August 7, 1999
OK, this is it. This is something else. I usually enjoy myself at the cinema, but it's been a while since I was quite so thoroughly blown away. It's better than Casablanca (I'll just wait a few seconds now for the thunderbolt to strike).
Have you ever seen Citizen Kane? Given the film's notoriety, remarkably few people have. I hadn't, and I'm the type who can tell the difference between a McCarey and a Capra. There's no better way to be introduced to a film than on the big screen, and luckily for any other Kane newcomers out there, it's on for two weeks at the Phoenix.
The film opens with a series of beautifully constructed shots of the decaying, unfinished and fantastically luxurious mansion Xanadu, within which its builder is dying. His last word, the first to hit the soundtrack, echoes spookily out: 'Rosebud'. Then the snowstorm globe in his hand falls to the ground.
Cut to a newsreel, explaining in the style of the day (perfect down to the scratchy photo quality and the overexcited announcer) just who the man was: the newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane, celebrated, hated and adored by millions of Americans, not to mention his own circle of intimates. Fabulously rich, expansive and not a little nuts, he tried his hand at and lost his shirt on all sorts of expensive toys: politics, running a newspaper, marriage, art collection. 'You know...' he says, 'if I weren't very rich, I might have been a really great man'.
The newsreel director is dissatisfied with the abrupt ending and sends his men out to find Rosebud, and with her, he hopes, a worthy end to the story of Kane's controversial life. The rest of the film fleshes out, in flashback, the basic newsreel biography as the journalists search for the elusive girl - whose identity, when finally discovered, is a masterstroke of poignancy. Kill anyone, instantly, who threatens to enlighten you on the mystery before you've seen the film.
Part of Citizen Kane's claim to fame is that almost all the main actors, not to mention the star and director, Orson Welles, were making their debut on the big screen. Perhaps this accounts for the superb quality of the acting, which except in one or two minor cases avoids the dated style that can be so embarrassing when you're showing your favourite oldie to a friend who doesn't go back beyond the '70s.
The camerawork is spectacular: during the first eerie twenty minutes there is not a single shot that couldn't be part of a book on artistic photography of the 1940s. Later the fancy work is replaced by a more everyday style giving centre stage to the acting. Welles and co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz use the same technique in their method of storytelling, cunningly getting almost all the plot out of the way in the first ten minutes in order to have free rein to concentrate on delineation of character - a neat trick. Welles manages to marry the best elements of a suspenseful story and an 'art'movie. He achieves the accessibility without the dumbness and the sophistication without the dullness.
Having recovered from the first effects, I've now placed it with a little more perspective in my personal league tables, behind Butch Cassidy and just above It's A Wonderful Life. Nevertheless, I don't expect to see a film on the same level this year. It's an artistic triumph, an emotional shock and as a debut utterly incredible. Go and see it. Even if you already have. Forget about exams; this is important.
Have you ever seen Citizen Kane? Given the film's notoriety, remarkably few people have. I hadn't, and I'm the type who can tell the difference between a McCarey and a Capra. There's no better way to be introduced to a film than on the big screen, and luckily for any other Kane newcomers out there, it's on for two weeks at the Phoenix.
The film opens with a series of beautifully constructed shots of the decaying, unfinished and fantastically luxurious mansion Xanadu, within which its builder is dying. His last word, the first to hit the soundtrack, echoes spookily out: 'Rosebud'. Then the snowstorm globe in his hand falls to the ground.
Cut to a newsreel, explaining in the style of the day (perfect down to the scratchy photo quality and the overexcited announcer) just who the man was: the newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane, celebrated, hated and adored by millions of Americans, not to mention his own circle of intimates. Fabulously rich, expansive and not a little nuts, he tried his hand at and lost his shirt on all sorts of expensive toys: politics, running a newspaper, marriage, art collection. 'You know...' he says, 'if I weren't very rich, I might have been a really great man'.
The newsreel director is dissatisfied with the abrupt ending and sends his men out to find Rosebud, and with her, he hopes, a worthy end to the story of Kane's controversial life. The rest of the film fleshes out, in flashback, the basic newsreel biography as the journalists search for the elusive girl - whose identity, when finally discovered, is a masterstroke of poignancy. Kill anyone, instantly, who threatens to enlighten you on the mystery before you've seen the film.
Part of Citizen Kane's claim to fame is that almost all the main actors, not to mention the star and director, Orson Welles, were making their debut on the big screen. Perhaps this accounts for the superb quality of the acting, which except in one or two minor cases avoids the dated style that can be so embarrassing when you're showing your favourite oldie to a friend who doesn't go back beyond the '70s.
The camerawork is spectacular: during the first eerie twenty minutes there is not a single shot that couldn't be part of a book on artistic photography of the 1940s. Later the fancy work is replaced by a more everyday style giving centre stage to the acting. Welles and co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz use the same technique in their method of storytelling, cunningly getting almost all the plot out of the way in the first ten minutes in order to have free rein to concentrate on delineation of character - a neat trick. Welles manages to marry the best elements of a suspenseful story and an 'art'movie. He achieves the accessibility without the dumbness and the sophistication without the dullness.
Having recovered from the first effects, I've now placed it with a little more perspective in my personal league tables, behind Butch Cassidy and just above It's A Wonderful Life. Nevertheless, I don't expect to see a film on the same level this year. It's an artistic triumph, an emotional shock and as a debut utterly incredible. Go and see it. Even if you already have. Forget about exams; this is important.