CITIZEN KANE

Orson Welles' 1941 classic, Citizen Kane, is often cited as the greatest movie of all time. How many people would actually list it as their favourite, however? Everyone says that it was unlike any movie before and influenced every movie since, and now many see Citizen Kane as homework for film students. They think that Citizen Kane is what people who love Star Wars watch so they can make The Avengers.

So, does the greatest film of all time have any value outside a classroom?

I've seen Citizen Kane a handful of times--most recently, on the big screen at the ByTowne Cinema. It's not my personal favourite movie (that would probably be Who Framed Roger Rabbit) or even my favourite Welles movie (I prefer Chimes at Midnight). But I do like Citizen Kane--not because I was told to or because I am trying to impress people, but because, aside from being a great film, it is also a good movie.

(A warning: I will be spoiling some of Citizen Kane's story in this post, and not just the stuff everyone already knows about. Be careful if you haven't seen it, and want to be surprised when you do.)

Citizen Kane opens with one of cinema's most famous sequences. We see a close-up of a snow-covered house. The camera moves back, revealing that we were watching the inside of a snow globe. 

Next, we see an old man's lips. 

"Rosebud,"  he says.

He drops the snow globe. His nurse enters the room and, after a brief pause, walks over to the man's bed, places his arms across his chest, and pulls the blanket over his corpse. 

The movie's central character, newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane (played by Welles himself), is already dead. The rest of the movie is about him, as told by those who knew him to journalist Jerry Thompson (William Alland), who is tasked with finding out the significance of "Rosebud". He hopes that understanding the word will shine light on the life of the man who spoke it in his dying breath.

Charles Foster Kane. Now there's a character. He is funny, reckless, ambitious, selfish, charismatic, abusive, confident, and insecure. For two hours, we wander through his life, from ages eight to seventy and at many points between. Like Hamlet, he has a sense of humour that might surprise those who expect all Great Art to be dusty, dry, and dull. Take this line, delivered to Walter Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris) :

You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in sixty years.

But Citizen Kane is not a comedy: it has its share of drama, too. Perhaps the most difficult parts of the story are those relating to Kane's second wife, Susan Alexander Kane (Dorothy Comingore), a singer who cannot sing.

The idea of an artist who is too incompetent to create art has most likely existed for as long as art has--after all, don't all artists (or at least all of those who care enough about their art to actually think about it) suffer some insecurity? Yet the part that makes this particularly tragic is that Kane clearly wants Susan to become a singer significantly more than Susan herself does. She is being forced through her insecurities against her will, without passion and without any hope of a reward. She doesn't even have the satisfaction of knowing that she's pursuing her dream because it really isn't her dream.

Another scene that has always stuck in my mind: Kane's friend, dramatic critic Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), is writing a scathing review of one of Susan's performances. Leland falls asleep before finishing his work, but has written enough that Kane is able to get the gist of it from the first few sentences. Rather than force a rewrite, Kane finishes it himself, keeping the same negative tone, then fires Leland. And he continues to force Susan to sing.

Not all influential pieces of art have aged well, for the simple reason that innovative ideas are usually polished through practice and refined by repetition. I don't believe that Welles fell victim to this, however. Yes, Citizen Kane was influential. Much of what makes it influential has been copied by later movies, but I don't think they've necessarily improved upon them. I still find it very watchable and enjoyable, even today--funny when it wants to be, moving when it needs to be. Citizen Kane didn't just show what a film could do--it showed how to do it.