The Most Overrated Movie Of All Time!

Rating: 5/10 (9 May 1999)

Here goes! Citizen Kane regularly tops the list of American critics' best films of all time lists and runs in the top ten in European critic ratings, despite having been a huge commercial failure at the time of its original release. It is a serious, well-acted and groundbreaking film certainly, but to describe it as the best film ever made is ludicrous; in fact I would rate it the most overrated movie in the history of film. Because I don't like Welles? Not at all. Welles had one of the most original and creative careers in world cinema and Othello (1952) would probably rank in my own top ten list. So why my scepticism? One of the biggest problems I have with the film is that, like Apocalypse Now, it requires a certain political position in order to fully appreciate it. Pauline Kael, the doyenne of American film critics, is on record as saying that the film was an important cultural statement for left-wing Americans at the time, and that is certainly true. But a film which has that kind of appeal usually makes assumptions that are far from universally shared, and often ungenerous ones at that. Hearst was a bete-noir of the American left whose newspapers had decades earlier encouraged a jingoistic war in Cuba. Did that give Welles the right though to dissect his life without even knowing the man (he later met him once in a lift) and, in particular to characterise him as cold an ungiving at a personal level? (It is worth remembering, in this context, that when Hearst later fell on hard times his wife apparently so starved of love sold her jewels and remained with him). The film has too much the feel of a hatchet job. Someone could make a similar movie today about Rupert Murdoch and it might be well-acted and beautifully shot but you see the problem! Welles was only twenty-five when he made this movie and it shows. Certainly he had a right to an opinion and a right to state it, but life is a little more complex than you would know from this movie.
Defenders of the movie often point to the originality and quality of its cinematography and the influence it has had on American cinema in particular. This is undoubtedly true. In the same way that Eliot, Joyce and Nabakov changed literature, Welles helped to change cinema. But Picasso was unquestionably the most influential figure on twentieth century art and yet his influence would not necessarily be universally accepted as benign.
I am not suggesting that the influence of Citizen Kane was malign, but influence and quality are discrete concepts. As for the cinematography itself is it really as original as many American critics seem to think? What about early Eisenstein or, at the risk of being non-pc, the extraordinary cinematography several years earlier of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph Of The Will? A serious film? Yes! An important film? Unquestionably! The greatest film ever made? Move over! It is simply too cold ever to be that.