CITIZEN KANE is back on the campaign trail, seeking victory
CITIZEN KANE (Orson Welles, 1941
Film Forum
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September 5-11
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Citizen Kane is the best-made film we have ever had the pleasure to watch — again and again and again — and it is even more brilliant on the big screen. A young, brash, determined Orson Welles created 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 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 Oscar 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. However, after being number one on Sight & Sound’s poll that comes out every ten years (in 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2002), Citizen Kane has shockingly been beaten out this year by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller Vertigo, which has been climbing the Sight & Sound spiral staircase from number 7 in 1982 to number 4 in 1992 and number 2 in 2002 after not having even made the top ten in 1962 and 1972. Film Forum is setting the two films against each other this month, with Citizen Kane screening September 5-11, followed by Vertigo, which isn’t even the best Hitchcock film, being shown September 12-18, giving everyone a chance to see just how wrong Sight & Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute, is.