Greetings, fellow humanoids. First and foremost, I have to state that I'm a dirty liar. In the 30 Flicks Epilogue post, I said the following: "I've just written 30 movie reviews, but I can't wait to watch more movies!" Well, nothing could have been further from the truth. I was extremely burned out on watching movies at the completion of that project and wanted to watch nothing other than stupid YouTube videos about cats when it was over. Couple this with taking on a new job at my workplace and the travel and training required therein, and movies were the last thing on my mind. At long last, though, I'm now entrenched in a new routine and ready to start taking in some classic movies again.
I chose to start with two movies that couldn't possibly be any more different - but both are considered among the greatest films ever made. I watched one of them once some 15 years ago. I had never seen the other in my life up until this point. We're not doing the usual eight-paragraph format here - I cut them in half to four. Call these fun-size reviews, or something much less lame. Grab your popcorn for Movie #1...
1941
Directed by Orson Welles
Starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Agnes Moorehead, Paul Stewart, Ruth Warrick, Erskine Sanford and William Alland
Now that we have the inevitable reference to Orson Welles' sterling late-stage career as a frozen foods pitchman out of the way, let's get to business. Citizen Kane, the movie that Welles wrote, produced, directed and starred in, released in 1941, forgotten for years before being re-appraised and spending multiple decades being considered the greatest film ever made. I remember reading the mammoth-sized Roger Ebert essay on this film in one of the video companions and thinking that this sounded like the most magnificent thing ever committed to celluloid. Lo and behold, I rented a DVD when I was in college...and no sir, I didn't like it. I RESPECTED it - I could see the technological innovations and the storytelling techniques that would be endlessly copied for the rest of time. But I couldn't connect with the story or characters at all. Thus, I forgot about the movie for a long time. Roughly halfway through 30 Flicks, though, I was aware that I was liking films that I would not have liked even five years ago. This realization got me curious about Citizen Kane once more, asking myself if I would like it better now that I'm a 57-year-old man.
So, what is Citizen Kane? Essentially, it is a creative mix of drama and fictional biography, with a touch of mystery thrown in. The film opens with the death of title character Charles Foster Kane (Welles in a powerhouse performance) and his last word: "Rosebud." Based on real-life media mogul William Randolph Hearst, Kane was a highly visible newspaper magnate who lived the last years of his life in seclusion at a palace called Xanadu. The script introduces the basic storytelling device of a newsreel team's search for the meaning of the famous last word "Rosebud," and we follow this investigation with reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) as he interviews the various characters in Kane's life, seeing snippets of his past at each stop.
The film becomes a study in both megalomania and the power of human ego. Kane's news empire is built on the idea of standing up for the working man (back when that was actually a thing), and his ambition seems to know no bounds. He marries the President's niece and eventually begins a political career of his own. His downfall comes when he meets would-be singer Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) and becomes determined to make her an opera star. From a story perspective, the best stuff in the movie undoubtedly comes in the segments dealing with the fall of Charles Foster Kane. These scenes also give us some admittedly stunning cinematography tricks, such as the scene where Kane signs away control of his business and walks to the background, revealing that the windows there were MUCH larger than the viewer initially thought in a move that symbolizes the power he has just lost. There are dozens of shots like that in the film, subtle and not-so-subtle visual cues that become a character in and of itself.
There is zero doubt that Citizen Kane was a revolutionary film. It was a technical marvel in 1941, with striking "deep focus" camera work, optical illusions and eyeless cockatoos dazzling the eyes of audiences everywhere. It was also endlessly creative from a script standpoint; rather than slog from A to Z in a straight line as all films before it, it jumps in and out of the various time periods in Kane's life. But these were all things that I knew on that first watch. So the question is still there: did I care about the story more? Yes, I did. I was able to recognize this time that the story of Charles Foster Kane is a tragedy about wanting to be loved and being unable to buy or influence people into doing this, and this theme connected with me. More than my initial viewing, I also appreciated the awesome performance by Welles, going from a full-of-piss-and-vinegar muckraking publisher to a sad, bitter, dying 70-year-old effortlessly. Is it the greatest film ever made? I don't know...but neither does anybody else with absolute certitude. That's the beauty of art, people.
