Citizen Kane Watch: Citizen Kane (1941)

Watched:  09/04/2024

Format:  Criterion Disc

Viewing:  Third?  Fourth?

Director:  Orson Welles

It's an absolute crime that Orson Welles got so screwed by the studio, the cowardly Academy and Hearst.  At age 26, he makes the most groundbreaking mainstream cinema we've seen since The Great Train Robbery, that changes things forever, rewrites the rulebook, brings some of the finest new actors America will see to Hollywood, all while giving the middle finger to the Jeff Bezos/ Elon Musk of his day - and everyone was too nervous to give the guy his flowers.

Oh, to be young and fearless and brilliant but not realize the very movie you're making will cause you so much grief.

We put on the movie because Jamie reminded me, here as we approach our 29th dating anniversary, that she'd never seen it.  And I don't think I'd watched it since we lived in Phoenix, so 2006 at the most recent.  So it was time.  I do own the 4K set from Criterion, but the 4K disc had issues, and we swapped out for BluRay for the second half.  To be honest - the movie's 4K glow-up looked weird and I likely won't watch that disc again as it looked *too* clean, like they removed the film grain.

There's nothing else like Citizen Kane (1941).  Even The Magnificent Ambersons got taken away and cut up into a studio melodrama - and it's still great, just not Kane.  It's a two-hour montage of technique, breathtaking visuals, stunning performances, cultural criticism, and hurling a spear at the heart of the American myth.  And in 2024, a reminder that nothing is ever new.  We are not living in unprecedented times.

In 1940, movies in the US were already undergoing some interesting changes.  We'd had movies like Fantasia in 1940, Walt taking his stab at *art*, but even the good ones were working with the language of stage.  Citizen Kane starts with a curiously framed scene and goes into a full newsreel announcing the death of Charles Foster Kane, laying the groundwork for what's coming.  Linear time be damned, the film is going to start at the end and work in flashback, trying to understand our central character.  Yes, a thousand films would borrow from this novelistic conceit.  

The look is as shocking as German Expressionism, taking cues more from European works that American film.  Not that there wasn't lovely stuff in the US at the time, but the camera thrown at odd angles, the curious lighting, the massive, cavernous sets- it all says "Fritz Lang with a budget" more than it says RKO movie.  And people have borrowed from this movie endlessly, but they never quite commit to the look and feel in the same way that Welles did.  Noir would look at this movie and say "thanks!  Don't mind if I do!" The characters in the film borrow from archetypes and made new ones.  Joseph Cottens' moralistically gray best-friend/ observer of the Great Man's downfall.  The business partner with the big heart who remembers what could have been, if only...  Hell, my girl Jean Hagen borrowed Dorothy Comingore's accent and persona for Singin In The Rain.  

For folks in 2024, seeing what was possible, cinematically, at the time might be a shock.  Or seeing the Mercury Theater players rolled out to the public for the first time, showing movie-goers how it's done.  But, more than that, it's both history lesson and demonstration that time is a flat circle.  You're going to want to cry seeing the thinly-veiled real history repeating itself with a Great Man propelling it - and these days, we see so many pro "Great Man" movies about people doing shit like designing a marginally better car.

There's no real reason to discuss Citizen Kane here at The Signal Watch.  It's *the* movie.  It's the Citizen Kane of movies. You either stop here or we'd all be in for a TLDR post that covers well-documented territory.

What I would recommend is setting aside two hours and watching it.  It's way shorter than an Avengers movie.   

If Hollywood hadn't gotten so weird on Welles, we wouldn't have probably had Lady From Shanghai, and that would have been a bummer.  But who knows what we would have had?  In the meantime, we can watch film chase this one til the end of time.