The Weekly Gravy #41

Sand (1949) – ***

From Kentucky and National Velvet (which both won Supporting acting awards) to Seabiscuit and War Horse (which both earned Best Picture nominations), to The Black Stallion in between, the Academy has long appreciated a good horse film. Sand, which earned a nomination for Color Cinematography, is not on the level of the films previously mentioned (well, I haven’t seen Kentucky), but it’s not bad either. It’s just another smoothly made, undistinguished studio picture which did its job and was subsequently forgotten – more than most, as it currently has less than 100 votes on the IMDb and even Erik Beck hadn’t seen it as of 2018. Moreover, the only version available seems to be taken from a long-ago broadcast, and is in decidedly rough shape. But I’m glad to have seen it at all.

The film begins as a seemingly wild stallion arrives on a ranch owned by Joan Hartley (Coleen Gray) and her grandfather Doug (Charley Grapewin). The stallion tries to lure Lady, a prize-winning mare owned by the ranch foreman, Chick Palmer (Rory Calhoun), away for an assignation, but the hot-tempered Chick tries to shoot the stallion, and accidentally kills Lady instead. Joan learns about a missing show horse in the area, and contacts its owner, Jeff Keane (Mark Stevens), who’s able to spot the stallion (named Jubilee) from the air, and intends to return on horseback and bring Jubilee home.

Jeff stays at the ranch before setting out, and Joan’s obvious interest in him is soon reciprocated, much to Doug’s delight. Chick tries to get restitution from Jeff for Lady’s death, but he refuses; however, Jeff is offering a handsome prize for Jubilee’s return, which keeps his anger in check. But when Jeff goes to retrieve Jubilee, the stallion proves less than cooperative – he has begun to go wild. And when further efforts to retrieve him lead to Chick’s firing (and his promise to get revenge for Lady), the odds of a happy ending to this story grow troublingly long.

Of course, this being a studio film of the late 40s, and a color film aimed at a family audience to boot, such an ending is achieved, but for me it wasn’t the most satisfying resolution, in part because it adds to a weird pro-conformity message which is most awkwardly expressed in Joan’s dolling herself up for and throwing herself wholesale at Jeff. When the film begins, she seems to be a capable ranch manager and a self-possessed individual; when it ends, she seems to have given it all up for her man, even though they’ve known each other a week or so.

Stevens’ genially bland performance doesn’t help much; there’s only a fleeting hint of a love triangle here, but given that Calhoun is more handsome and more charismatic than Stevens, even with his temper, it seems hard to believe Joan, if she is so eager for a man, isn’t at least a little more drawn to him. Not that Calhoun is especially strong, nor is Gray; they’re all fine in that contract-player way. Grapewin, best known as Uncle Henry in The Wizard of Oz, gives easily the most memorable performance; he’s a wily old rascal, and he’s quite fun to watch.

His eager matchmaking is but one facet of the film’s odd horniness. The film begins with Jubilee trying to get some, and one of the strangest scenes in the film has Jeff trying to lure the rebellious Jubilee with one of Joan’s mares, whom he ties to a tree and exhorts to “turn on the charm” and “get glamorous!” It reflects the film’s decidedly dated gender politics, just as the fleeting black and Native American characters are, if not much worse than what you’d expect from the era, then certainly no better.

That said, the film manages a decent amount of excitement, and up until the rather flat resolution, the final act is genuinely compelling. Louis King’s direction isn’t especially memorable either, but it’s competent, and the film moves at a solid pace (it helps that it runs a brisk 77 minutes). Daniele Amfitheatrof’s score is fairly good as well, lush and exciting as befits the moment. Sand wasn’t a major film, as one might guess from the lack of stars and subsequent obscurity, but it’s a solidly crafted one.

And of course, there’s the matter of the Oscar-nominated cinematography by Charles G. Clarke (who’d been nominated the year before for Green Grass of Wyoming, also a horse film, also directed by King). It’s hard to judge Clarke’s work accurately, since the available version looks so poor; the color is flat, the focus is soft, and the night scenes are so dark it’s often impossible to make them out. I can tell it was once a pleasant-looking film, between the attractive Colorado scenery and Clarke’s smooth, unfussy lensing. But it would really help if a higher-quality version could be made available, for Turner Classic Movies if nothing else.

