Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Things I don't like about Citizen Kane:

• The "News on the March" montage. It's an efficient way of cluing the audience in to what it's about to see, but is it necessary? And was it necessary to make it a parody of "The March of Time" newsreel, down to the use of the Timespeak so deftly lampooned by Wolcott Gibbs ("Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind")? 
• Susan Alexander Kane. Not only did Welles leave himself open to charges that he was caricaturing William Randolph Hearst's relationship with his mistress, Marion Davies, but he unwittingly damaged Davies's lasting reputation as a skillful comic actress. We still read today that Susan Alexander (whose minor talent Kane exploits cruelly) is to be identified as Welles's portrait of Davies, when in fact Welles admired Davies's work. But beyond that, Susan (Dorothy Comingore) is an underwritten and inconsistent character -- at one point a sweet and trusting object of Kane's affections and later in the film a vituperative, illiterate shrew and still later a drunk. What was it in her that Kane (Orson Welles) initially saw? From the moment she first lunges at the high notes in "Una voce poco fa," it's clear to anyone, unless Kane is supposed to have a tin ear, that she has no future as an opera star. Does she exist in the film primarily to demonstrate Kane's arrogance of power? A related quibble: I find the portrayal of her exasperated Italian music teacher, Matiste (Fortunio Bonanova), a silly, intrusive bit of tired comic relief.   
• Rosebud. The most famous of all MacGuffins, the thing on which the plot of Citizen Kane depends. It's not just that the explanation of how it became so widely known as Kane's last word is so feeble -- was the sinister butler, Raymond (Paul Stewart) in the room when Kane died, as he seems to say? -- it's that the sled itself puts so much psychological weight on Kane's lost childhood, which we see only in the scenes of his squabbling parents (Agnes Moorehead and Harry Shannon). The defense insists that the emphasis on Rosebud is mistakenly put there by the eager press, and that the point is that we often try to explain the complexity of a life by seizing on the wrong thing. But that seems to me to burden the film with more message than it conveys. 

And yet, and yet ... it's one of the great films. Its exploration of film technique, particularly by Gregg Toland's deep-focus photography, is breathtaking. Perry Ferguson's sets (though credited to RKO art department head Van Nest Polglase) loom magnificently over the action. Bernard Herrmann's score -- it was his first film -- is legendary. And it is certainly one of the great directing debuts in film history. I don't think it's the greatest film ever made. In the top ten, maybe, but it seems to me artificial and mechanical in comparison to the depiction of actual human life in Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953), the elevation of the gangster genre to incisive social and political critique in the first two Godfather films (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, 1974), the delicious explorations of obsessive behavior in any number of Alfred Hitchcock movies, the epic treatment of Russian history in Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966), and the tribulations of growing up in the Apu trilogy (Satyajit Ray, 1955, 1956, 1959). And there are lots of films by Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, Robert Bresson, and Jean-Luc Godard that I would watch before I decide to watch Kane again. There are times when I think Welles's debut film has been overrated because he had a great start, battled a formidable foe in William Randolph Hearst, and inadvertently revealed how conventional Hollywood filmmaking was -- for which Hollywood never forgave him. It's common to say that Citizen Kane was prophetic, because the downfall of Charles Foster Kane anticipated the downfall of Orson Welles. That's oversimple, but like many oversimplifications it contains a germ of truth.     

L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

The ironic title -- an "adventure" in which nothing adventurous occurs -- is enough to establish L'Avventura as one of the most subversive films ever made. It subverts narrative by never resolving its initial mystery, the disappearance of Anna (Lea Massari). And as a film about sex, it is notably anti-erotic. Antonioni's (and his cinematographer Aldo Scavarda's) camera is in love with Monica Vitti's Claudia, exploring her unconventional beauty in extended closeups. It is the "male gaze" -- the objectifying, depersonalizing view of women -- at its utmost. But then Antonioni subverts the male gaze by two scenes in which it is exposed in full and repellent play: The first is when the would-be celebrity Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Poliolo) causes a near-riot in the streets of Messina. The second, more bitter scene comes when Claudia, having left Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) to fetch Anna from the hotel in Noto where she thinks she may be staying, begins to be surrounded by more and more men, like a pack of feral dogs, casting eager, exploring stares at her. The sex in L'Avventura is troubled, like that between Anna and Sandro that earlier had left Claudia standing alone and idle in another street. Or the relationship of Claudia and Sandro that develops after Anna's disappearance, leaving neither of them particularly eager to find her. In the end, Sandro proves incapable of remaining faithful to Claudia, all too ready to ease his boredom with, of all people, Gloria Perkins, who returns to prowl the hotel in Taormina in search of paying customers. Before their liaison, Sandro is eyed by a woman who stands in front of a painting of Roman Charity, in which a woman breastfeeds an elderly man, a scene that blurs the distinction between charity and lust. After Claudia discovers Sandro and Gloria in flagrante, she flees the hotel in tears, followed by Sandro, and the film concludes with a scene in which her gestures, stroking his hair as he weeps, demonstrate her own form of charity -- or is it lust? L'Avventura presents us with a world in which the conventional and expected word and action never takes place. It was fashionable at the time the film was released to say that it was a depiction of alienation and ennui. But films about alienation and ennui invariably wind up alienating and boring, as many of the subsequent films made under its influence (including some of Antonioni's own) tediously demonstrated. L'Avventura didn't point out a viable direction for other movies, but it remains, like many great films, sui generis.  

