Yes­ter­day we fea­tured a trail­er for Cit­i­zen Kane nar­rat­ed by its direc­tor, a cer­tain Orson Welles. Today we give you footage of anoth­er film that needs no intro­duc­tion spo­ken over by anoth­er film­mak­er who does­n’t need one, either: Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb. But instead of a pol­ished trail­er, Kubrick put togeth­er this near­ly twen­ty-minute “pro­mo reel,” which appears in a two-part playlist above. “Split over two parts and record­ed off the wall from the pro­jec­tion of the rare 35mm reel, the pro­mo reel fea­tures some alter­nate takes not used in the final cut,” writes Cain Rodriguez at Indiewire. “While we’re not exact­ly sure what the reel’s orig­i­nal func­tion was — maybe to pla­cate investors since the satir­i­cal ele­ments are some­what down­played — we’re glad to see this has sur­faced online.” Kubrick recounts the sto­ry of Dr. Strangelove — one as deeply famil­iar as ancient myth to those who have, like me, seen the movie count­less times, always the­atri­cal­ly. He does so in a sur­pris­ing­ly flat, straight­for­ward man­ner, giv­en that the final prod­uct turned out so thor­ough­ly shot through with the black com­e­dy of the absurd.

Over audi­ble pro­jec­tor noise, he tells of all the now-famil­iar ele­ments: the B52‑s cir­cling con­stant­ly, refu­el­ing in midair; Brigadier Gen­er­al Jack Rip­per’s sud­den order to bomb Rus­sia; Gen­er­al Buck Turgid­son’s wee-hour depar­ture for the “War Room”; the siege of Burpel­son Air Force Base; Group Cap­tain Lionel Man­drake’s strug­gle for the recall code and sub­se­quent con­fronta­tion with the “prevert”-fixated Colonel Bat Guano; Pres­i­dent Merkin Muf­fley’s bad news-break­ing call to Russ­ian Pre­mier Dmitri Kissoff; the tit­u­lar Ger­man expa­tri­ate sci­en­tist’s plan to restart soci­ety after the nuclear apoc­a­lypse. But as Kubrick talks about these scenes, some of the most mem­o­rable in 20th-cen­tu­ry cin­e­ma, we see dif­fer­ent ver­sions of them than the ones to which we’ve long grown accus­tomed: dif­fer­ent angles, dif­fer­ent cuts, even dif­fer­ent lines. Despite down­play­ing the com­e­dy, this reel does hint at the bril­liance of the mate­r­i­al, and more­over of Kubrick­’s then-coun­ter­in­tu­itive treat­ment of it. But can any­one who saw it have imag­ined to what an extent the final film would change the way we think about U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy, mil­i­tary intel­li­gence, and the very con­cept of glob­al ther­monu­clear war?

via Cinephil­ia and Beyond

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inside Dr. Strangelove: Doc­u­men­tary Reveals How a Cold War Sto­ry Became a Kubrick Clas­sic

Aban­doned Alter­nate Titles for Two Great Films: Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go

Watch Orson Welles’ Trail­er for Cit­i­zen Kane: As Inno­v­a­tive as the Film Itself

675 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Over the years, the movie trail­er has evolved from being a long bag­gy com­mer­cial for an upcom­ing fea­ture to a visu­al­ly strik­ing mini-gem of film­mak­ing that some­times over­shad­ows the film it adver­tis­es. Pret­ty much every trail­er from a movie by Zack Sny­der, for instance, is expo­nen­tial­ly bet­ter than the actu­al film.

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, one of the first film­mak­ers to embrace the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the movie trail­er was one of cinema’s great inno­va­tors – Orson Welles. The trail­er for Cit­i­zen Kane, which you can see above, has no actu­al footage from the movie – some­thing of a rar­i­ty. Instead, the trail­er serves as a curi­ous four-minute long doc­u­men­tary fea­tur­ing behind-the-scenes footage and short vignettes of char­ac­ters react­ing to the movie’s mys­te­ri­ous cen­tral char­ac­ter.

Dis­play­ing the same visu­al verve that would make Cit­i­zen Kane a cin­e­mat­ic land­mark, the trail­er opens with a gor­geous shot of a boom low­er­ing into view. And then we hear Welles’s sig­na­ture bari­tone voice intro­duc­ing him­self, “How do you do, ladies and gen­tle­men. This is Orson Welles.”