But then again, it’s hard to say anyone really needs to go to that much trouble for Sand; it’s not distinctive enough in of itself to really merit the attention. However, as an Oscar nominee, it’s a footnote in film history, and for that it should at least be preserved. But it’s about as likely we’ll ever see more of Sand than that one ragged upload (which also seems to be missing some transitional material here and there) as it is Will James, who wrote the novel it’s based on, will ever be a big enough name again to get billed above the title of a film.

Score: 67

The Killing of Two Lovers (2020) – ****

I went into The Killing of Two Lovers knowing nothing about it but the title and the fact of its critical acclaim, and I’m glad I did; I think the majority of films benefit from being seen with as few preconceptions as possible, but the structure of The Killing of Two Lovers rewards an open mind and one’s patient attention. You could do worse than skipping to the next review if you have any plans of seeing it; know that it comes highly recommended, and at less than 90 minutes, it’s no great time investment.

The film begins with a man and a woman asleep in bed. Another man stands over them with a gun, pointing it at them, but cannot bring himself to shoot. He finally crawls out of the window and we follow him as he runs a couple of blocks back to his father’s house, taking care of some household chores and talking about his plans for the day as if nothing had happened. He then drives back to the house where the man and woman slept, and watches the man leave, first following him to a gas station (helping him get a cup of coffee), then down the highway, trying to pull up alongside the man to shoot him, but failing to do so and returning to town to go about his day. This occupies roughly the first 10 minutes of the film.

Only gradually do we learn who the first man is, who the woman is, who the second man is, why he was in the bedroom with a gun, why he didn’t shoot them, why the second man didn’t recognize the first (the film takes place in a small Utah town, the kind where you either know everyone by name or not at all), and how the deep-buried rage the first man displays from the very start informs everything else that follows, even the moments which seem to reflect his better nature.

The first man is David (Clayne Crawford), and the woman is Nikki (Sepideh Moafi), his wife. They’ve been married for 15 years or so, getting married right out of high school and having four kids together. But it seems they’ve matured at different rates, and have separated, agreeing that each of them can see other people. Nikki is seeing Derek (Chris Coy) – the second man – but she doesn’t know that David knows about him, or that he knows that Derek has been sleeping over at their house. Their teenage daughter Jess (Avery Pizzuto), who’s already upset about the whole affair, tells David about Derek, and he defends Nikki. But we already know that some very dark thoughts are going through his mind, and we can only watch and wonder how it’ll all play out.

Writer-director Robert Machoian opts to tell the story with carefully composed images, often putting the characters at the bottom or the corner of the frame and letting the mountains in the distance dwarf them. Other times, however, he brings his camera in very, very close, focusing on the characters so intently (as when David is driving) that we cannot fully grasp what is happening around them. Adding to the sense of unease is the soundtrack, which doesn’t exactly constitute a musical score, so much as a series of groans and percussive sounds which sound like doors slamming, guns cocking, and trains rumbling. It powerfully conveys the turbulence inside David’s mind.

Machoian’s script doesn’t gloss over David’s toxic qualities, but by foregrounding them when have to consider the moments when he is seemingly kind, gentle, considerate, and even charming in a different way. Is he stuck in a perpetual adolescence? Have his struggles to provide (he doesn’t seem to have a steady job) worn him down? How much has his anger manifested itself in the past? We can only meditate upon these, but the film depicts him with enough depth that we feel inclined to. We can learn as much from his performative courtliness towards a temporary employer, Mrs. Staples (Barbara Whinnery) as from his waking his sons up in the middle of the night to tell them jokes.

Although nearly the entire film is seen from David’s perspective, we also come to understand where Nikki is coming from, how used she is to managing David’s temper, how weary she is of the cycle of good times and bad, how much she hopes for a new beginning with Derek, how frustrated she is at David’s new status as the “fun” parent, and how much of an uphill battle she faces in getting through his defensiveness and petulance. It’s sadly easy to see how men could see David as a good man wronged by an ungrateful woman, but that’s not the film I watched.