All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

Bette Davis and Thelma Ritter in All About Eve

Margo Channing: Bette Davis
Eve Harrington: Anne Baxter
Addison DeWitt: George Sanders
Karen Richards: Celeste Holm
Bill Sampson: Gary Merrill
Lloyd Richards: Hugh Marlowe
Miss Casswell: Marilyn Monroe
Birdie: Thelma Ritter

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Based on a story by Mary Orr
Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner

Talk, talk, talk. Ever since the movies learned to do it, it has been the glory -- and sometimes the bane -- of the medium. We cherish some films because they do it so well: the films of Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, and Quentin Tarantino, for example, would be nothing without their characters' abundantly gifted gab. Hardly a year goes by without someone compiling a list of the "greatest movie quotes of all time." And invariably the lists include such lines as "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night" or "You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point." Those are spoken by, respectively, Margo Channing and Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, one of the movies' choicest collections of talk. Joseph L. Mankiewicz won the best screenplay Oscar for the second consecutive year -- he first won the previous year for A Letter to Three Wives, which, like All About Eve, he also directed -- and in both cases he received the directing Oscar as well. Would we admire Mankiewicz's lines as much if they had not been delivered by Bette Davis and George Sanders, along with such essential performers as Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter, and, in a small but stellar part, Marilyn Monroe? It could be said that Mankiewicz's dialogue tends to upend All About Eve: The glorious wisecracks and one-liners are what we remember about it, far more than its satiric look at the Broadway theater or its portrait of the ambitious Eve Harrington. We also remember the film as the continental divide in Bette Davis's career, the moment in which she ceased to be a leading lady and became the paradigmatic Older Actress, relegated more and more to character roles and campy films like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962). All About Eve, in which Margo turns 40 -- Davis was 42 -- and ever so reluctantly hands over the reins to Eve -- Baxter was 27 -- is a kind of capitulation, an unfortunate acceptance that a female actor's career has passed its peak, when in fact all that is needed is writers and directors and producers who are willing to find material that demonstrates the ways in which life goes on for women as much as for men.

Fury (Fritz Lang, 1936)

The major Hollywood films about lynching -- this one and The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943) -- had white men as the victims, when the unfortunate fact is that black men (and a few women) were statistically by far the more frequent targets of vigilante mobs. Not until Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949), can I think of an American film that confronted the reality of the situation. But I don't think Fritz Lang, making his first American film, was thinking about the United States at all when he made Fury. He had seen rampaging mobs in Germany, which is why he left in 1933. That's why the film reaches its full actuality in its scenes of the mob in full cry. Those scenes alone are almost enough to establish the film as a classic, although much of the rest of Fury feels a bit scattered and aimless. It starts like a conventional romantic drama, with Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) and Katherine Grant (Sylvia Sidney) window-shopping for furniture for the home they hope to make when they're married. There's some sidetracking into Joe's relationship with his brothers, Charlie (Frank Albertson) and Tom (George Walcott), which although it seems like it will bear fruit -- Charlie has been associating with some shady characters, to which Tom objects -- is pretty much a narrative dead end. And after Katherine leaves for California, where Joe plans to join her when he makes some money, there's an injection of cuteness when Joe adopts a small dog he names Rainbow.* But when Joe finally gets to California his reunion with Katherine is interrupted by the law, who arrest him on the basis of circumstantial evidence as a suspect in a kidnapping. Gossips immediately take up the story and a mob led by a layabout named Kirby Dawson (Bruce Cabot) storms the jail and burns it down with Joe (and Rainbow) inside. Joe escapes (Rainbow doesn't) and goes into hiding, where he plots revenge. Eventually, when a trial leads to conviction of 22 members of the mob and their sentencing to death, Joe is presented with a moral dilemma: to reveal that he's alive, thereby saving the mob members from hanging, or to stay hidden and get his revenge. This being Hollywood, the decision is pretty much a foregone conclusion. Lang's direction is not so sure-handed as it was in his German films, but it keeps Fury watchable even when you spot the holes and compromises in the screenplay he co-wrote with Bartlett Cormack based on a story by Norman Krasna. Tracy is fine, though the character seems to split into two almost discrete roles: the affable Joe of the first half of the film and the obsessive revenge-seeker of the latter part.

