Orson Welles’s picnic begins badly and ends with a slap in the face. It’s a memorable sequence, but it is only 2:07 seconds of screen time.
Despite the southern Florida heat, Charles Foster Kane and Susan Alexander are lounging by a crackling fireplace in Xanadu, their palatial estate: he in front of the fire; she at the other end of the room doing a jigsaw puzzle. Both are bored with each other, and in an attempt to enliven his floundering relationship, Kane, the hero of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), suggests a picnic. “I thought we might have a picnic tomorrow,” he says, “it might be a nice change after the Wild West party tonight. Invite everybody to go to the Everglades.” Alexander is not interested; “Who wants to sleep in tents,” she retorts, “when they have a nice room of their own – with their bath, where they know where everything is?”
When it’s all arranged, the beach is lined with a cortège of cars and trucks—a line of traffic rolling along just beyond the reach of the surf.
At Kane’s camp in the Everglades, staff erects tents for dining and a kitchen for preparing food. For Show, a chef in a white toque tends a spit-roasting pig.
As guests mingle, a jazz band plays “It Can’t Be Love.” It’s meant as irony because the true nature of Kane and Alexander’s marriage is no longer loving. It is rapidly disintegrating. Instead of mingling and dancing, they are alone in a separate tent, miserably arguing so intently that Kane slaps Susan. “Don’t tell me you’re sorry,” she snaps, to which he responds, “I’m not sorry.”
See: Orson Welles. Citizen Kane. The screenplay is by Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz, John Housman, Mollie Kent, and Roger Q. Deny (1941); Randy Loren Rasmussen. Orson Welles: Six Films Analyzed, Scene-by-Scene (2006)
The Cast: Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane, Dorothy Comingore as Susan Kane, Joseph Cotton as Jedidiah Leland, Everett Sloan as Mr. Bernstein, and Paul Stewart as Raymond