The already well-drawn characters are deepened considerably by the fine acting. Crawford carries much of the film on his shoulders, and he does a tremendous job; he shows the depths of fear and rage David can sink to, the intensity of his resentments, and the devotion he feels towards his children, even as he seems barely more mature than any of them. And he shows just how intense David’s feelings for Nikki are, how they draw her in and her push her away all at once. It’s a magnificent performance.

Although she has considerably less screen-time, Moafi gives an excellent performance as well, subtly showing the warring emotions at play within, and the external pressures which force her to keep them in check. We learn virtually nothing about who Nikki was before she married David, and Moafi’s performance suggests that this is the first time in her adult life she’s been able to define herself. It makes an already thought-provoking character study the more complex.

The rest of the cast likewise do good work. Coy has the right sense of low-key, vaguely sleazy affability; Derek turns out to be something of a shit in his own right, but we can also see where he’s coming from (David brings out the worst in everyone). Pazzuto is properly frustrated and temperamental without tipping over into brattiness; she has an especially good scene where she calls out Derek on his lies when he attempts to drop off some flowers for Nikki. And the Graham brothers, who play David and Nikki’s sons, are likably natural.

It’s extremely well crafted all around, from Oscar Ignacio Jimenez’ stunning cinematography to Machoian’s restrained editing, which never wastes a moment of the 84-minute running time, but builds the tension throughout. Violence bubbles underneath the surface of the whole film; there’s a particularly unnerving moment where David and a neighbor joke about him killing Jess for her bad behavior; only when the neighbor says he’s got a place in the backyard to bury her does David decide the joke has gone too far.

At first, I found the film’s ending somewhat unsatisfying and unnecessarily ambiguous, but on further reflection I see how well it caps off the deliberately elliptical narrative. I do still think the film could’ve worked as well or better had it ended a scene earlier, but the final scene forces us to question whether what we’re seeing is a happy ending, or if the can has just been kicked a bit farther down the road. It’s a fitting end to a film that stimulates and unsettles us from the very beginning.

Score: 91

The Golden Head (1964) – **

After a period of glory in the 50s, and a brief resurgence thanks to the success of How the West Was Won, Cinerama was on the wane by 1964. 3-strip Cinerama was being phased out in favor of a 70mm single-lens format, with the only 3-strip release after 1963 being Russian Holiday, itself edited from previously shot 3-strip footage. Perhaps the diminishing returns for the classic Cinerama travelogues were the reason The Golden Head, itself shot for single-lens Cinerama, never actually saw Stateside release; despite being an English-language film, with recognizable stars in George Sanders and Buddy Hackett, it didn’t premiere in the States until 2009, though it’s now available on home video and streaming on Kanopy in the “Smilebox” format, the closest you’ll come on a flat screen to the Cinerama experience. Even then, it remains fiercely obscure, with even fewer votes on the IMDb than Sand.

But maybe it never saw a proper Stateside release because it’s just not a very good film. A slight trifle of a caper with fleeting travelogue aspects, The Golden Head was hardly worth the expense of making 70mm prints at the time, or the trouble of displacing other 70mm releases to show it. It was, however, given the full roadshow treatment in the UK, complete with intermission – all of which is thankfully preserved in the restoration.

The story: Det. Insp. Stevenson (Douglas Wilmer) is sailing down the Danube with his children, heading for Budapest, where he’s to take part in an international police conference. Shortly after crossing the Hungarian border, he’s approached by his colleague Braithwaite (Robert Coote), who tells him he must go to Budapest at once for the sake of giving a speech at the conference. He reluctantly leaves his children behind, putting his eldest, Michael (Jess Conrad), and his Hungarian girlfriend Anne (Cecília Esztergályos) in charge. At the same time, shady characters Basil Palmer (Sanders) and Lionel Pack (Hackett) cross the border by car.

During an excursion to buy food, the youngest Stevenson, Milly (Lorraine Power) is taken by a kindly priest (Sándor Pécsi) to see a religious icon, a golden, bejeweled bust of Saint Laszlo, which has been removed from public view for cleaning. While looking at the bust’s usual spot in the town cathedral, Milly is approached by Palmer, who gets her to reveal where it’s being cleaned. Later, the police bring in the Stevensons for questioning, and we learn that the bust has been stolen – and when Palmer comes into the room, he denies ever having seen Milly, and she is assumed to be a liar or a fantasist.

Of course, Lionel stole the bust, and he and Palmer develop a scheme to further discredit the Stevensons, but Milly and middle child Harold (Denis Gilmore) aren’t so easily discouraged, and after convincing Michael and Anne of the truth – but not their father, who doesn’t seem to believe a word they say – they decide to try and outsmart the crooks themselves. The journey eventually leads them to Budapest, where we get to see a few of the city’s sites while the plot – complicated by a couple of suspicious-looking fellows on Palmer and Lionel’s trail – plays itself out. And it all might have made for a pleasant, forgettable trifle, had it not been such a shining example of an Idiot Plot.

From the very start, where Det. Insp. Stevenson commits an act of customs fraud (to avoid having to declare his own pipe tobacco), the film is full of characters making absurd choices or being placed in absurd situations. Stevenson is forced to leave his children behind on the thinnest of pretexts; couldn’t Braithwaite have made the speech himself? The inciting events of the plot are rather ridiculous; why does Milly go off in the middle of a shopping errand? Why does the priest take her to see the bust in the first place? If it’s such a priceless treasure, why isn’t it better protected? Why does Milly tell Palmer where the bust is being cleaned? Didn’t her father (you know, a policeman) teach her about talking to strangers? Why don’t we see the actual theft? Why do Palmer and Lionel sit and chat about the theft in a public cafe, while Lionel has the bust under his jacket?

And that’s just the start. I’ve never liked the whole “adults refusing to believe children” trope, but The Golden Head takes it to ridiculous extremes. Why does no one ever believe Milly? Unlike The Window, we’re never given any reason to believe she isn’t honest and straightforward. Why does Stevenson never believe his own children? Wouldn’t he, being a policeman, have instilled in them the value of telling the truth? Is he betraying his own low opinion of his parenting? Even the priest, after Palmer claims never to have met Milly, tells her “I don’t know what to believe.” I get that the point is to establish why the younger Stevensons decide to solve the case themselves, but it just makes everyone else come off like jerks.

It’s no surprise that Lionel is a bit of an oaf – he’s a Buddy Hackett character, after all – but he’s so aggressively stupid you wonder how he manages to exist. He constantly forgets what he’s talking about, becoming completely lost when Palmer refers to the head as “the thing” or any other euphemism. He’s constantly distracted by his own lust for young women, becoming fixated on the idea of taking a hot shower with them (which Palmer tells him is standard practice in Hungary). He’s constantly drawing attention to himself, even openly taking about the theft in public. Not only can you not believe in him as a successful crook, but you can’t believe that someone like the sly, suave Palmer would ever put up with him.

The only reason they aren’t caught sooner is because the authorities are even thicker. Stevenson is pretty bad, being constantly flustered and distrusting his own children to the point of cruelty. But Braithwaite is even worse, culminating in a moment where he and Stevenson actually catch Palmer and Lionel, with the bust, only to get outfoxed by the most farcical gambit imaginable. Well, that and their own utter idiocy. The Hungarian authorities don’t come off much better, being duped by Palmer at every turn.

Hell, if you really think about it, the very theft itself is pretty ridiculous. The head is too recognizable an item to be easily fenced. Were Palmer and Lionel planning to ransom it? To extract the jewels and melt the gold down? They talk about taking the money and escaping to Japan, but how are they going to get money out of this particular object? Sure, it makes for a nifty-looking MacGuffin, but if you think about it for even five seconds, it makes little sense. (And again, if it’s so valuable – we’re told the Hungarian authorities are desperate to get it back – why in the hell wasn’t it better-protected to begin with?)

All of this might have been easier to overlook if the film had been played for breakneck farce; when your film is filled with such incredible levels of stupidity, there’s really no other way. But being a glorified travelogue, it’s mostly played at a leisurely pace, allowing us too much time to reflect on what fools the characters are and how insubstantial the story really is. Richard Thorpe’s lackluster direction really doesn’t help; he was mostly an MGM contract director, and the films I’ve seen by him (namely Ivanhoe and Knights of the Round Table) don’t have much personality in the direction, nor much humor. Apparently, Thorpe was brought in to replace James Hill, best known for Born Free, who might not have been an ideal choice, but he might’ve have least managed more verve and energy than Thorpe displays.

Obviously, I don’t think much of the script, written by Iván Boldizsár and Stanley Goulder from Roger Windle Pilkington’s novel Nepomuk of the River; it’s pretty weak as a caper, and I hadn’t even mentioned the character of Augustus Pilkington Smythe, the upper-crust young sleuth in London the Stevensons briefly bring into the case; he’s not listed in the credits for some reason, but he’s an example of everyone’s favorite trope, the proper young boy who acts like a miniature adult and believes himself smarter than the adults he encounters. While not an unreasonable conclusion to reach in this particular film, it doesn’t make him any less insufferable.

But the film isn’t very effective as a travelogue or at showing off the single-lens Cinerama format either. Oh, Hungary looks nice enough, and Budapest seems like a handsome city, but aside from a laughably obvious sequence where Anne points out some landmarks to Michael as they sail past, most of the second half could’ve been shot anywhere. And aside from a couple of dance sequences (one folk, one ballet) that are as awkwardly wedged into the plot as possible, the only scene which really does much to take advantage of the super-widescreen is a climactic chase through the streets of Budapest, which is admittedly a pretty exciting little set-piece. István Hildebrand’s cinematography is a bit more fluid than other Cinerama films, thanks to the greater freedom of the single-lens camera, but it’s nothing really special.

The acting is mostly unnoteworthy. Power and Gilmore aren’t bad as child actors go, but they’re not especially memorable. Conrad and Esztergályos (who’s had a pretty lengthy career in Hungary, this being her only notable international role that I can see) are attractive but generic young lovers. Wilmer and Coote can’t do much with their bumbling characters other than look flustered and act comically clueless. Sanders is always watchable, with his air of courtly menace and wonderful rich voice, but Hackett, who could be quite funny with good material, is quite terrible with the bad material on hand; he mugs constantly, acts the buffoon, and even seems to attempt an accent at points – all to no comic avail.

Oddly, Hackett was something of a fixture of super-widescreen films at this time; he was Terry-Thomas’ unlucky squire in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and Mickey Rooney’s partner in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, where he’s forced to fly a plane, with hilarious results. He’s much better in both of those films, but in those cases he had better writing and direction, and in Mad World his buffoonery was in keeping with the film’s general tone of high-speed slapstick. Stanley Kramer wasn’t necessarily a great director, but he believed in his films in a way that Richard Thorpe probably never did.

Not that there’s much to really believe in in The Golden Head, which remains ridiculous right up to the ending, which throws any remaining believability out the window for the sake of a final gag (and possible sequel hook), and has Stevenson still refusing to believe Milly, even after she’s expressly thanked for helping solve the case by the Hungarian authorities! At least we get the last few bars of Szabolcs Fényes’ rather lovely score – by far the best thing in the film – to send us away from this silly little film.

Score: 51

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) – *

May 21 was my mother’s birthday, and I could think of no better way to mark the occasion than by re-watching one of her favorite films by, I do believe, her favorite director. She always had a high opinion of Edward D. Wood Jr., perhaps most of all for Glen or Glenda?, which she praised as one of the most sincere statements of personal identity ever put on film. I think it was that sincerity, even more than the camp factor of his actual films, that fueled her admiration for him; she might’ve found his films delightfully ridiculous, but she was also moved by his incredible dedication to his vision. Such was her esteem of him that I remember her being actively disappointed when I saw this film for the first time without her. Consider this my attempt to right that wrong.

