Citizen Kane an Impostor?

Rating: 7/10 (19 March 2007)

Number One film of all time? Easy to see why. Brilliantly photographed (Gregg Toland), staged (Orson Welles) and performed, with a then radical out-of-tense script (Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles) that flashed backward then forward in time (edited by Robert Wise), one is virtually overwhelmed with its brilliance, on every level.
One's blinded to a couple of chinks in the armor which, in turn, lead to other chinks. They, in turn, lead to the emotionally hollow yet technically impressive response "Citizen Kane" ultimately evokes, decades later.
Charles Foster Kane dies alone. He utters the word, "Rosebud." A nurse comes in, covers his head with the sheet. Fade to silhouette and then to black.
Fine. Wonderfully effective, visually.
Except the premise for the film rests on reporters somehow "knowing" his last word was, "Rosebud." Uh, how would they know since nobody was around to hear it? It's a false dramatic premise we're expected to ignore in light of all the "brilliance" that follows.
Confronted by one reviewer, after "Citizen Kane's" release, by this fact, Welles paused and said, "Don't tell anybody." Sloppy plotting and screen writing? Arrogant attitude that, "Nobody will notice because we're going to blow them away with our technique?" Easily correctable in post-production. Simply have the nurse, or somebody, overhear "Rosebud." But no.
The excitement of displaying their talents must have overtaken everybody, so eager were they to display their creativity, that the Director, Screenwriter(s), Producer and everybody else failed to realize the premise of "Citizen Kane" is based on a clumsy plot-point flub: NOBODY HEARD "ROSEBUD." That's a gigantic mistake. Understandable, one guesses. Except that professionals in Hollywood in those days rarely let something this egregious make it into their theatres. Minor flub details? Sure. A film's entire premise? Not so much.
Equally problematic? The ending. A direct steal from Alfred Hitchcock's concluding image in "Rebecca" a year earlier. Flames engulf Kane's childhood "Rosebud" sled just as flames envelop Mrs. Danvers' lovingly handmade nightgown case with "R" embroidered on it in "Rebecca's" final shot.
Difference? One shot is organic. The other is phony and plagiarized.
"What?" we ask incredulously. "The big revelation is that 'Rosebud' was the name of Charles Foster Kane's sled? We've been through all this brilliant movie-making to arrive at  what? Who, at life's end, remembers the name stenciled on their childhood sled? And what's that supposed to mean?" Compare that stolen final image with Hitchcock's previous image in "Rebecca," where the flames devouring Mrs. Danver's coverlet "R" not only recall and evoke every theme in the film  the hovering ghost of Rebecca  but finally consume her last remnant and free our protagonists (the DeWinters) to live and love.
Organic and full of meaning. Certainly not stolen from another director's film.
One watches "Citizen Kane" with appreciation for the talents involved, and the wonderfully realized scenes. All "work." Yet it doesn't add up. It signifies nothing, gives unrelated insights into several characters and finally devolves into a pseudo-sentimental false childhood image to evoke some "emotion." Maybe "Citizen Kane" was the best film ever made up to its time. But it's brilliantly talented people showing off technical chops absent any real cinematic heart. Individual scenes are evocative and moving. Add 'em up.
A sled named Rosebud. Huh? Keyword: "Showing off." "Citizen Kane" if you go along with the story that "Rosebud" was actually William Randolph Hearst's nickname for an intimate part of his mistress', Marion Davies', anatomy, sort of works. But then, the burning sled image is meaningless. (Hearst and Davies were supposedly the models for Kane and Susan.) Maybe "Citizen Kane" functions best as a demo-reel of the finest young talents in Hollywood at the time.
Not as "the best film of all time." That would be "La Dolce Vita." A film as full of life and truth and revelation about individuals and society as "Citizen Kane" pretends to be.
Where "Kane" trumpets style over substance, the hallmark of Orson Welles over his career's wincing downward trajectory . . .
. . . "La Dolce Vita" eschews fancy pretension to strip away artifice and reveal character. Watch it again and again. The directorial and cinematographic technique is there in spades. The composition of shots equals anything Gregg Toland achieved in "Kane." The shots just don't call attention to themselves (i.e., detract from the characters' revelations of themselves). The seemingly minimalist and improvised script is anything but. Fellini was famous for post-dubbing lines. There is not one word, one syllable, in "La Dolce Vita" that doesn't relate to and develop its themes.
Nobody is barnstorming in "La Dolce Vita," cinematically. Yes, the actors as their characters do. But this is not a film that begs, "Look at how brilliant I am!" It studiously avoids calling attention to its cinematic brilliance, focusing instead on character arcs.
Result? "La Dolce Vita's" final, non-derivative, closeup is perhaps more devastating (summing up the previous three hours) than anything since Gloria Swanson's final closeup equally overwhelmed audiences in "Sunset Boulevard" in 1950.
Yes, "Kane" and "La Dolce Vita" and "Sunset Boulevard" are essential to any collector.
Enjoy and study them for what they truly are.
Of the three, only two still have the power to disturb and upset (i.e, are still emotionally relevant).
"Sunset Boulevard" reveals lives you and I will never lead.
"La Dolce Vita" reveals lives, 50 years later, ALL of us now lead, small or large, clinging to the celebrity media circus that has replaced individual integrity and substance.
All three represent peaks of cinema achievement.
One of them stinks from the head (and ending), becoming an artifact of artifice and plagiarism in the name of celebrity ego (Orson Welles').
The other two are self-effacing (they sacrifice technique for character and story).
"Citizen Kane" is a blow hard impostor to "best film." But what a demo-reel!