Citizen Kane is the best movie ever made. I realize it’s the favorite of critiques and the lot of you like to fade ‘experts’. But in this instance, they are absolutely right.
There once was a time when I hated old movies. I felt they were a waste of time, stupid dead people on black and white screens. But then I calmed down and started to pay attention to what was being said on the screen, instead of what was happening. Orson Welles, who would’ve been the best director to ever live had it not been for being blacklisted for making Citizen Kane, preferred to make black and white movies over color. Well into the color teevee days, he still made black and white films because he felt it added a certain glamor to the movie, making viewers focus on the content and not the pageantry (extra Ashley Schaeffer).
Citizen Kane represents a lot of things to me.
When I was young and successful, growing up in the business, truth be told, I was ashamed at how young I looked. I always looked 5 years younger than I actually was and meeting clients was always a point of stress for me, since I looked like a kid out of high school. Now that I am older I realize that youth was never anything to be ashamed of, but to embrace.
Orson Welles was the youngest director at the time. At 25, he made the greatest movie of all-time. This success was never to be repeated and marked the apex of his long career. What a terrible thing to live with, topping out and never being able to repeat the glory you once had.
Welles, famous at the time for one of the best pranks of all-time (Interestingly enough, many years later, a lad in Ecuador tried to repeat this prank, which resulted in his audience to go bat-shit crazy. Riots ensued and they burnt the fucking radio station down to a cinder, killing 7 in the process.), the War of the World’s radio broadcast, which tricked all of the idiots listening into believing a martian invasion was at hand, was a firebrand and because of this was given a blank check to make Kane. Commercially, it was not a success and behind the scenes it was a fucking nightmare for movies execs, since the movie is actually about the life of the most powerful media man of the time: William Randolph Hearst.
At any rate, if you’ve never seen Citizen Kane–do it today. It is a timeless classic.
NOTE: As a result of Citizen Kane, I researched and viewed all of Welles’ work, even the stuff never published. For the next few weeks, I will be reviewing his films, opting for thematic reviews over random.
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