So, look. You know Citizen Kane is a Great movie. Maybe you haven't seen it yet (one good reason to be reading reviews of it), but you know it's Great, just as I knew it long before it bobbed its way to the top of my Netflix queue this week. If you're a serious movie aficionado at all, the kind so serious you've forgotten what a pretentious word "aficionado" is, you've seen Kane, probably at least a couple of times. And there are plenty of terrific, informed, witty, deeply thoughtful movie reviewers right here on Epinions (mfunk75 and Vormancian jump immediately to mind) who could surely explain to you exactly why Citizen Kane is Great. (Update: so can many of the actual Advisor and Lead reviews of the movie, which I didn't want to bias myself with). You can even get a persuasive explanation of its Greatness as a free bonus if you read Michael Chabon's the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, which you should. So if you haven't seen Citizen Kane, the issue of its Greatness must not be what be what's concerning you.
That's where I come in. I have no power or qualifications to determine when a movie is Great, and we can thank Christ for slipping at least this much justice into His dad's world. If I did get to decide what was Great, college filmmakers would be earnestly learning how-tos from Frank Oz's Little Shop of Horrors, starring Rick Moranis as a dork, Ellen Greene as a female dork, Steve Martin as a sadistic dancing dork, and a carnivorous green leafy plant as a soul singer. Clearly we don't want that.
What I _am_ qualified to answer is a question that reads more like: "Okay, look, I don't usually watch movies made even as far back as the 1970's. I loved Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, of course, but i honestly thought What's Up Doc? starring Ryan O'Neal and Barbara Streisand was even funnier. I like Alfred Hitchcock a lot, but wouldn't consider any of his films to be _more_ dignifiedly nerve-wracking, or more provocative, than Oliver Stone's Talk Radio or Stephen King's Storm of the Century. I don't get Gone with the Wind at all, nor do I get the 'on the other hand' to the statement 'the Birth of a Nation [which I've watched] is a piece of racist garbage'. I'm a bloody philistine. Is it likely that I'll enjoy Citizen Kane?"
To which my answer is yes. It's an amazing movie, and a great story. Even if, like me, you learned who "Rosebud" was from a Peanuts strip when you were ten.
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Charles Foster Kane, the movie's subject, should be treated as (roughly) a real person: Orson Welles's stand-in for William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of a more interesting age. The opening of the movie -- after some stunning photographic dissolves of Kane's gigantic "Xanadu" estate in a visual style that still looks original after sixty years probably filled with attempted crass imitations -- is a shouty twelve-minute 1940s-style obituary newsreel catching you up on the basics of Kane's life and career. In the newsreel, we're quickly introduced to
- his normal childhood and wealthy adolescence
- his early days running one newspaper
- his crusading anti-rich-folks journalistic career and his invention of follow-the-blood "yellow journalism"
- his key role in creating the Spanish-American War
- his failed run for the governorship of Ohio, stymied by an adultery scandal
- his creation of a huge chain of newspaper and radio stations (we see little radio towers dotting a U.S. map
- his subsequent retreat towards the traditionally upper-class political right, including an amiable neutrality about Hitler
- and his huge collection of artworks from around the world, stored in Xanadu. None of this is the story, but it's all the outline from which the story will be colored in.
By the end of the twelve highly informative minutes, you have every right to be hoping a more traditional movie emerges. Relax, one does. But a short history-teacher's checklist seems in order, and the facts do parallel Hearst pretty well. Hearst, unlike Kane, was actually elected to the House of Representatives, before losing _three_ mayor and governor races (and a couple of early-aborted presidential campaigns). None of those races involved the equivalent of Kane's adultery scandal -- but Hearst did have that scandal later, once his political hopes were dashed. The childhood details similarly are changed in detail, right in spirit. And when we see Kane respond to a telegram from Puerto Rico where his reporter denies there are any war stories to report, and Kane twirls and dictates "You provide the prose poems STOP. I'll provide the war", this is a virtual copy of what is taken to be truth about Hearst: he told Amercians they were mad, so they got mad, so their president got mad, and we had war. Although Hearst's reporter was asked to provide pictures.
