Best film on which Welles had final cut

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, NoFake, Mazursky told us that story.

Similar to Curtis Harrington's experience, the occasion came suddenly on the evening before Mazursky was to begin shooting an important picture. Unable to turn Welles down, he went to Orson Welles' home, where he found a large group of prominent film personages in party mode. He said that Welles coached him to adlib favorably about J.J. Hanneford's TOSOTW, and had Jaglom attack it. Then, Welles left them to carry on an increasingly raucous conversation for over four hours, as he sent fresh brandies to them all the time. Welles moved from group to group, each of which had been given various arguments to make, covertly popping in with his cameras, every-so-often. Oja Kodar was wielding a spotlight.

Mazursky said that it was a great film making experience for him, and whatever becomes of the film, he would not have missed the opportunity.

Glenn

[Tashman]

Glenn,

I fail to recognize, or boast a familiarity with, quite a few of the filmmakers! But, as to your rundown, the chieftain at the Voice, half the NYer staff, the Guardian critics, and Mr. Rosenbaum are accounted for. I'll go out on a limb and stipulate that AO Scott, had he submitted to the pollsters, would have included KANE. (Has the NYT ever had an interesting critic, by the way? Maybe Frank Nugent?) Note that Rosenbaum shirked the present issue by leaving Welles and a few others off his list as "granted." Since this was only a device to permit himself a polemical thrust, I don't think he recommends a methodology. (It's also possible his inclusion of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES may be attributed to my pal, Mr. Tashlin, who somewhat oddly considered it the great sound comedy. But I add this aside only to further muddy the "critical" pool.) However...

I really thought in terms of directors, and only in 2002 were directors added, possibly in hopes that the conclusions might be a bit different. They were differences, below the Number One Spot.

This democratic ascension of KANE, repeated again and again over (for our purposes) a considerable span of time, stands unchallenged for whatever it's worth. And by that I mean to say that democratic indicators are worth something, only they are not definitive statements: if anything, they are messy, clumsy statements. To attempt to make them precise indicators on a highly specific point is a losing battle. They are general indicators on general points. That you say there were only differences below the number one spot means that you're hovering at this general level, the final tabulation, and not looking below the surface, where--as you've noted--the Mazurskys of the world rate KANE anywhere from two to nowhere, amid whatever potential clutter of oddball inclusions alongside or above it. (Meanwhile, it also occurs to me, vis-a-vis 8 1/2, that in this country it's been several directors, particularly from one generation, who have led the resurgence of VERTIGO.)

Most critical evaluations of modern literature or drama give higher marks to works which are original and set in the life and times of the creator.

Contemporaneity can be thrown out right away with regard to critical opinion in this series of polls. "Period" films have continually ranked highly from directors who also made works in a modern setting--SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, THE SEVENTH SEAL, ANDRE RUBLEV, THE SEARCHERS, STAGECOACH, THE BIRTH OF A NATION, THE SEVEN SAMURAI, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, and on and on. Still more importantly, the most personal work of some of the masters would be lost under this emphasis: John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Carl Dreyer, Jean Cocteau, Ernst Lubitsch, Max Ophuls, D.W. Griffith, and so forth. "Authorship" I'll take a pass on, however much that would likewise knock down quite a few names.

Aren't these old bugaboos dead yet? Is MR. ARKADIN a better film, because timely and original, than OTHELLO? Was TOUCH OF EVIL really modern in its contemporaneity or was it, like VERTIGO, classical underneath the surface? In terms of modernity of style, isn't OTHELLO TOE's equal?

Anyway, the main point is this: among people of sound judgment, I think there are as many who rate Welles as the greatest or among the greatest of directors (per your anecdote) and who thus put KANE on lists merely to stand for Welles or his body of work, as there are those who are just genuinely crazy for the movie CITIZEN KANE. Added to which, people factor in historical import--something that, when married with overall excellence, will trump comparisons with other works.

[Store Hadji]

I'm wild about Tim Burton's film ED WOOD, but I find all of Burton's other films to be unwatchable. I suspect the KANE fans have the same experience with the rest of Welles' output, and wonder (as I do with Burton) why he never made a film that good again. With Welles, I love everything he did and all his appearances, even in the commercials.

[Glenn Anders]

Tashman: It was not my purpose, seldom is my purpose here, to simply demolish arguments for disagreeing opinions (and all yours, mine, and the SIGHT AND SOUND participants' judgments are, agreed, only opinions). Undoubtedly, as you rightly suggest, critics and directors pick CITIZEN KANE or some other worthy film THE BEST for a variety of reasons. A glance at human nature would suggest that a film (or any other work of art) one experiences at a particular moment, in coming of age perhaps, in savoring maturity, or in the the recognition of aging, will be the one remembered as best.

