kael's own biographer Brian Kellow. Not to mention the credible accusation that Kael stole credit for much of the research for the piece from fellow UCLA faculty member Howard Suber. It's unfortunate that Kael's fame and prominence means that her worthless falsehoods stay in print and are much better known to the public (or even casually interested film fans) than all the later work showing its errors. Any article that only discusses "Raising Kane", and not the response and scholarship showing it to be bunk, is garbage.