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So! After the newsreel comes the movie itself. Jerry Thompson, bigshot reporter for one of Kane's old papers, decides there is a scoop to be had on Kane's famous death: Kane has gasped the unexplained last word "Rosebud" (in an opening scene jarringly filmed with the camera right on his lips), and Thompson can be the first one to find out who Rosebud was, and thus unlock the key to Kane's character. That's the movie's frame. He pursues interviews with the major people of Kane's life, does reading of Kane's papers (tightly guarded in a classic too-roomy too-neat "Sssshhh!" sort of library), and each time he does so, the incidents related by the interviewees or the papers are brought to life before us.
By the end we've vividly gotten to know Kane's resentful theatre critic and ex-best-friend Jed Leland, eager to spout character-analysis theories he's been storing up since he got committed to the rest home, especially if the interviewer will smuggle him in some cigars. We've nodded at Kane's general manager Bernstein, played to Platonically ideal, perfecter-than-life Jewish Brooklynness by some obvious WASP named Everett Sloane. We've met Kane's first wife (the independent and tolerant Emily Norton) and second wife (the passively amiable Susan Alexander, who is no longer passive _or_ amiable about the prospect of discussing Kane with yet one more interviewer). And, much more to the point, we've seen lots of Charles Foster Kane himself. Kane had style.
Kane had such style that he'd introduce himself, at 23, to the fortune that will make him the richest man in the world, look over his holdings, find a little money-losing newspaper, and tell his wealthholders that he wants the little money-losing newspaper to be his new focus, because "It would be fun to run a newspaper". (If that doesn't sound obscenely daring and scandalous, it's cuz you're not looking at all those funny 19th-century suits and hats while he says it). Such style that he'd have his newspapers run soak-the-rich editorials and explain (i paraphrase from poor memory) "There's two of me. There's the me that owns roughly 28,794 shares -- see, I do pay a little attention to this stuff -- and that me thinks Charles Foster Kane, the newspaperman, should be strung up"... while later clarifying to his fortune's manager that his ideal persona would be "Everything that you hate". Such style that he would befriend a pretty girl precisely because she'd never heard of him, and build an opera house precisely so that she could sing in it. Regardless of whether she wanted him to. And enough style, then, to write his own vicious review of her operatic debut, simply to prove his own honesty to his theatre reviewer and best friend -- whom he then fired, in part for dissing his wife's singing.
Jerry Thompson, obsessed with the meaning of "Rosebud", interviews each Kane associate and then tells his co-workers that he came away with "nuthin'", as if Orson Welles wasn't busy handing us lots of little pieces to explain his theory of, apparently, William Randolph Hearst. I personally think we're supposed to agree with Jed Leland, who claims Kane was "always trying to prove something to someone". A surpassingly common motive, in a way: how different is his desire to always live somewhere larger and more garish, from my wife's desire to each time buy a better (comfier, more practical, better-handling, but also cuter) car than the one she's outlived? How different is his desire to prove that his friend-turned-scandal-object-turned-second-wife is an opera star, from a mother's attempt to prove that her deeply mediocre C-student child in Brighton High School's G block needs to be "challenged" more, perhaps at a private school? How different is his desire to top his own sales records with a newer/wilder story, from Orson's desire not to spend the rest of his life as "that man who did that War of the Worlds stunt"? (Which, for the record, was a _really_ cool stunt)
The differences are three: Kane has more money, and Kane has more imagination, and oh yeah: Kane has newspapers to tell you what a hero Kane is. This is quite enough to make Kane more interesting than that G block mother -- who probably also doesn't get a huge kick out of tormenting and financially endangering the class interests of her closest friends. Or then again, maybe she does vote Republican. Still no movie there.
A lot of movies have been shot about rich people, of course, but never has wealth so effectively been made to look obsessive-compulsive. There's the camera's pans over Xanadu's massive, indifferent, cluttered heaps of great artworks. There's its then-new (and still striking) shots through multiple doors and multiple mirrors, and over long distances as people move through beyond-human-scale houses. There's the "deep focus" camera technique that keeps the material-world backgrounds as clear and remarkable as the foregrounds. There's the obnoxious self-importance of the newsreel itself. It's all luxurious and over-the-top and damnably uncomfortable. Citizen Kane shows us Architectural Digest as an outpost of Hell.
And if you don't think that works, consider this: over the last 20 years, fewer and fewer younthful adults have watched Citizen Kane. And over the last 20 years, new houses have gotten steadily larger, higher, more agoraphobically open and wall-less, more tightly guarded, and more expensive. Coincidence? Eh, probably. But watch the movie, and decide for yourself.
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