Rating time: *** 1/2 out of ****. Citizen Kane still isn't exactly my type of film, and it's not one that I will be able to pop in any day of the week. But it's definitely worth another watch sometime in the not-too-distant future to see if even more details stick out to me. Highly recommended.
With that, time for Movie #2...
1979
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Starring Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne and Dennis Hopper
"My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam. The way we made it was very much like the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little we went insane." These were the words of director Francis Ford Coppola to describe the extremely troubled production of Apocalypse Now, and more appropriate words have never been spoken about a film. The budget nearly doubling during, actors dealing with addictions and insecurities, the extreme weather of the Phillippines rearing its head on multiple occasions delaying the shoot and destroying sets...you name it, it happened while this film was being made. It was only from this kind of shoot that a movie like Apocalypse Now could eventually result. This was my first time watching the film, and I was absolutely riveted. When it was over, I felt like I had been run over by a truck, but strangely, I wanted to watch it again. And I did.
As the movie begins, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is given the mission of traveling far up the Nung River to terminate Special Forces Colonel Kurtz, a rogue officer waging his own kind of brutal war in Cambodia. The central story of the film may revolve around the would-be assassin Willard, but this is very much an ensemble piece, as Willard's mission requires the use of a river patrol boat crew. Every soldier on the vessel is given a distinct personality and dramatic purpose, with a very young Laurence Fishburne being a particular standout as trigger-happy gunman "Mr. Clean." Along the way, the crew has dangerous encounters with the hallmarks of the Vietnam war - Montagnards, Viet Cong ambushes, even an over-the-top USO special. These scrapes with danger are gloriously filmed but never glorified, as personified in the village raid led by Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall). Duvall puts in a tour-de-force performance in his brief role, an officer who believes steadfastly in American superiority to the point that he makes his soldiers surf on the conquered beach after dropping the Napalm - which smells great in the morning, by the way.
The film is a perfect marriage of visual and script storytelling. From a conventional standpoint, it is extremely well-structured, with narration by the obedient and single-minded Willard giving us brief glimpses into the life and times of his quarry Kurtz in various intervals as the boat gets closer to its destination. Each episode on the river plays out like a vignette, with events that have consequence on the story moving forward ranging from an encounter with a tiger to character deaths. I have indeed read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the novel upon which this film is loosely based, but that was many years ago; from memory, I don't recall the source material being as effective as Apocalypse Now. Visually, however, the film is definitely a Heart of Darkness. Sometimes, the jungle is shown as green, vibrant and full of life. Sometimes, it is dark, drab, and monotone. And sometimes, most notably in the film's climax, it is almost unreal and abstract. This is a movie that rewards you for watching, even when very ugly things are happening.
At one point, I had this pegged as one of the films that I would review for the 30 Flicks project. It fit every criteria; it has a reputation as masterpiece, it has something to say, and I had never seen it before. I ultimately decided against it simply because I already had six films from the '70s on the list and I wanted more balance when it came to the cinematic decades. Had Apocalypse Now been included in 30 Flicks, it would have undoubtedly been my favorite film on the list. It instantly became my favorite film about war, because it is only briefly concerned with blowing stuff up. The film is about morality, about a character in Kurtz who makes eloquent arguments for committing atrocities and another in Willard who seems to have no philosophy at all but needs a mission like a drug. In these two characters, the audience sees the effect that war has on the human psyche, and this theme was never represented better than it was here. Lastly, I initially watched the film in its 2019 "Final Cut" version, which clocks in at just over three hours. I followed this up by watching the original theatrical cut, and this was actually my preferred version. Leaner and meaner, the film's 1979 cut maintains a steadier pace and tone. It also does not contain the much-debated French plantation sequence which almost grinds the movie to a halt just before act three in the Final Cut.
Rating time: **** out of **** with very little internal debate. Unforgettable, powerful, well-acted and beautifully shot, this flick immediately launched onto the list of my favorite movies of all time. Although I'm still waiting on that musical version:
