Reviews

The careers of Orson Welles and Herman Melville are eerily similar...there is the great early work that is thought by some to be the alpha and omega of their respective forms (Citizen Kane and Moby Dick), there is the long eclipse, there is the great late work rediscovered (Touch of Evil or (the yet to be rediscovered and absolutely flabbergasting) Chimes at Midnight and Billy Budd, sailor), and there is the irrepressible mindf**k (F for Fake and The Confidence Man). But even more than that, Welles and Melville were the two most disillusioned artists America ever produced, which goes a long way toward explaining why average people interested in the arts as mere "entertainment" don't like their work. Both Kane and Ahab are singularly unpleasant individuals who are crushed by the cosmos in one way or another in spite of their indomitable defiance. These are not pleasant archetypes in the least...but they are infinitely more valuable than all the "heroes" of popular fiction. Welles and Melville take a speculum to the human condition by testing these characters to destruction. Citizen Kane has one of the most difficult structures in film. Its fractured narrative prevents the viewer from truly understanding Kane--but this is the point of the movie...why else would the film conspicuously leave out one crucial viewpoint (Kane himself)? In this respect, Citizen Kane is also a lot like Hamlet, which is similarly impenetrable. Anyone who demands identification with the "hero" is going to be sorely taxed by Kane--this separates the men from the boys, so to speak.

Is Citizen Kane THE greatest film of all time? Of course not. To declare that any film holds that honor is ludicrous. After all, once a certain level of craftsmanship is attained, once a certain level of insight is expressed, these distinctions become meaningless. Star Wars lost the best picture Oscar to Annie Hall in 1977--is one better than the other? The experience of watching either of them is so radically different that the comparison is absolutely invalid...they have nothing in common except their relative excellence. Kane's hold on the honor stems from the fact that it invented more of the language of sound filmmaking than any other movie, but no one claims that the other contender based on that criterion is the greatest film of all time (that would be the extremely controversial Birth of a Nation). Dont get me wrong...Kane is ONE of the greatest films...but no film could or should be asked to stand as the alpha and omega of the art.

Even so, Kane is a harrowing aesthetic experience.

And Kane IS massively entertaining. I resent the notion that a film has to elicit some knee-jerk emotional response to be considered entertaining--having the eye engaged and having the mind challenged ARE entertaining...but I sometimes forget that we as a people more and more value feeling over thought...God help us all.

(If anyone is interested, I also reviewed Cat People (1942)

I have this theory about the horror films of Val Lewton. It is my contention that these movies caused a sea change in the content and tone of the movies of Alfred Hitchcock. The reason I say this is simple, really: Lewton is the only filmmaker I have ever caught Hitchcock cribbing scenes from. He did it twice. Once from The Seventh Victim (dir. by Mark Robson), which I swear to god provides the first half of the Shower Scene from Psycho. The second from Cat People, which provided the pet store scene in The Birds. This second scene is almost a shot for shot swipe. Both of these steals are evidence that Hitch knew and admired the Lewton movies. More than that, though, there is a change in the subtext of Hitchcock's thrillers after the Lewton movies. The movies he made before them were cut from the Fritz Lang mold of political thrillers. After the Lewton movies, Hitch's movies became more psychosexual in nature. Vertigo, for instance, could easily fit into Lewton's output.

Cat People is the first of the Lewton movies and sets the tone for them. It pretends to be about a McGuffin (serbian were -panthers), but is actually about something else (in this case, frigidity and repressed lesbianism). This represents a huge change in the evolution of the horror movie. Cat People is the first horror movie to explore these themes as central concerns rather than as sub-rosa undercurrents. It also pioneered the techniques of film noir (which as a genre didn't really exist yet). Cat People is strikingly stylized and its effect is of stranding the viewer in the middle of a darkened room with some dreadful beast circling just outside his sphere of perception. This has a hell of an impact--particularly if you have the good fortune to see this in a theater. I'm not going to claim that Cat People is one of the best horror movies ever made (it does have flaws), but it is one of the four most influential horror movies ever made (along with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Psycho, and Night of the Living Dead). But unlike its brethren, its influence spreads corrosively through the entirety of cinema through both film noir and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. You would be hard pressed to find any film short of Citizen Kane or Rashomon that is nearly as influential.