{"id":139,"date":"2011-11-12T12:44:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-12T17:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=139"},"modified":"2020-12-06T21:34:01","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T02:34:01","slug":"the-fame-of-kane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=139","title":{"rendered":"The Fame of Kane"},"content":{"rendered":"

I get a little tired of people telling me that Citizen Kane <\/em>is the greatest film ever made.\u00a0 Don\u2019t get me wrong; I love the film, but calling it the \u201cgreatest ever\u201d seems a little hard to swallow.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen a lot of Welles films, but certainly not all of them… I have to tell you that I don\u2019t even think Kane <\/em>is the best Orson Welles film.\u00a0 I tend to like Touch of Evil <\/em>better.\u00a0 It seems a much more relaxed and confident film to me.<\/p>\n

(For the record, I\u2019m frequently interviewed by people who ask me variations on this… \u201cWhat is your favorite film?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWhat\u2019s the greatest film ever made?\u201d\u00a0 I don\u2019t have an answer for this.\u00a0 The greatest film ever made, and my favorite, is moldering in a can somewhere, waiting for me to find it.\u00a0 I have a real weakness for auteurish films by obscure people like Max Davidson, Warren William, or Charley Bowers.)<\/p>\n

Citizen Kane <\/em>could hardly have been a bad movie if it tried.\u00a0 Welles was a first-time director, but he was given a great cinematographer (Gregg Toland), a great composer (Bernard Herrmann), a great editor (Robert Wise), a great co-screenwriter (Herman Mankiewicz) and a great cast.\u00a0 He was protected from studio interference by contract and they adhered to it.<\/p>\n

RKO in the early 40s was a really great place to make a movie.\u00a0 I often cite William Dieterle\u2019s The Devil and Daniel Webster<\/a> <\/em>(1941) as another film done at the same studio at about the same time, that is also a great film.\u00a0 Both Welles and Dieterle were influenced by German expressionism, with the editor, composer, and studio brass the same for both films. (I would be remiss not to point out the scene at 47:05 when we first see Simone Simon.\u00a0 I will only say that I\u2019d have worked on this film for free.)<\/p>\n

Some of these same people went on to do other great pictures at RKO.\u00a0 Kane<\/em>\u2019s editor, Robert Wise, moved up to the director\u2019s chair, and worked for producer Val Lewton.\u00a0 Lewton headed up a B-unit there that made twelve amazing pictures, largely free of studio interference, between 1942 and 1946.\u00a0 Lewton was allowed to make pretty much anything he wanted so long as he used the studio\u2019s title, which led him to make a film like Curse of the Cat People <\/em>(1944)\u2013basically a sentimental Christmas story with a ghost in it.<\/p>\n

I realize that I\u2019m painting an overly rosy picture of RKO as a studio that left artists alone.\u00a0 I do remember what happened to The Magnificent Ambersons<\/em>, but that was an unfortunate anomaly that was not <\/em>typical of RKO\u2019s behavior at the time.\u00a0 In fact, Robert Wise, who was responsible for the studio-backed recutting of Ambersons<\/em>, was embarrassed and defensive about it even as late 1995 when he was grilled about it at Cinecon.<\/p>\n

But as I get back to Kane<\/em>, I see a film with Welles being extra ambitious to make an artsy film that would get people talking.\u00a0 He succeeded, but as a result, Kane <\/em>is not exactly subtle.\u00a0 The direction calls attention to itself at nearly every opportunity.\u00a0 Flashy editing, flashy photography, dramatic lighting… it\u2019s all there.\u00a0 This doesn\u2019t make Kane <\/em>a bad film\u2013far from it\u2013but I find that Welles matured as a director and did more confident, more cinematic work later in his career.<\/p>\n

The legend around Citizen Kane <\/em>is that Welles did his very best work for his first film, and that everything he did afterward was a step down.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe that.\u00a0 Welles was highly idiosyncratic, and he had a reputation of being \u201cdifficult.\u201d\u00a0 He tended to offend studio people and they tended not to hire him for a second picture.\u00a0 This meant that it became progressively more difficult for him to get work as a director, and he had to resort to using technical people who were less than the stellar crowd he got on Kane<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s easy to say, because the crew for Kane <\/em>is among the best ever assembled for a movie.\u00a0 Almost any other crew would be a step down.<\/p>\n

Welles was unable to make great films from lousy budgets, but he managed to do good, solid work with much smaller budgets.\u00a0 The Lady from Shanghai <\/em>(1947), made for skin-flint Harry Cohn, still has a lush Wellesian feel, especially when we compare it to other films made at Columbia during this period.<\/p>\n

When I watch Citizen Kane<\/em>, I note that Welles seems to be relying heavily on advice from his cinematographer, Gregg Toland.\u00a0 Kane <\/em>is very much a photographer\u2019s film, and that\u2019s fine by Welles, who loved heavy Expressionist lighting.\u00a0 But there comes a point at which I feel Welles is using Toland almost as a crutch.<\/p>\n

Toland was tinkering with special lenses that let distant objects and closer objects stay in simultaneous focus.\u00a0 Normally directors use different lenses, focus on the character speaking, and then rely on the editor to combine disparate shots of actors in the cutting room.\u00a0 This practice is rough on inexperienced actors, because they are frequently not talking to another person, but rather to a bank of lights and a camera lens.<\/p>\n

Watch this scene from Citizen Kane<\/em>.<\/p>\n