In the early 1970s the New Yorker magazine's legendary, fearsome film critic Pauline Kael set the cat among the pigeons when she claimed that Herman Mankiewicz, and not Orson Welles, deserved most of the credit for Citizen Kane. Kael was never afraid to take on cinema's sacred cows, and her withering review of David Lean's 1970 Irish epic Ryan's Daughter helped drive him away from film-making for over a decade.

The cows, though, don't come much more sacred than Welles, and Kael's attack on his masterpiece sparked a furious debate that has never quite been resolved. The release of a new print of the 1941 film this month gives us a good excuse to re-examine it.

The new Kane print will be shown this month at the IFI, Temple Bar, as part of a Welles season, and is as breathtaking an achievement today is it was when first released. The question is: does Welles deserve the lion's share of the credit for it or not?

The answer is more complicated than you might imagine, and the problems seem to stem from how the young Welles was marketed by the RKO publicity machine in advance of the release of his extraordinary debut film.

Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1939 with a formidable reputation as a wunderkind. Born to a wealthy Wisconsin family in 1915, Orson could read by the time he was two, recite King Lear in its entirety at 11, and disappeared to Ireland at 16 to bluff his way on to the Gate Theatre stage.

His productions of an all-black 'voodoo' version of Macbeth in Harlem, and a Broadway production of Julius Caesar set in fascist Italy, had electrified the New York theatre scene in the late 1930s, while his infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast had sounded so realistic it had sparked a mass exodus in New Jersey.

Orson, it seemed, could turn his hand to anything, and his movie career would be a blaze of glory. Or rather that was how RKO saw things, and as the movie was developed and filmed they ramped up the publicity around Welles as the "one-man band". At that point it was highly unusual for actors to direct or vice-versa, yet Welles was starring in, directing and writing Citizen Kane, and when the film was released on May 1, 1941, his multi-talented personality was a major selling point. He was a 25-year-old genius, and few might have guessed what he could not achieve.

In an interview just prior to the film's release, Welles had remarked, almost in passing, "so I wrote Citizen Kane". But in a darkened study in Hollywood sat a quietly fuming screenwriter who saw things differently.

Herman J Mankiewicz was a sophisticated East Coast former newspaper columnist and wit who arrived in Hollywood in the late 1920s and subsequently put his literary stamp on films as diverse as The Front Page, Dinner at Eight and The Wizard of Oz. His brilliance as a screenwriter was well known to Welles, who went to pay the writer court in 1939.

Mankiewicz was then recovering in hospital after breaking his leg in a car accident that may not have been unrelated to his legendary consumption of alcohol. Welles became a regular visitor, and was delighted by "Mank's" ready wit. Orson had been toying for a while with the idea of a film about a public figure who would somehow encapsulate the American experience.

Mankiewicz had also been planning a screenplay about a celebrity of sorts that would be told by those who knew him, but had been thinking more along the lines of the late gangster John Dillinger. But Welles wasn't interested in playing Dillinger, and suggested they find someone else as an inspiration for their film. It was Herman Mankiewicz who came up with the idea of William Randolph Hearst as a model -- he had known the legendary multimillionaire media mogul, and had been a regular guest at Hearst's palatial ranch at San Simeon.

Hearst had banned Mank from his lavish parties because of his drunkenness and sharp tongue, and the writer was in the mood for a spot of vengeance. And while both he and Welles would later deny that Hearst had been a model for Charles Foster Kane, the similarities are undeniable.

Pauline Kael would later claim that Mankiewicz had been planning to write a film about Hearst as early as 1925, but it was his collaboration with Welles that provided the spark. Once they'd hit on the plan, Welles was happy to let the screenwriter do his magic, and Kael would later dig up a former secretary of Mankiewicz's who claimed that Welles had not written a single word.

He may have made the odd change, but it seems certain that the lion's share of the writing was done by Mankiewicz, who was not best pleased when it emerged that RKO was not planning to give him a writing credit. On the finished film they got a co-credit, but many would later forget Mankiewicz's contribution.

Pauline Kael wanted Herman Mankiewicz to be given due credit as one of the great creative forces of the 1930s and 1940s, and used the Holy Grail of Citizen Kane to make her case. Among those principally outraged by her actions were director and film buff Peter Bogdanovitch, who became a fierce advocate on Welles's behalf.

He pointed out, and rightly so, that while the story may have come from Mankiewicz, the writing was not the really special thing about Citizen Kane. It was Welles who came up with the revolutionary ideas of lighting -- and shooting -- people from beneath, the extended use of deep focus, and scenes where the camera seems to melt through walls. It was all of this that lifted Kane into the sphere of visual poetry and extended the language of cinema -- and set a new benchmark.

The new print of Citizen Kane will be released on November 13. pwhitington@independent.ie

- PAUL WHITINGTON

Irish Independent