Sliced Bread

Rating: Null/10 (30 April 2010)

I came across this old film in the bargain bin at my local pound store and couldn't believe I hadn't heard of it before
OK, only kidding. Let's face it: you'd have had to have spent your entire life living in a hermetically sealed bubble to not know about Orson Welles' debut film, which is almost universally hailed as the greatest movie of all time. It's an interesting – and divisive – title for any film to be saddled with, that World's Greatest Movie tag. Imagine being branded something as modest as the world's greatest commis chef, or world's greatest dishwasher, and see how quickly people would start trying to bring you down from your lofty perch. There seems to be a lot of people wanting to know what's so great about Kane, mostly because every groundbreaking film-making technique generally – and to a degree, mistakenly – attributed to Kane, now forms the core of every film school's Big Book of Movie-Making, thereby blunting Kane's once industry-changing impact. The film deserves recognition because of its place in history, no doubt about it. But is it any good?
Well, yes, actually. Citizen Kane provides the audience with an intelligent, insightful and sophisticated character study of an egotistical megalomaniac and delivers, in almost every shot, something meaningful that contributes to our understanding of Kane. A rich vein of irony runs through the film. For example, the photograph in the opening newsreel of Kane with his son and smiling wife below the newspaper headline announcing his nomination for Senator is taken the moment before his wife reveals to him she knows about his mistress. Kane's political aspirations die within an hour of that jubilant photograph being taken. Welles doesn't bother to point that out, crediting the audience with enough intelligence to not require a guiding hand.
I doubt whether any Hollywood film prior to this one had penetrated so deep or so vividly beneath the surface of its character. As the film progresses, Kane's material wealth grows in direct correlation to the loss of his personal relationships, until he is alone in a vast, monolithic castle on a hill. In the first half of the picture the character of Kane is permanently surrounded by others, but as his political aspirations fade and his personal shortcomings come to the fore, his figure either becomes smaller or he occupies the screen alone.
Perhaps Welles the actor is one of the film's biggest liabilities: his acting is unconvincing at times. Welles himself felt he tended to over-intellectualise when he acted, and I think he was right. Whatever the reason, he doesn't always inhabit the character the way he should to be totally convincing. Joseph Cotten, one of Welles' Mercury Theatre players also making his debut, gives probably one of the most convincing performances, while Dorothy Comingore as the hapless songbird who becomes Welles' second wife, becomes so shrill towards the end that you begin to wonder why he would want to keep her around.
Is it the greatest film ever made? I don't know. A lot of people ridicule the idea, but many of them are of a younger generation, and fail to come up with a realistic alternative. It's pretty good though, I know that, and is easily superior to anything else Hollywood was putting out back then. It makes you wonder how much more Welles might have achieved if Hollywood hadn't been so intimidated by his precocious exuberance.