After inform­ing the audi­ence about a com­ing attrac­tion — his film — Welles segues straight into a shot of pret­ty girls, deliv­ered with a wry wink at the audi­ence. “Speak­ing of attrac­tions, cho­rus girls are cer­tain­ly an attrac­tion. Frankly, ladies and gen­tle­men, we’re just show­ing you the cho­rus girls for the pur­pos­es of bal­ly­hoo.”

He goes on to intro­duce the cast of Cit­i­zen Kane — mem­bers of Welles’s famed Mer­cury The­atre like Joseph Cot­ten, Agnes Moore­head, and Ray Collins — on set but out of cos­tume, look­ing bash­ful­ly toward the cam­era. The one per­son miss­ing is Welles him­self, who, aside from his urbane, author­i­ta­tive voice over, is com­plete­ly absent.

The trail­er then shifts gears. “Cit­i­zen Kane is a sto­ry about a mod­ern Amer­i­can called Kane, Charles Fos­ter Kane. I don’t know how to tell you about him, there’s so much to say. I’ll turn you over to the char­ac­ters in the pic­ture.” We then see a mon­tage of the char­ac­ters of Cit­i­zen Kane. They’re all on the tele­phone, air­ing their wild­ly diver­gent opin­ions of the film’s cen­tral char­ac­ter. Kane him­self nev­er makes an appear­ance. Welles ends the piece by pre­sent­ing Kane as an enig­ma, “a hero, a scoundrel, a no-account, a swell guy, a great lover, a great Amer­i­can cit­i­zen, and a dirty dog.”

Crit­ic and actor Simon Cal­low argued in his book Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu that the trail­er for Kane was just as ground­break­ing as the movie. It’s all shot with the same look as Kane — deep focus and expres­sion­is­tic light­ing.

Com­pare Kane’s trail­er with one that was more typ­i­cal of its time like Casablan­ca. Amid the over­wrought copy and some com­i­cal­ly flashy tran­si­tions, that trail­er all but tells you what is going to hap­pen in the film. There’s vio­lence! Dan­ger! Romance! Kane’s trail­er, on the oth­er hand, is less a sales pitch than a mys­tery. It shows plen­ty about the peo­ple behind the mak­ing of the movie but it shows noth­ing from the actu­al film. Based sole­ly on the trail­er, you don’t know what Kane is about, short of being about a shad­owy, com­pli­cat­ed char­ac­ter called Kane.

Welles wasn’t just being cagey for the sake of build­ing audi­ence inter­est. He was try­ing to head off a fight.  Though Welles pub­licly claimed that Kane was not about media baron William Ran­dolph Hearst, you can hard­ly blame the tycoon for feel­ing oth­er­wise. Hearst was a news­pa­per mag­nate with a show­girl mis­tress who built him­self a pre­pos­ter­ous­ly opu­lent cas­tle. Cit­i­zen Kane is about a news­pa­per mag­nate with a show­girl wife who built him­self a pre­pos­ter­ous­ly opu­lent cas­tle.

Hearst did every­thing he could to stop the movie’s pro­duc­tion – and he could do quite a lot. When he failed to kill the pic­ture by pres­sur­ing the stu­dio, he pres­sured the­ater own­ers. He used his media empire to slan­der Welles – using the direc­tor’s com­pli­cat­ed per­son­al life as tabloid fod­der and even imply­ing that he was a Com­mu­nist. Hearst’s cam­paign to dis­cred­it Welles was so suc­cess­ful that when the direc­tor’s name came up dur­ing the 1942 Acad­e­my Awards, it elicit­ed boos.

Welles, of course, got the last laugh. Kane was such an auda­cious, stun­ning­ly orig­i­nal work that, once redis­cov­ered in the 1950s, it was quick­ly declared a mas­ter­piece. The pres­ti­gious Sight and Sound poll of crit­ics and film­mak­ers rat­ed Kane as the best movie ever made for five decades straight before get­ting unseat­ed last year by Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Ver­ti­go.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Orson Welles’ Clas­sic Radio Per­for­mance of 10 Shake­speare Plays

Lis­ten to Eight Inter­views of Orson Welles by Film­mak­er Peter Bog­danovich (1969–1972)

Watch Orson Welles’ The Stranger Free Online, Where 1940s Film Noir Meets Real Hor­rors of WWII

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.