For instance, to bolster your point, the SIGHT AND SOUND critics did not pick CITIZEN KANE the "Best Film of All Time" in 1952. Many of them in Europe would not have seen it because their country was occupied or they were off fighting a the most terrible war in history. In America, the War had created a barrier which clouded what had existed before, and Post-War Welles, in all his multi-forms, was an appreciably reduced figure. Color was coming in big time, Television was replacing Radio, and the Republicans had taken over the White House. Welles was a Radio figure who had made one esteemed important film in CITIZEN KANE (disappointing at the box office), already in its monochrome grandure as historical a chronicle work as any of Shakespeare's, and the political or social causes underlying his work were, in 1952, either being swept away or not yet come to fruition. For my part, CITIZEN KANE crystalized ideas sensed while listening to the pre-war Mercury Theater on the Air, and I believed it was the best film I'd ever seen because of its impact upon me, at the age of ten. Hardly, a logical basis for such a conclusion.

But granting your generational explanation or demur, no film other than CITIZEN KANE (in the person of Charles Foster Kane), certainly no other American film, sums up so grandly, so ironically, so ruefully the American experience in the 20th Century. If a man like Kane could win life's lottery and fail so badly then anyone could. Perhaps, Europeans, from their destitution after two world wars, looking at the distant glitter of incredibly rich America, saw that recognition, too. From every standpoint, CITIZEN KANE became Cinema's towering achievement.

VERTIGO, a film which keeps coming up in your remarks, seems to me a reasonable rival to CITIZEN KANE, in many ways. [Another film often mentioned, 8 1/2, is to me solipsistic and self-referential, fatally attractive to film critics and film buffs like ourselves.] Both . . . KANE and VERTIGO are about power, the fear of its loss, guilt over wielding it, regret at its costs. As someone said to me the other day, Hitchcock made the same film over and over again until he formulated his truth completely in VERTIGO. Personally, the film grows on me from year to year, but in the larger view of life, CITIZEN KANE still encompasses us all more completely. As Hadji suggests, Welles, unlike Hitchcock, got it right the first time in CITIZEN KANE, and then, went on for nearly forty years making other films about different aspects of the masterpiece he had achieved right off the bat.

"Anyway, the main point is this: among people of sound judgment, I think there are as many who rate Welles as the greatest or among the greatest of directors (per your anecdote) and who thus put KANE on lists merely to stand for Welles or his body of work, as there are those who are just genuinely crazy for the movie CITIZEN KANE. Added to which, people factor in historical import--something that, when married with overall excellence, will trump comparisons with other works."

I entirely agree with you, Tashman.

Glenn

[Store Hadji]

I agree with Bogdanovich that Welles developed greatly as a director and actor Kane after KANE, and while hampered by inadequate budgets and inferior technicians and actors, films like THE TRIAL, FALSTAFF and even F FOR FAKE are all superior to it. KANE was the lucky one for which Welles had (for the only time) all the power, money and people in place at the same time, but even without those elements I still think the later films are better.

[Tashman]

It was not my purpose...to simply demolish arguments for disagreeing opinions

No, no. Admittedly, it may seem argumentative on my part to raise minor distinctions or question the precision of a poll (or the oddities among those polled, more to my point), but both big and small things are tied up in the reputation of a film. You invoked certain of them, and one either kicks the tires or accepts them as given. Some are merely interesting in and of themselves, outside of the KANE discussion. But as to KANE, the evidence of polls says that the audience for it seems to come from every band of the spectrum (of filmgoers). It is more catholic in its reach, perhaps, than any other of the titles of comparable public estimation. Even SINGIN' IN THE RAIN would suffer from the block of critics who demand "seriousness" of the cinema.

I think you were also right in defending KANE against mere familiarity or boredom at its omnipresence. There's the psychology, a form of jealously maybe, in which persons are disappointed to learn that their favorite book is number one on the Times list. The less it belongs only to them, the less it means. This can have an alternative basis, too, which is the sentiment that if something is popular, if it touches a wide swath of people, it must not be great. I doubt if KANE suffers that way, at least here at Wellesnet. There may be distrust, however, of those Hadji described who love KANE but see the after-films as one collective falling off. Frankly, they should be distrusted. They either haven't bothered to see the films, or they are poor judges of what they see. Looking at some of the Sight & Sound lists, one wonders on both counts.

The other important thing to remember is that it is not an either/or between KANE and the other films. Though, at the same time, there is a complicating factor in making that statement, because KANE is undoubtedly a nonpareil film. One could practically say this of it in its bare conception. The person looking to knock down KANE the film will first have to find any picture of similar aim with as full a thematic palette. That person will come up with very few returns. If that sounds like blather, it is less an exaggeration to say that "News on the March" nearly seals the case without seeing anything more. Which brings us to the cinematic palette. In the ultimate realization, Welles of course fulfills KANE's rare conception and with the added, incomparable element of his magician's eye. A homerun.

