Captured on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies

'Captured on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies' is one of several documentaries directed by Hugh Munro Neely and produced by Hugh Hefner, each one spotlighting a legendary actress of silent films. Full disclosure: I've had some minor interaction with Mr Neely and I consider him a friend, so I may be slightly prejudiced in favour of this movie. But I genuinely enjoyed it.

Any appraisal of Marion Davies's life and career must necessarily examine her relationship with William Randolph Hearst. 'Captured on Film' goes to great lengths -- protesting *too* much, methinks -- in its insistence that Hearst and Davies were *not* the inspiration for the fictional relationship between Charles Foster Kane and Susan Alexander in 'Citizen Kane'. Unfortunately, this documentary offers a series of talking heads making that disavowal, but provides no real evidence. I wish that 'Captured on Film' had mentioned, even briefly, the two real-life couples whose relationships probably inspired Orson Welles's depiction of Kane and Susan Alexander. Jules Brulatour was an early film producer who tried to build up an acting career for his untalented mistress Hope Hampton (whom he wed secretly); their relationship strongly resembles the Kane/Alexander liaison. An even stronger inspiration was undoubtedly the life and career of newspaper publisher Colonel Robert McCormick, who built the Chicago Opera House so that he could groom his beautiful but tone-deaf mistress for a career as an opera diva. Anyone familiar with McCormick's career will realise that his life, and his relationship with his mistress, resemble Citizen Kane and Susan Alexander far more closely than Hearst and Davies ever did. It's a shame that Hugh Neely never mentioned any of this while making his argument. I predict that future generations will continue to 'know for a fact' that Citizen Kane is Hearst and Susan Alexander is Davies, and will be uninterested in learning otherwise.

This documentary features some delightful excerpts from Davies's more obscure films, but does not always identify them. We see a brief (and funny) clip of Davies walking down a street with a procession of men following her, but we're not told that this is from 'Tillie the Toiler'. We also see a brief clip of Davies with a chorus line of Coldstream Guards from 'Hollywood Revue of 1929'; I wish that this documentary had included her entire musical number from that film. More favourably, I was pleased when narrator Charlize Theron mentioned that Davies was production manager of her films: unlike Susan Alexander, Marion Davies was *not* some brainless bimbo living off a sugar daddy! Also, I was gratified that Neely and his crew got the name right for Davies's film 'The Florodora Girl' ... because that show's title is often misspelt as 'FlorAdora'.

We're shown a brief clip of Davies in 'The Red Mill', but this documentary never mentions the tremendous irony behind that film: 'The Red Mill' was directed (under an alias) by silent-film comedian Roscoe Arbuckle, after Arbuckle's acting career was ruined by the publicity-hungry Hearst. We get some sound bites from two matronly ladies who knew Davies when they were girls: these ladies are daughters of King Vidor, the man who directed Davies in some of her best films (including her best and sexiest performance, 'The Patsy'). I wish that this documentary had done more to establish the working relationship between Davies and the underrated Vidor, since he did so much to mould her career. Hearst liked to showcase Davies in elaborate costume dramas that would position her as a 'serious' actress, but Vidor recognised that Davies's true talent was for light social comedies.

I was pleased that this documentary entirely avoided a device that has been overused in several other showbiz documentaries: re-enactments of key incidents in the subject's life, performed by modern actors with their faces out of frame. Hugh Neely's documentaries often feature elaborate and imaginative visual sequences that must have been complicated to set up. We get one of those here, as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle conjoin themselves to form a head shot of Davies, which then dissolves into a publicity photo of Davies. It's clear that Neely and his crew must have done this sequence backwards: duplicating the vintage photo, then cutting up the duplicate into a jigsaw puzzle, then disassemblng the pieces. The effort involved is impressive. I'll rate 'Captured on Film' 9 out of 10. I would have rated this enjoyable documentary a perfect 10 if only it had included a brief mention of Colonel McCormick and his mistress ... the *real* inspirations for the Citizen Kane story.

This reassessment of Marion Davies will make you long for the chance to see her movies, many of which are difficult to find. In every excerpt Marion Davies shines! A deft performer of the silent era, she had extraordinary range and a brilliant comic talent. She made a successful transition to talkies, but her physical expression proves she was a kind of female Chaplin. Seeing this documentary has changed my whole perspective on the Orson Welles/William Randolph Hearst controversy over "Citizen Kane"--given the depth of this great actress's talent it's no surprise Hearst fought so hard to keep "Kane" from being released. And now I wish I could have been invited to one of the fabled parties at San Simeon--what a blast they must have been with someone with a flair for joyous expression like Davies as hostess!

"Capturing the Truth: The True Story of Marion Davies" is a pretty good documentary about the screen comedienne and mistress of publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst.

The documentary was made to dispel assumptions that Marion is basis of "Susan Alexander," the drunken no talent opera singer married to Charles Foster Kane in "Citizen Kane." It goes on to tell of the love story between Davies and Hearst, with a 1951 interview of Marion's occasionally supplying interesting audio bytes.

There was definite bias toward Hearst here, saying as much that he was within his rights to attempt to stop the release of "Citizen Kane." In fact he abused his power many times and used it as a weapon.

The good part about this documentary is that it shows Marion the actress and Marion the woman with recounts from friends about her sense of fun, her generosity and her devotion to Hearst. It is a good insight into the woman, into the Hearst marriage, and into the 30 years Hearst and Marion had together.

