Coming out

Rating: 8/10 (22 May 2002)

I've been putting it off and putting it off but have finally decided to come out. So here goes! . . . I don't think "Citizen Kane" is the greatest film ever made. Indeed I would not be hard pressed to name a couple of hundred titles I prefer. And while I am about it here is another piece of heresy; I don't find "Casablanca" particularly entertaining. And allow me just one more. . . I find the plot of "The Maltese Falcon" terribly confusing but have never bothered to work it out as it just seems to be about several nasty people doing nasty things to each other in claustrophobic Los Angeles apartments. There, that's me done for! I doubt that anyone will take my cinema writings seriously again. But back to "Citizen Kane". It really is a very good film indeed, brilliantly inventive, its monochrome visuals as breathtakingly exciting as any I know. It is so clever that one cannot but admire it; the wonderful "March of Time" parody, the haunting use of deep focus photography in the childhood sequence, the disintegration of a marriage charted in a sequence of breakfast vignettes. I wrote the other day of how the great Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi achieved a wonderful marriage of the head and the heart. What ultimately prevents "Citizen Kane" from being a a great film to my mind is that it is all head and very little heart. In 1941 the Oscars for best picture and director were awarded to John Ford's "How Green was my Valley", a film that not only displays marvellous Hollywood craftsmanship but possesses such an abundance of heart that it just had to be the winner. Take a look at Ford's earlier "The Hurricane" (1937) and you will even see those sets with ceilings that "Citizen Kane" is purported to have pioneered.