Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair.

Rating: 10/10 (4 November 2008)

I don't know exactly what's left to say about "Citizen Kane", about it's technical dazzle or the maturity of its plot, but it's interesting to note that its prominence gained height only gradually. At first, if not disregarded, it was mostly unnoticed, probably because William Randolph Hearst and his newspaper chain (pre-TV and pre-blog) avoided any mention of it. Only in the last 20 years or so has it been recognized for the masterpiece that it is.
Of course everyone's heard of it by now, and though most of us admire it, some despise it. I suspect that if some of us dislike it, it's not because of the film itself, but because the majority adore it. This is known as "contrarianism" and I blame the Frogs for it.
The French -- I can carry on with these Olympian generalizations, can't it? I mean, I'm protected by the First Amendment, right? The French have this tendency to turn common values upside down. That's what gave the world Jerry Lewis.
Not that I intend to put France and its couture down entirely. The single best sandwich I ever ate was in the Gare du Nord. But, really, take the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss as an example. Greek mythology? Pfui. Let's look more closely at Tlingit myths. The Tlingit are not proto-scientists or philosophers. They're a bunch of clam diggers in the Northwest. I should know, having lived with them.
Where was I? Oh, yes. That sandwich. Wow.
Getting back to "Citizen Kane," I watch it now and again -- not too often because I have it memorized. But here's an example of why I think it's a masterpiece. Okay. Charles Foster Kane has forced his wife, who has a mediocre voice, to push herself into becoming an opera star with the help of his vast financial resources. She fails and tries to poison herself.
Here's how that scene plays out on screen. The camera is shooting poor half-dead Dorothy Comingore in fuzzy close up, looking anything but glamorous, breathing heavily, covered with sweat, unconscious, her face away from the door on which Kane and his minions are banging. Behind her figure is a table on which we see the suicide apparatus -- bottles and glasses. It's a rear projection, meaning that Comingore was being filmed while a screen behind her (previously shot) is being shown behind her. And -- within THAT back projection -- there is a third projection screen of the door, which finally swings open and admits Kane. Back projections were in common use in 1941 -- but a projection within a projection? (Welles used the same technique later, in "Lady From Shanghai.")
Okay. As someone said, Welles was a kid with a new toy -- the camera. But he turned it into a model that did barrel rolls and crazy eights. Few have done it better since then -- and Welles' technique was tacked onto an adult story with no bad guys and no good guys, yet gripping. A young man loses his illusions as he ages. (Don't we all?) Welles' output went downhill from there, his apologists notwithstanding, not because of a monstrous ego. That's too easy. He couldn't bring himself to finish the editing because it was never again to meet his demanding expectations.
Don't let revisionists beguile you. It's one of the best movies ever made, and you can measure its quality along any number of dimensions, from Greg Toland's revolutionary photograph to Benny Hermann's subtle but apt score.
It's pretty good.