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By Lars Trodson
There's been a lot of chatter about "Citizen
Kane" being knocked off the No. 1 perch in Sight & Sound's poll of the
best movies ever made, a survey the British-based magazine publishes just once
a decade.
"Kane" had held the top position for 40 years,
unrivaled, but this year Sight & Sound asked a total of 846 critics to
arrive at their verdict, a much wider net cast than ever before. While I don't
know the demographics, I suspect the end result of this year's poll has as much
to do with a lower age of the average reviewer as it does with the films
themselves.
Let's face it: a lot of the things in Orson Welles' first
film are hopelessly out of date. The film is in black and white. It's about a
newspaper tycoon. Newspapers! And this
is a film decidedly lacking in any kind of sex. Oh, sure, Charles Foster Kane
gets himself a mistress and even puts her up in a fancy apartment. But there is
nothing sexy about Kane - either the man or the movie.
"Vertigo", on the other hand! Wow! The only
thing it has on its mind is sex! "Vertigo" -- for all its flaws -- just
seems more modern. Charles Foster Kane exhibits old fashioned fits of jealousy.
He may even have a screw loose. But James Stewart's Scotty Ferguson is a real
head case, as they would have said back in San Francisco in 1958. Man, he's
gone.
But what are the virtues and drawbacks of each film?
Winner: Tie.
I love "Vertigo." I should say I love most of
"Vertigo." I tend to get bored with it toward the end -- although I'm
still amazed at how much James Stewart trusted Hitchcock. His character --
Scotty Ferguson, a cop -- is truly deranged. I do remember being shocked by the
ending the first time I saw it (when it was finally re-released in the early
1980s).
Today, with "Kane", I could easily fast-forward
through the early scenes of setting up the Inquirer in New York. Too broadly
played, too self-conscious. So each film has its dry patches.
Category: Editing.
Winner: Tie.
There are few films as beautifully edited as either
"Vertigo" or "Citizen Kane." "Vertigo" was edited
by George Tomasini, who edited eight Hitchcock films, including
"Psycho" and "The Birds" and who was nominated once for an
Oscar ("North By Northwest"). The scene in Hitchcock's film where
Stewart first walks into Ernie's -- a San Francisco landmark restaurant -- and
Stewart and Kim Novak turn toward and away from the camera in a series of shots
set up by Hitchcock is still breathtaking. And there is that astonishing silent
sequence during which Stewart follows Novak through various Bay area landmarks.
Robert Wise, a two-time Academy Award winning director,
edited "Kane" and few films are more beautifully paced than this.
Category: Cinematography
Winner: Tie.
Category: Acting
Winner: " Citizen Kane."
Kim Novak, God bless her, is a less than exciting actor.
She's so wooden she almost drains away her natural sex appeal She's got an
expressionless voice and dead eyes. She's much more captivating in her other
1958 movie with Stewart, "Bell, Book & Candle."
Many of the supporting performances in
"Vertigo", while adequate, hardly aspire to anything truly superb.
The one standout is Barbara Bel Geddes, smart and lonely and hurting as
Stewart's old college sweeheart (although trying to make them the same age seems
a mistake).
Almost every performance in "Kane" is superb
(aside from Everett Sloan who was allowed to overact toward caricature by
director Welles). The actors playing his parents, Agnes Moorehead and Harry
Shannon, are truly lovely. There are truly wonderful actors in this movie in
major and minor roles.
Category: Music.
Winner: Bernard Herrmann.
This is of course a joke. Hermann composed the score for
both films, putting himself in a category of one. Hermann was nominated for
"Kane" and not for "Vertigo" but both scores are luminous.
Category: Directing
Winner: Tie
This is not a cop out. It's like winning the gold in
swimming by a thousandth of a second. Who's to say? I bet both directors put
down on screen exactly what they wanted, and that is a rare thing.
There is a low-point in each film: the mood lighting
Hitchcock uses to show how mesmerized Stewart is over Kim Novak was hokey back
then.
And the astonishingly bad animation that Welles used for
the birds flying overhead during the camping trip was sloppy even for 1941.
Summing Up
Hitchcock made 53 feature length films -- a handful of
which any critic would also put at the top spot of any film list
("Psycho", "Rear Window", "Notorious") -- to
Welles' twelve feature films. Hitchcock started directing in the 1920s, his
first films are silent, and he essentially outlasted Welles. Hitchcock made his
final feature in 1976 ("Family Plot"), with Welles having cobbled
together "F For Fake" for a 1973 release. We're all still waiting on
"The Other Side Of the Wind."
So, in a way, compared to Welles, Hitchcock is the big
dog in this fight. He had a long and incredibly successful career. He had a
lucrative TV show, a paperback series that published thrillers with his name on
it, and he worked with the best actors and technicians right up until the end.
He never lacked for funding. Unlike Welles, he never won a competitive Oscar
(that's a real Hitchcockian shocker), but he never lacked for defenders. He
lived to be 80.
Welles, of course, never made any money. He apparently
never had money himself, and when he did he put it back into his films -- even
such ludicrous projects like "Mr. Arkadin." He never got a chance to
make some of the films he wanted to, like "Catch-22." He was a
vagabond. He lived to be 70.
But Welles always had one thing: he had made a film that
many people considered, year after year, to be the greatest ever made. He had
that. I guess I would have kept the crown with Welles, but for all the wrong
reasons. I'm like old Charlie Kane himself. I'm a sentimentalist. I want to
hold on to some of the old things before they fall out of reach, and break.