*An oddly prescient name: Rainbow is played by Terry, who also played Toto in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939).  

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

Humphrey Bogart, Madeleine Lebeau, and Leonid Kinskey in Casablanca

Rick Blaine: Humphrey Bogart
Ilsa Lund: Ingrid Bergman
Victor Laszlo: Paul Henreid
Capt. Louis Renault: Claude Rains
Maj. Heinrich Strasser: Conrad Veidt
Signor Ferrari: Sydney Greenstreet
Ugarte: Peter Lorre
Carl: S.Z. Sakall
Yvonne: Madeleine Lebeau
Sam: Dooley Wilson
Emil: Marcel Dalio
Annina Brandel: Joy Page
Berger: John Qualen
Sascha: Leonid Kinskey
Pickpocket: Curt Bois

Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch
Based on a play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Art direction: Carl Jules Weyl
Film editing: Owen Marks
Music: Max Steiner

A few weeks ago, Madeleine Lebeau, the last surviving member of the cast of Casablanca, died at the age of 92. Lebeau played Yvonne, the Frenchwoman with whom Rick Blaine has been having an affair. When he breaks off their relationship coldly, she comes to his cafe on the arm of a German officer to spite him, but when the crowd starts singing the "Marseillaise" to drown out the Germans' singing of "Die Wacht am Rhein," Yvonne, tears streaming down her face, joins in. It's one of the many character vignettes that make Casablanca so entertaining. The film is filled with characters who have nothing at all to do with the main plot: the choice Rick has to make whether to renew his old affair with Ilsa Lund or let her leave Casablanca with her husband, Victor Laszlo. But if the movie simply focused on that love triangle, would it be the classic that it appears today to be? What makes Casablanca such an enduring film, I think, is the texture of its screenplay, which won Oscars for Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch. And that texture is provided by several dozen character players, to whom somehow the screenwriters managed to give abundant time. The result is such memorable bits as the one in which the waiter, Carl, sits down at a table with an elderly couple, the Leuchtags (Ilka Grüning and Ludwig Stössel), who have just received the visas they need to immigrate to the United States. Carl speaks German to them at first, but the Leuchtags insist that they should speak English so they will fit in when they reach America. Then Herr Leuchtag turns to his wife and asks what time it is:

Liebchen -- sweetness -- what watch?
Ten watch.
Such much? 

Carl assures them, "You will get along beautiful in America." Has there ever been a movie more quotable? It is, of course, a great movie, largely because everyone took the time to weave such moments into its fabric. I don't claim perfection for it: The subservience of Sam to Rick, whom he calls "Mr. Rick" or "Boss," smacks of the racial attitudes of the era, and I wince when Ilsa refers to Sam as "the boy." (Dooley Wilson was in his 50s when the film was made.) James Agee, who was not as impressed with Casablanca as many of his contemporaries were, "snickered at" some of the expository dialogue, such as Ilsa's plea, "Oh, Victor, please don't go to the underground meeting tonight." But it continues to cast a spell that few other films have ever equaled.

Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. Will today's kids feel sentimental about the multiplexes in which they see movies, the way I feel about the Lyric and the Ritz in the small Mississippi town where I grew up, the places where I learned to love movies? The Ritz, built sometime in the 1930s, was the newer one, and it made a feint at elegance with some art-deco-style trimmings; the Lyric was, I was once told, originally a livery stable. The last I heard, the Ritz was derelict, and the Lyric had been converted into a venue for live music, catering to college students. So since I have my own lost cinema paradises, I should be the right audience for Cinema Paradiso, with its tribute to a bygone era of moviegoing. Tornatore's movie has some good things going on, including the performance of Philippe Noiret as Alfredo, and the wonderful rapport between Noiret and young Salvatore Cascio as Toto. Leopoldo Trieste's performance as the censorious Father Adelfio is also a delight, and ending the film with Alfredo's assemblage of the kissing scenes the priest made him excise is a masterly bit. But once Toto grows up to be the lovestruck teenager Salvatore (Marco Leonardi), I begin to lose interest, as Tornatore's screenplay lards on more and more sentimentality. I've seen it twice now, though I have yet to see the 173-minute "extended cut" of the film, in which, I am told, the grownup Salvatore (Jacques Perrin) is reunited with his teen love Elena (Agnese Nano), now grown up and played by Brigitte Fossey. Frankly, I don't much want to: The 155-minute version seems overlong as it is. Cinema Paradiso is beloved by many, and often makes lists of people's favorite foreign-language films, but I find it thin and conventional.

Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2013)

The flashback is a time-honored storytelling device in movies, but if virtually the entire film is a flashback, it better have a purpose for its existence. In Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950), for example, the film flashes back to tell us whose corpse is floating in that swimming pool and why. Inside Llewyn Davis starts with Davis (Oscar Isaac) performing in a Greenwich Village club, then being beaten up for some unknown offense by a man outside that club. The film then flashes back to several days in the life of Davis in which, among other things, he becomes encumbered with a cat, learns that a woman (Carey Mulligan) he knows is pregnant and wants him to fund an abortion, travels to Chicago to try to find a well-paying gig, tries to give up his music career and rejoin the Merchant Marine, and then finally returns to the night he performed at the club and was beaten up, whereupon we learn that he had cruelly heckled his attacker's wife the night before. Is there a meaning to this method of storytelling? If there is, it's probably largely to make the point that Davis is caught in a vicious circle, a spiral of depression and self-destructive behavior. Llewyn Davis is a talented folk musician in a business in which talent alone is not enough: As the Chicago club-owner (F. Murray Abraham) tells him after he performs a song from the album Davis is trying to push, "I don't see a lot of money here." Davis doesn't want a lot of money, just enough to pay for his friend's abortion (which it turns out he doesn't need) and to stop couch-surfing, but every time he is on the verge of making it, something rises up to thwart him. In the movie's funniest scene he goes to a recording gig to make a novelty song, "Please Please Mr. Kennedy," which his friend Jim (Justin Timberlake) has written about an astronaut who doesn't want to go into space -- or as Al Cody (Adam Driver), the other session musician, intones throughout the song, "Outer ... space" -- but he signs away his rights to residuals because he needs ready cash. Of course, the song becomes a huge hit. As unpleasant as Davis can often be, his heart is really in the right place: Not only does he agree to fund his friend's abortion, even though the baby may not be his, he conscientiously looks after the cat he accidentally lets out of the apartment where he has been sleeping, and when the cat escapes again he nabs it on the street -- only, of course, to find out that the cat he has picked up is the wrong one. Are the Coens telling us something about good deeds always being punished? Are they telling us anything that can be reduced to a formula? I think not. What they are telling us is that life can be like that: random, unjust, bittersweet. And that, I think, is enough, especially when the lesson is being taught by actors of the caliber of Isaac (in a star-making role), John Goodman (brilliant as usual, this time as a foul-mouthed junkie jazz musician), and a superbly chosen supporting cast. The Coens always take us somewhere we didn't know we wanted to go, but are glad they decided to take us along.

Close-up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)

Like most movie-obsessed kids, I used to imagine myself as the star of my own movie, which happened to be my life. I never imagined myself as the director, but perhaps that's because I didn't know what a director did. Close-up struck a nerve with me, nevertheless, with its eloquent presentation of the entanglement of life and art: It's a documentary about the trial of an unemployed Iranian man whose daydreams about making movies led him to pose as the celebrated director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and to persuade a wealthy family that he was going to use their house as a set and star them in a film. But the remarkable thing about Close-up is that its director, Abbas Kiarostami, then persuaded the Ahankhah family, as well as Hossain Sabzian, the con man, to re-enact the events leading up to the trial. Sabzian and the Ahankhahs -- as well as the journalist Hassan Farazmand; Haj Ali Reza Ahmadi, the judge in the trial; and even Makhmalbaf himself -- appear in the dramatized scenes, proving more than capable actors in playing themselves and creating a simulacrum of the real thing. Kiarostami's film is full of head-spinning tricks of this sort, including a taxi driver who says that he doesn't go to the movies because he's too busy with real life. In the end, when Sabzian is released from prison, he meets with the actual Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Kiarostami was so touched by the encounter of the two men that after shooting the sequence he decided to fake "microphone problems" so as not to intrude upon their privacy. I don't know of any film that more profoundly demonstrates the way movies, the first art form created for and by the masses, have intertwined themselves with our lives. That it should have come from Iran, a country so mysterious to Americans, who pride themselves on having created the motion picture industry, is deeply ironic.

Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

I had never seen a film by Kiarostami before, though I knew he was a celebrated Iranian director, so I watched Taste of Cherry with a mostly unbiased eye. I say "mostly" because in his introduction on TCM Ben Mankiewicz commented that although the film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and has a host of admirers, Roger Ebert found it "excruciatingly boring" and listed it as one of his "most hated films" on his web site. Having seen the film and read the review, I have to wonder if Ebert was in the wrong mood when he saw and wrote about it. I saw it in relaxed anticipation and found it anything but boring. Not a masterpiece, perhaps, but a strangely haunting film, whose images stayed with me through the following day: the winding dirt roads in the hills outside Tehran; the cascades of bare soil turned up by massive agricultural equipment; the shadow of the protagonist, Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi), projected upon these mounds of dirt; the faces of the men the protagonist tries to enlist in his plan: a young soldier (Safar Ali Moradi), a seminarian (Mir Hossein Noori), the taxidermist (Abdolrahman Bagheri). I was struck by the way Kiarostami chose to make those three men aliens in Iran -- a Kurd, an Afghani, a Turk -- as if to emphasize the inner turmoil that mirrors the external conflicts of the region. I was tantalized by the suspense about what Badii wants the other man to do, and as Ebert points out, the fact that we suspect that he is cruising the outskirts of Tehran to find a sexual partner. (Which, given that homosexuality is a capital offense in Iran, is a frighteningly risky thing to do.) And when we learn that Badii wants someone to throw dirt over him after he commits suicide in a grave he has dug for himself, I was intrigued by what has driven him to this brink. But I'm astonished that Ebert took such a literal-minded approach to all of this, wanting to know why we are being led to believe that Badii is gay and to know more about what has driven him to this extremity. Have we not learned long ago not to expect full backstories of characters in literature and film, or to be able to explicate them in some definitive sense? Isn't that why Kiarostami uses the "distancing" device at the end of showing the film itself being made? I'm content with what it tells us of Badii, and with the emotions and ideas demonstrated by the men he picks up: the young soldier's terror, the seminarian's steadfast faith, the taxidermist's hard-earned wisdom. I was struck by the way we watch Badii at the end through the window of his apartment, as if we will never get any closer, but then see his face as he lies in the hole fleetingly illuminated by lightning. But Taste of Cherry is not so much a character-driven film as a fable: a story about the mysteries of human existence and the interplay of lives. It is full of reverberations, not only of one scene with another but of the events in the film with the troubles -- political, social, environmental -- that haunt our times. It can't be reduced to conventional narrative or even allegorical terms. It took me someplace alien -- i.e., Iran, and the possible last day of a man's life -- and yet deeply, humanly familiar.

Kameradschaft (G.W. Pabst, 1931)

A Swedish poster for Kameradschaft

A film made in 1931 about a rapprochement between the French and the Germans seems naïve perhaps only with the benefit (if you can call it that) of hindsight. Pabst's Kameradschaft was also released with the French title La Tragédie de la mine, and the dialogue oscillates between German and French. It's less a plea for political unity than for a comradeship of workers, united against the forces that exploit them. A fire and explosion on the French side of a coal mine that extends beneath the border between France and Germany traps a number of French miners. Hearing of this, a German miner named Wittkopp (Ernst Busch), urges his fellow miners and his bosses to put together a rescue team to help the trapped Frenchmen. They wind up being hailed as heroes by the French, though the speeches at the end of the film are a bit heavy-handed. Like most successful mine-rescue movies, this one depends on well-drawn characters, exciting action and convincing sets. The characters were created by Ladislaus Vajda and Peter Martin Lampel from a story by Karl Otten, based on an actual disaster along the Franco-German border in 1906. Pabst's direction, aided by skillful editing by Jean Oser and Marc Sorkin, keeps things suspenseful and coherent. But perhaps the greatest contribution comes from production designers Ernö Metzner and Karl Vollbrecht, whose sets, constructed in the studio, have a claustrophobic reality. The cinematography of Fritz Arno Wagner and Robert Baberske adds to the illusion.