Of course, trying to objectively rate Plan 9 is rather difficult; it’s The Worst Film of All Time like Citizen Kane is The Best Film of All Time. Neither actually is, in my view, but Kane is pretty damn good and Plan 9 is pretty damn…well, silly, no doubt, but bad? That’s where things get a bit tricky.

See, Wood was a pretty bad director, but he at least had a reasonably competent cinematographer, veteran William C. Thompson, who ensured the shots would be fairly well lit and framed. To be sure, Thompson’s cinematography, especially in the rather crisp print I watched, makes the incredibly cheap sets even more obvious, especially the hilariously fake cockpit (the control sticks are just pieces of wood vaguely shaped like the real thing) and the cemetery with its pathetically flimsy tombstones. And the special effects, mostly toy saucers being dangled on fishing line, are none too convincing. But all in all, Plan 9 doesn’t look much worse than a lot of 50s television, and it certainly looks more polished than a lot of truly wretched films I’ve seen.

Nor is the acting necessarily much worse than other low-budget films of the era. Sure, Tor Johnson’s gaping expression as the dead Insp. Clay is hilarious, Paul Marco as Patrolman Kelton seems especially unsure of how to say his lines, and Gregory Walcott as the obnoxious “hero,” Jeff Trent, seems rather embarrassed by the script. But Dudley Manlove is almost passable as Eros, his pompous frustration with the brutish nature of humankind coming rather close to believability. Bunny Breckinridge (credited as John Breckinridge) strikes the right note of decadent weariness as the ruler of the aliens who plan to raise the dead of the Earth for…some reason. And veteran Lyle Talbot, as Gen. Roberts, was experienced enough as an actor to deliver his dialogue with something like conviction.

No, what really makes the film so special, beyond the obvious cheapness, is Wood’s dialogue. He seemed addicted to having his characters state the obvious, almost as if he didn’t realize that the medium of film allowed him to show rather than tell, or as if he didn’t trust his audience’s memory. A few choice examples:

“But one thing’s sure. Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody’s responsible.”

“I saw a flying saucer.”

“A saucer? You mean the kind from up there?”

“Yeah, or its counterpart. It was shaped like a human cigar.”

“There’s got to be a reason for their visits!”

“Visits? That would indicate visitors!”

“This is the most fantastic story I’ve ever heard.”
“And every word of it’s true, too.”

“That’s the fantastic part of it.”

Honestly, thinking back at the kind of dialogue I wrote in my earliest scripts (I would’ve been about 12), I can’t say I wrote much better than Wood did at 32. Of course, I’ll be 32 this year, and I think I’ve lapped him, but will anything I write achieve the immortality of lines like “You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!”? Probably not.

Then, of course, there’s Criswell’s narration, which he apparently wrote himself, and which is even more overwrought than Wood’s own lines:

“The grief from his wife’s death became greater and greater agony. The home they had so long shared became a tomb, a sweet memory of her joyous living. The sky to which he had once looked was now only a covering for her dead body. The ever-beautiful flowers she had planted with her own hands became nothing more than the lost roses of her cheeks. Confused by his great loss, the old man left that home…never to return again!”

“We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?”

“My friend, you have seen this incident based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn’t happen? Perhaps on your way home someone will pass you in the dark, and you will never know it, for they will be from outer space. Many scientists believe that another world is watching us at this moment. We once laughed at the horseless carriage, the aeroplane, the telephone, the electric light, vitamins, radio, and even television. And now some of us laugh at outer space. God help us in the future.”

I wonder who actually laughed at vitamins. It doesn’t look like Casimir Funk was mocked to anything like the degree of Ignaz Semmelweis. But I digress.

Judging Plan 9 is especially difficult because it’s so hard to tell where the high camp ends and the low camp begins. I really can’t believe that some of the cast didn’t consciously send up the melodramatic material; Manlove in particular seems to get as much melodramatic mileage as he can out of his lines. And when he explains the “Solaranite” bomb the aliens want to stop Earth from developing, he manages to make the imaginatively ludicrous concept – which involves literally exploding particles of sunlight – sound almost ingenious, at least from a point-of-view sufficiently divorced from reality.

