On Citizen Kane and the whole "greatest of all time" thing

Rating: 10/10 (7 September 2002)

Let's get one thing straight. There is NO unquestioned greatest film. Opinions on the greatest films diverge widely. The people here that are offering negative reviews seem to be under the impression that Kane is the cinema's Shakespeare What you have to realize is that, while Kane invariably shows up at the top of greatest film lists, these lists are always composites, based on hundreds of different lists by different critics and reviewers.
Check out the web site of Sight and Sound, where they have the top ten lists for the past 50 years. Kane is on the top this year, just as it was in 92, 82, 72, and 62. But if you look at the individual lists, you'll find a lot of variety in people's individual choices, and you'd be surprised how many Citizen Kane doesn't even appear on. Or, when it does, how rarely it is at the top. In fact, outside of dim bulb TV talking heads reading off of a teleprompter, I don't think I have ever heard anyone say that Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made. It just happens to show up in the most critic's lists.
And in any case, this sort of thing is cyclical. Kane didn't have this kind of respect until the 60s, and it's already starting to falter a bit. A recent poll made up of critics and afficionados in their 20s ranked Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo at the top.
In any case, Citizen Kane is not my favorite movie. It's not even my favorite Orson Welles movie (that would be Touch of Evil). When I took part in one of these polls, it didn't even make my top ten. But I can easily understand why it's so well respected, and it would probably make my top 20 or 25. All the tools of cinema are used to sublime effects here, from the expressive camera angles to the stunning interplay of shadow and light. The acting, especially be Welles, is simply stunning. And the plot is constructed artfully, non linear but always quite engaging. We get a deep sense of the characters in all of their subtleties, quite a difficult task that most filmmakers fail to accomplish even today.
I have to laugh when people complain about how Kane doesn't live up to 'today's standards.' Of course, this is just a matter of personal taste, as I enjoy the dreamlike grace of the classic films so much better than anything post '77 (ironically, the year that I was born.) And if you think that Forrest Gump or The Green Mile are the pinnacle of filmmaking, then you probably won't 'get' what's so great about Citizen Kane. Which is fine, nobody says you have to, but I have to think that you're missing out.