A master charlatan at work

Rating: 7/10 (8 May 2011)

One scene sums this film up for me. Welles, as Kane, walks to a window which appears to be of normal size. As he approaches it, we see it is enormous and 6 feet off the ground. He then walks to the foreground again, and once more the window looks normal.
This seems to say "Look how clever I am, to do this". This cleverness pursued for its own sake is the hallmark of Welles in general and Citizen Kane in particular. As Welles himself said in the film which provides the other bookend to his career, F For Fake: "I am a charlatan".
This is not to say that Kane is not a good film, merely that its constant gimmickry detracts from it. It has as many special effects as a modern day science fiction film and Welles, being the infant terrible he was at the time, has an endless need to put in as many trick shots as possible even if they seriously overbalanced the rather slight storyline. Never do a simple shot when you can have a camera crane in, then dissolve, then have a piece of furniture open up and so on. All this has made the film beloved among cinephiles and uncriticisable among anyone else.
But is the story any good? Does the pacing and narrative hold up? The answer is just about yes, although the story is not as good as it thinks it is.