So why do people say Kane is the greatest movie ever made?

Rating: Null/10 (13 November 2001)

It's hard to see Kane plainly for the voices you hear on either side of you now-- the one telling you it's the greatest movie ever made, and the other one (represented by so many people here) asking, what's the big deal? Here's an attempt at an historical answer for why Kane has been regarded as supremely great-- and whether there is any justice in the claim.
Throughout the 1930s there was a certain critical faction, especially in New York, that felt that the art of the cinema died with the arrival of talkies-- that movies got visually dull and politically timid in dealing with the important issues of the time (remember that the whole debate about whether Hollywood should make social problem/message movies like The Grapes of Wrath would have just happened when Kane was made). That Hollywood had sold out for the buck, turned its back on geniuses like Griffith and Stroheim and the kind of cinematic art represented by German Expressionist classics like The Last Laugh and Sunrise.
The capper on the whole decade would have been the enormous hype for Gone With the Wind, a masterpiece of middlebrow sentiment that even the New York critics were cowed into tiptoeing around. (Read the NY Times review, in which future Searchers screenwriter Frank Nugent feels compelled to argue, a bit nervously, why it might NOT be automatically the greatest movie ever made.) Once in a while these critics had managed to make a certain smaller noise about a movie they felt met their criteria, such as John Ford's The Informer, which was about as good an imitation of a German Expressionist silent picture as Hollywood ever made.
Along comes a New York theater figure, Welles, who makes a movie which looks like The Informer (even using a cinematographer who had worked with Ford and apprenticed under the cinematographer of The Last Laugh), but unlike the somewhat ponderously arty Informer has a much livelier American-feeling pace that links it to the tradition of American newspaper comedy-dramas. Where cameras had been mostly parked at a two-shot distance for ten years, Welles uses his like a silent filmmaker, diving through skylights and burrowing in for mammoth closeups. He plays with the medium by starting his movie with another movie, a newsreel, which he mocks brilliantly (and there were plenty of people in New York then who delighted in the mocking of the Time-Life empire). And he dares to poke its nose into the personal life of a still-feared and influential figure, Hearst, at a time when, say, Hollywood could make a movie about the Dreyfus case 40 years before and still be too timid to say the word "Jew."
So not surprisingly, the critics, thinking that most of humanity thinks Gone With the Wind is the best movie ever made, jump all over a movie that seems to have been made just for them and say, no, HERE'S the greatest movie ever made. As it happened, few agreed with them at first, but starting some time in the 50s, when the film started to be seen again at 16mm film societies, its reputation spread and as a result, where it wasn't even mentioned on the first Sight & Sound International Critics Poll in 1952, it has placed #1 every ten years since (though perhaps in 2002 it will finally give way, probably to Godfather I & II).
But you look at it today... and you say, so what's so great about it.
Well, in one regard it's suffered the fate of so many innovative films-- it has been influential to death. (How many more Abysses and Mission to Marses can 2001: A Space Odyssey take before it suffers the same fate?)
Within a very short time the German Expressionist-influenced look of Kane became the shadowy look of film noir. The flashback-narration structure, which seemed very innovative at the time (although the critics would have all just seen it in the French film Le Jour se Leve-- but that may have been a bonus for Welles rather than a detriment), was also picked up by dozens of thrillers in no time. (Go rent The Mask of Dimitrios if you want to see Kane practically remade as a crime thriller.) And, of course, the idea of telling the inside story of a famous person's life is no longer the province of daring art, but of glossy trash like The Greek Tycoon and The Carpetbaggers.
It took somewhat longer for Welles' camera style to be absorbed. For decades only a few maverick stylists like Stanley Kubrick used the camera like a pen the way Welles did. But since the era of the music video and the Steadicam, suddenly everyone does. Welles' style seems rather staid after you've watched the camera glide through the bar in Goodfellas, chase dogs through a grocery store in Raising Arizona, and stick up a pharmacy in Natural Born Killers.
So what does Kane still have to offer? Well, for one, a deep sense of mortality and moral decline and failure, an almost Shakespearean psychology, that's extraordinary in a 26-year-old filmmaker. Second, a density and richness of visual imagery that deserves to be seen on the big screen, where Welles' and Toland's black and white chiaroscuro can be at its most seductive. But before you go to it, rent a couple of ordinary movies of the late 30s-- best of all a couple of biographies or historical films, perfectly enjoyable in themselves, like The Life of Emile Zola or In Old Chicago-- and then, with their visual style in your head, try to recapture a bit of how Welles seemed to set the camera-- and the director-- free.