And just how divorced from reality was Wood? It’s hard to say. The film Ed Wood depicted him as being totally unfazed by the limitations placed upon him, if not delusional, but it’s a decidedly fanciful portrait of the man. But by all accounts, he gloried in the act of creation, and was, especially during the “height” of his career, a kindly man who loved what he did. Maybe it’s most accurate to say he didn’t write deliberately bad dialogue but deliberately pulpy dialogue which, given his lack of talent, crossed over into the ludicrous (“I’ll bet my badge right now, we haven’t seen the last of these weirdies”).

So in the end, there’s no question Plan 9 is a pretty damn ridiculous movie. I think it thoroughly merits a low objective score, your subjective thoughts on it being heavily dependent on your appreciation of camp and your indulgence of Wood’s sincerity. But that very sincerity, the elements which are genuinely effective, and Wood’s flashes of imagination are enough to keep it from sinking into the lower levels of badness; if I were to slot it into my Bottom 100 Films list, it would come in somewhere in the upper 50s. It’s far from the worst film I’ve ever seen. But it wears the public title of the honorary Worst Film of All Time with pride, and it’s a must-see.

God help us in the future.

Score: 21

Citizen Kane (1941) – ****

What better choice than to follow the Worst Film of All Time with the Best Film of All Time?

Of course, I don’t think Plan 9 is the worst film ever made, nor do I think Citizen Kane the best. I don’t think it’s the best film of 1941; I rate it third behind Fantasia and The Maltese Falcon. I also doubt it’s the best film Welles ever made; I need to rewatch it, but in general I think Touch of Evil surpasses it. That said, it is a great film, a film full of dazzling technique, stunning imagery, bravely ambiguous writing, and a streak of humor which keeps the fundamentally tragic story from overwhelming us with its themes of wasted potential and lost happiness. And despite a few slightly dated aspects, in the main it remains a sophisticated piece of work 80 years on (indeed, it celebrates its 80th birthday this month).

When I last watched Kane a few years back, I felt that the sequences of Kane’s early life and middle age were the most effective, but that the scenes of his old age suffered from Welles’ own youth; it seemed to me that Touch of Evil more fully grasped the weight of age and mortality. But that didn’t bother me this time. Instead, I was a bit surprised and disappointed at how little of the young Kane we actually see, given how much fun the scenes of him taking over the Inquirer and remaking it in his own image are. (This section of the film climaxes in the party scene, where Jed Leland’s brooding doubts serve to foreshadow the unhappiness still to come.)

No, what frustrated me the most this time around was the acting. To be sure, there’s some first-rate acting on display here, namely from Welles himself. It was a bit surprising to go back and realize how limited his screen-time actually is (according to Screen Time Central, he’s in just over 50% of the film), but his wonderful voice and his ability to move between charm, pomposity, pathos, and menace, honed by his career on stage and in radio, are firmly apparent. He shows how the headstrong brashness and the boundless appetites of the young Kane slowly curdle into the imperious arrogance and inability to be truly happy or satisfied that marks the old one. It’s a fine performance.

The rest of the cast, however, is something of a mixed bag, and their performances frequently betray the fact that most of them were making their film debuts. In particular, the dialogue is often delivered in an oddly rushed fashion, and for every bit of overlapping dialogue which has the crackle of reality, there’s another that just feels like the actors are stepping on each other’s lines. If that sounds like nitpicking, it may be, but it’s an issue which grates on me throughout the film – especially since the writing is so very good.

Some of the performances are almost entirely successful. Ray Collins really only has one scene to craft the role of Boss Jim W. Gettys, but you absolutely believe that he’ll give Kane the multiple “lessons” he threatens. George Coulouris, who actually had prior screen experience, is wonderfully prickly as Thatcher, constantly getting his knickers in a twist over the latest Inquirer headline. Paul Stewart is amusingly slimy as Kane’s last butler, Raymond (“I knew how to handle him”). Erskine Sandford is amusingly befuddled as Carter, managing editor of the Inquirer, who finds Kane’s methods…frustrating, to say the least. And Ruth Warrick, as Kane’s first wife Emily, is able to suggest her internalized patrician arrogance and her genuine distress at realizing her husband is cheating on her.