Marion was talented and hard-working - would she have become a star if she hadn't had Hearst's support - given the right opportunities, probably. If her work seems old-fashioned today, it's because that work is 80 years old.

Film and film acting were in its infancy. If people appeared in the documentary that were peripheral, as one of the posters here said, it's because it was hard to find people still alive who could speak about Marion or Hearst.

As to was she or wasn't she Susan Alexander, perhaps partially, perhaps not. Hearst was obviously too sensitive about the whole project to be rational. Orson Welles said it was a compilation of tycoons, and it probably was to an extent, but there isn't any doubt with Xanadu, the publishing, etc., that it relied heavily on Hearst.

Welles was a 24-year-old boy who came from radio and the New York stage to make "Citizen Kane," and Marion Davis at the time hadn't made a film in 4 years. Certainly it was well known that Hearst put the power of his publishing business behind her - to some people, that may easily have translated into thinking she had no talent. Frankly, I don't think that notion started with Citizen Kane.

What Hearst was most upset about was that Susan Alexander was a drunk, and Marion had a drinking problem. That surely was put into the script to make the character more interesting. There was nothing of Marion's personality in Susan, and people who knew anything about her at all certainly recognized that at the time.

Welles may have taken an idea that was floating around in the ozone and created a whole different scenario with it - modeling it, in fact, on Robert McCormick, a publisher who built the Chicago Opera House to promote his untalented girlfriend as an operatic star. It is sad that it remains a pervasive rumor that Susan is Marion - alas, sometimes rumors have more longevity than fact.

Growing up, all I ever knew about MARION DAVIES was that she was the protégé and mistress of William Randolph Hearst and there were rumors galore that Orson Welles based his CITIZEN KANE on the relationship between the real life newspaper magnate and an untalented actress by the name of Marion Davies.

When finally I did get to see a few films of Marion Davies, I remained unimpressed by her so-called "talent" as a comedienne that others refer to. Only one of her pictures, THE RED MILL, even made a favorable impression on me. The rest were mired in old-fashioned acting techniques and staging that belonged more to the silent period than "talkies". In other words, I never warmed up to Miss Davies as an actress. In sound films, there's certainly nothing special about her speaking voice or her appearance and whatever talent she had seemed minimal to me.

Still curious, I viewed the documentary to get a better overall view of the woman and her career and to see whether I would come away with a better impression. I didn't. They say she was the forerunner of the sort of beautiful, funny comedienne that Carole Lombard was. Well, I'll take Carole any day--both as an actress and comedienne.

I'm still left with the impression that MARION DAVIES was a mediocre screen personality with minimal talent and find it difficult to believe that people are talking about her as if she was a truly dazzling comic talent. I just don't see it that way.

And the documentary itself is a disjointed thing--full of film clips, still photos, audio voice-over of Davies expressing thoughts about herself and her career (bad recordings), and a few remarks by people like RUTH WARRICK and CONSTANCE MOORE that bear no more weight than feathers.

This is a very good documentary of a remarkable person. I believe that Marion would have been flattered by the honesty and poise of Virginia Madsen, Charlize Theron and others.

Marion has sadly been remembered as the inspiration for Susan Alexander Kane from Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane". That character, who had no talent and no mind of her own, and whose singing career is propped up by newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane's obsession that she had the potential to become a great opera singer, eventually breaks down under the strain and attempts suicide. Welles might have had a much more successful career than even he had if his film had not been appearing to pick on Marion Davies, because that was one thing William Randolph Hearst could not abide. He didn't care what people wrote or thought about him, but he basically started a war with RKO over this presentation of his lady fair, and it's probably one reason "How Green Was My Valley" won best picture of 1941, and not Kane.

The documentary talks about Davies from her birth, discusses her background, and how her mother encouraged all of her daughters to go for money and not romance in men, because she believed that romance would eventually die out anyway. That might have been how Davies' relationship with Hearst started, but she stayed with him for 34 years, even after all hope of marriage to him had faded because his first wife liked the social standing of being Mrs. Hearst and her price for divorce was too high, after Marion ironically saved Hearst financially during the 1930's by writing him a check for one million dollars. How was she rewarded in the end? When Hearst died Marion had been heavily sedated and was sleeping. When she awoke, Hearst's body was gone and all signs that Hearst had ever lived in Marion's house had disappeared courtesy of his sons.

This documentary goes very much into her film career too, not just the personal story. Marion made her first film in 1917, and was one of the few actresses who successfully made the transition to sound. She even overcame a stammer, which was something I didn't know before. Hearst was making films in the 1910's, years before he met Marion, but IMHO Hearst, for all of the talents that he genuinely saw in the woman, is probably one of the reasons her film career never really took off. He was always insisting that she star in period pieces and odd productions that just did not play to her strengths. Part of the problem was that for over a decade she was associated with MGM, which did drama very well but was never good at comedies, which was Marion's forte. And when MGM did drama during the age of Irving Thalberg, it was usually his wife Norma Shearer who got the best parts. If you want to see Marion's very best work look at "The Patsy" and "Show People", two very good late silent period comedies that MGM got right in spite of itself.

Marion once told a story about William Randolph Hearst saving a stranded mouse that ventured into the house by capturing it, feeding it cheese, digging it a little hole outside, which he covered in leaves and a corner of Marion's chaise blanket which he cut up for the purpose of keeping the mouse safe and warm. I'm thinking that his karmic reward for this single act of kindness was not wealth, power or prestige but Marion Davies- she was the gift of grace and sunlight in his life.