While I was away, I had the opportunity to watch what I suppose one might as well call a "few" movies. Here's some of them, in bite-sized form. Or maybe two or three bites, because if there's one thing even moving to Pittsburgh can't beat out of me, it's my awful long-windedness. Today's subjects: Citizen Kane
, His Girl Friday
, Network
, and Good Night, and Good Luck
.
CITIZEN KANE (1941)
Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) dies, and a newshound (William Alland) seeks the story of his final words. He never solves the mystery of Kane for himself—although we are privy to more than he—but he learns through conversations with the great man's friends that he was human like the rest of us, even if he didn't know it.
Orson Welles'
Citizen Kane is very likely the single most overrated film made in the sound era. But
that says more about the overreaching critical reevaluation of it
—the reevaluation that eventually snowballed into its acclamation as the long-running Best Film Ever on just about any critics' poll you'd care to look at
—than it could
ever possibly say about the quality of the actual film itself... which is, of course, simply
deliriously high. Yes, fewer pictures have been more talked-about than this one, and
Kane has been just about talked to death: its spectacularly well-appointed deep focus compositions; its beautiful lighting schemes; its monumental art direction; its bitterly humorous satire, so viciously on point it might have been slanderous were everything bad not based at least in part on something true; and, of course, its extraordinary lead performance by Welles, taking William Randolf Hearst only as the starting point for his creation of the saddest man in the world—the man who thought he could buy happiness. So, no, maybe it wasn't particularly close to the best movie ever made, not even back in 1941. But Goddamned if it isn't still absolutely Great—even after all those decades it spent, condemned to be The Greatest. Maybe now that
Vertigo is the Best Film Ever (an even worse choice, but never mind), we can enjoy
Kane for what it is and always was: entertaining, moving, human,
and expertly-crafted, too.
Score: 9/10
