Seminal, innovative film

Rating: 10/10 (15 July 2009)

A friend once remarked that "Casablanca" is a much 'warmer' film than "Citizen Kane." Upon rewatching 'Kane', I found that is not quite the case. It starts out rather ominously, intentionally so, but once Charles Foster Kane's early adulthood is portrayed there is much humour abounding, both subtle and slapstick, until his (first) marriage begins to cool (as a decade is depicted in a memorable montage sequence over a long dinner table). Thereafter the film's noir shadows complement a descent into a very unpleasant downward spiral until the finale (obviously inspired by "Rebecca", produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, only a year earlier; some of that film's opulent interiors are also mirrored in Kane's extravagant settings). Welles must have realised the picture was plummeting into such dark, glamourless territory as to leave the moviegoers with a 'negative' experience that he tacked on an introduction to the Mercury Theatre players at the end of "Citizen Kane", backed by a jolly tune utilised in one of the earlier sequences.
Not all of the music is by Bernard Herrmann, as is commonly believed. Two musical segments in the "News on the March" sequence were appropriated from the 1939 "Gunga Din" film which was scored by Alfred Newman. The first, a pastorale snippet accompanying a quote about Xanadu from Coleridge's (unfinished) poem "Kubla Khan", then the trenchant strains while Kane meets with infamous world leaders like Hitler and Mussolini. The first appears in the "Gunga Din" scene where Sgt. Cutter (Cary Grant), atop an Indian elephant, halts just before a chasm spanned by a wooden bridge. The second appears in "Din" during a scene where the Thuggee cult leader (Eduardo Ciannelli) rants about prior despots, saying, "Surely Napoleon was the maddest of them all!"
None of Welles' later films comes close to "Citizen Kane" which only affirms that this was not a one-man show. A long list of superb collaborators only heightened the quality of this landmark motion picture.