Peerless though it is, there are nonetheless other types of films with markedly different ambitions and themes. To begin with (here's the newsflash), though crossbreeds to a degree, there are the other Welles films. Welles did not make KANE over and over. This is why it is not either/or. CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, to take one example, is not offended that KANE is peerless. It is a different animal. It is not even offended that KANE was made at RKO. One could probably write an article finding many of KANE's themes played out in Sirk's WRITTEN ON THE WIND but that would not make them birds of a feather. On the other hand, how would one compare CITIZEN KANE to the work of Ozu? In one, human drama plays out against what seems like the wide world, in the other, the small anonymous human family is the world. And this is to speak nothing of cinematic incongruities.

No, the claim to an overriding superiority, assuming this were realistic or measurable (or even desirable), lays in Glenn's remarks that "in the larger view of life, CITIZEN KANE still encompasses us all more completely" than any other American film, because it "sums up so grandly, so ironically, so ruefully the American experience in the 20th Century" to which we are presently heirs. It is on this general area of ground that most meaningful disagreement sets in. Because two people can both acknowledge the breadth of the themes in KANE, the truth of its portrait, the resonances we still appreciate first-hand, and yet can disagree on the depth and profundity of its view--not only writ large, but the view of human nature. Welles may be judged overly harshly, being a magician, if some come away thinking the genuine depth of his film also to be partly illusion. Still, to speak just for myself, I do not think it as profound as Glenn finds it. We'll call this the moderate view.

Again, we have hardly touched on purely cinematic concerns. But the question is left, as to polls, how does one square a film that is a nonpareil like KANE against differing or more modest works which might yet be as worthy achievements? "Very carefully," I guess would be the answer, or something like that.

[Glenn Anders]

Tashman: I cannot disagree with much of what you write.

Of course, the later films by Welles have great value. I find MR. ARKADIN, as I remember it, a more intriguing picture than its American counterpart, . . . KANE. THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI is a sad love letter, a solipsism recognized by anyone who has ever "loved and lost." As it stands, parts of it are as good as anything Welles ever did. Obviously, the character of Grisby appeals to me, though I'm not physically or emotionally much like Glenn Anders. THE STRANGER was one of the first postwar pictures to warn against the rise of neofascism in America. For that alone it should be treasured. I can't say that I care for THE TRIAL, a bit too stylized and academic for my taste, and I have never seen a good print of CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, in a theater. The restoration of TOUCH OF EVIL sums up everything that Welles felt so strongly about in the area of Civil Rights and the American system of justice. And I consider F FOR FAKE was Welles' second best film, one of the best personal documentaries ever made. Once again, a summation, in this case, in the nature of Art.

And I so wish that legendary 16mm print of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS would be uncovered in Rio (or that Roger Ryan's restoration would get a distributor). In its present state, a pleasant soap opera with some marvelous vignettes, it is my candidate for the most overrated of the later pictures.

[By the way, I'm reminded, that I was also introduced to Joseph McBride a week or so ago, and in conversation, he praised Roger's work highly.]

No, my criteria involves the pictures as they are, and how they resonate, at least for me.

As for CITIZEN KANE's virtures, I could go on but have too long already. I refer you to my long review of the film at Epinions:

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-4874-81FD18C-38741497-bd4

BTW (again), off the top of my skull, I consider SINGING IN THE RAIN one of the clones you suggest, Tashman, of CITIZEN KANE. An affectionate, satirical one. Consider how it begins, with "Dignity" replacing "Rosebud." Then we have "The Newsreel," as Don Lockwood recalls his career, etc.

Anyway, these movies are all really in our minds and our souls, not in academic dissections and pop psychology, much as we love all that.

Glenn

[Tashman]

I was probably too vague when I said "there are nonetheless other types of films." By this I meant most other films are other types of films. Any presumed points of similarity with Sirk (such as an academic critic or sociologist might find) were only to highlight the actual disparity. Of the example of SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, it could at least be said that Comden and Green were dabbling with a film a clef, a farcical Welles and Mankiewicz.

Having raised Phileas Fogg in the other thread, there's a bit of Donen trivia in that, as he very much wanted to make a musical of "Around the World in Eighty Days." When still climbing the MGM ladder, he pitched the idea unsuccessfully to Freed. This was a couple years after Welles' show had come and gone. He held onto his own idea for it after he'd become a director, but it was not long before it was sunk for good. He later told his biographer: "When the Mike Todd movie came out, my heart broke. It could have been the greatest musical of all time." He also later made a film of THE LITTLE PRINCE, coincidentally another idea Welles had once nurtured.

Appreciate hearing you expand on the after-films beyond the "Get real, gang" first post. I'm afraid I'm one of the over-raters of AMBERSONS (and am therefore eager to see Roger Ryan's work). But I also never knew VERTIGO had anything to do with "power," so we'll probably not agree on much!

Will look at your longer piece on KANE. Cheers.