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March 01, 2005
Students learn from fellow classmate about why an old film is appreciated
While sitting in the Sorin Dining Hall, discussing movies, as I often do, I brought up one of my all-time favorite movies: Citizen Kane.
You know the one, the film that seems to sit atop every critic’s list of greatest flicks the world has ever known, the one that ushered in the career of Orson Welles and so erroneously lost the Academy Award.
Much to my dismay, I heard all of the people at the table say they’d never seen the movie, and one person asked me what the big deal was, why it was ranked so highly among the thousands of films that have come out since Edison sneezed into the camera. Here is my response.
Citizen Kane was a revolution in Hollywood. Here was Orson Welles, the young boy genius, taking his first
giant leap into the film industry with a parody on the life of William Randolph Hearst.
He took a cast of virtual unknowns and took an enormous chance by hoping the audience would be so intrigued by the dying word of a fallen titan that they would be glued to their seats and stay interested in the film for another two hours.
The story of Charles Foster Kane is that of a boy, plucked from obscurity, who becomes the wealthiest man in the world, running a ruthless media empire (I’ll skip the Rupert Murdoch analogy), and then, just as suddenly, falls from grace and power to end up alone and miserable. Along the way, he suffers divorce, political scandal, and ruin.
Why is Kane so smashing? Partly it’s due to Welles’s marvelous employment of flashbacks, using detective Joseph Cotten’s search for the truth behind the final word of “rosebud” as a way to further delve into Kane’s history. With each interview, we see a different chunk of the titan’s life, starting from his humble roots as a boy and ending with his dark, gloomy days amid his hollow mansion.
Kane also manages to create a complex, multilayered plot that flows rapidly across the screen. The main character dies within the first 15 seconds of the film, yet he remains a vibrant entity throughout the movie.
The plot twists and crackles, but not for one second is there any reason to doubt the plausibility of this life.
Every character seems real, human, even when they’re given only a few short scenes to exhibit their role in Kane’s life.
The production quality is top-notch, from the dreaded mausoleum of Xanadu to Bernard Herrmann’s bewitching score (he would go on to highlight some of Hitchcock’s finest works, including Psycho).
All this creates the recipe for a great movie. To make it one of cinema’s best, you need the secret ingredient - Welles himself. As Kane, he creates a hollowed man, a visionary who keeps clutching to a vision of happiness that he can never quite reach.
He can have everything that money can buy, but strives for something worth more č the love of those he loves. Citizen Kane’s portrait of how some dreams never come true is what makes it such a lasting landmark in film history.
Posted by msveum at March 1, 2005 08:10 PM
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