1
Jan/15

ORSON WELLES 100: CITIZEN KANE

1
Jan/15

Orson Welles masterpiece kicks off centennial celebration of controversial auteur’s birth

CITIZEN KANE (Orson Welles, 1941)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
January 1-8
Series continues through February 3
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www2.warnerbros.com

Film Forum is ringing in 2015 with the greatest American movie ever made, the epic Citizen Kane, kicking off a massive centennial celebration of the birth of its creator, the rather iconoclastic writer, director, producer, actor, and wine spokesman Orson Welles. In 1941, a young, brash, determined Welles shocked Hollywood with a masterpiece unlike anything seen before or since — a beautifully woven complex narrative with a stunning visual style (compliments of director of photography Gregg Toland) and a fabulous cast of veterans from his Mercury radio days, including Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Paul Stewart, and Agnes Moorehead. Each moment in the film is unforgettable, not a word or shot out of place as Welles details the rise and fall of a self-obsessed media mogul. The film is prophetic in many ways; at one point Kane utters, “The news goes on for twenty-four hours a day,” foreseeing today’s 24/7 news overload. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen it and you know what Rosebud refers to; the film is about a whole lot more than just that minor mystery. Like every film the Wisconsin-born Welles made, Citizen Kane was fraught with controversy, not the least of which was a very unhappy William Randolph Hearst seeking to destroy the negative of a film he thought ridiculed him. Kane won only one Oscar, for writing — which also resulted in controversy when Herman J. Mankiewicz claimed that he was the primary scribe, not Welles. The film lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, but it has topped nearly every greatest-films-of-all-time list ever since.

Orson Welles

Orson Welles was one of a kind, as splendid Film Forum series shows

A classic American story that never gets old, Citizen Kane, in a 4K restoration, will run at Film Forum January 1-8, igniting “Orson Welles 100,” a four-week festival programmed by Bruce Goldstein along with consultant Joseph McBride, author of What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career. Welles’s career was fraught with controversy, with battles over editorial control, finances, and politics, with more unfinished projects than completed ones. As McBride points out at the start of his 2006 book, “‘God, how they’ll love me when I’m dead!’ Welles was fond of saying in his later years, with a mixture of bitterness and ironic detachment. But that’s a half-truth at best. More than two decades after Welles’s death, his career is, in a very real sense, still flourishing. But it is a disturbing irony that Welles is more ‘bankable’ now than when he was living.” The Film Forum series confirms this statement, consisting of more than thirty films that Welles directed and/or appeared in, including multiple versions of Touch of Evil and Macbeth; the lineup ranges from the familiar (The Magnificent Ambersons, The Third Man, Compulsion, A Man for All Seasons) to the obscure (Prince of Foxes, The Black Rose, Man in the Shadow, Black Magic), from the Shakespearean (Chimes at Midnight, Macbeth, Othello) to the Muppets (The Muppet Movie). Among the double features are The Immortal Story and F for Fake, The Stranger and Journey into Fear, and Jane Eyre and Tomorrow Is Forever. McBride will be on hand to present the rarities collection “Wellesiana” as well as the “Preview version” of Touch of Evil on January 14 and the “Scottish version” of Macbeth on January 16, joined by Welles’s daughter Chris Welles Feder.