On the other hand, Joseph Cotten, who would soon become a star in his own right, is excellent as the younger Leland, who’s shadowed with doubt from the very beginning of his partnership with Kane, but as the older Leland, who’s blissfully free from having to worry about him, he’s hammy and unconvincing, especially when he pretends to forget the name of Xanadu. And Dorothy Comingore, as Kane’s mistress and second wife Susan, is mostly affecting, but tips into the overwrought (in particular, the scene where she rants about the bad review she supposedly got from Leland). Everett Sloane gives a more consistent turn as Kane’s eternal right-hand man, Bernstein; he’s always a bit over-the-top, but for the most part he makes it work.

Agnes Moorehead would soon become one of the great character actresses – she’d get an Oscar nod the very next year for The Magnificent Ambersons – and as Kane’s mother you can see the potential, in her determination to give him a better upbringing and her sadness at having to push him away to do so. But she’s gone all too quickly from the film. Lastly, William Alland has the infamously thankless role of Thompson, the reporter whose quest for the truth about “Rosebud” drives the film, but as our guide and surrogate through the film, he’s most effective, and adds nice layers of cynicism and wit (“Are you Rosebud?”) to the role, which rarely allows us even to see his face.

But what really makes Kane the classic it is, beyond Welles’ performance and imaginative direction, is the cinematography by Gregg Toland and the editing by Robert Wise, which bring Welles’ (and, yes, Herman Mankiewicz’) vision to such brilliant cinematic life. You could cite any number of brilliant shots, from the obviously impressive (Kane’s campaign rally) to the subtle (the way the camera pans over the lines in Thatcher’s memoirs). The use of low angles to make men tower, the use of deep focus to put background on the same footing as foreground, the use of shadows, the use of process shots to put one character in a godlike position over another (Gettys over Kane at the rally, Kane over Susan at the opera), the use of the fake newsreel to try and convince us that Kane really did exist…on a visual level, the film reaches heights which even today are rarely surpassed.

And Wise’s editing must work both on the macro level (piecing together Kane’s life from a variety of perspectives) and on the micro level, allowing the individual moments to play out with a measured flow one moment and a staccato rhythm the next. It works magnificently for the most part, allowing for motifs and parallels which I didn’t even pick up on before. A photograph of the Chronicle staff dissolves into a shot of the same men, now at the Inquirer, which kicks off the period of Kane’s greatest success; later, a shot of Susan’s front door dissolves into a newspaper photograph as part of the revelation of Kane and Susan’s relationship, which kicks off the period of Kane’s gradual descent into isolation.

I need hardly mention the fantastic sets and fine costumes, which depict a range of 70 years and a wide variety of locales, from the Kane boarding house to the sprawling, never finished Xanadu. And Bernard Herrmann’s sonorous score, occasionally brightened by echoes of “Oh Mr. Kane” and memories of happiness, is a fine piece of work. There’s some striking use of sound, most famously the ghostly rasp of “Rosebud” which opens the film, and there are some excellent visual effects, namely the aforementioned process shots, alongside some rather bad ones (the animated birds in the Everglades, the eyeless parrot). And the makeup does a fantastic job of aging the actors, especially Welles, although the effect isn’t seamless (in the scene where Susan leaves Kane, the folds on Welles’ neck look especially fake).

But I do need to mention the script, the brilliant script which won Welles his only competitive Oscar, which represented the height of Herman Mankiewicz’ career, which led to a debate on the question of authorship which the film Mank dubiously reopened (all the objective evidence suggests it was a true act of collaboration). You can get hung up on the question of who influenced which character or which part of the story, how much was Hearst, how much Insull, and so forth. Or you can focus on how well it grasps human nature, and on how well it grasps our attempts to understand ourselves and each other, which are so often frustrated by our own agendas and prejudices.

“Rosebud” is perhaps the most famous symbol in all of cinema, symbolizing the simple happiness that Kane lost so early on and tried so long to reclaim. There’s a scene where Leland asks the younger Kane “How are you still eating?” and he barks back “I’m still hungry!” He’s hungry, all right, but he’s got an appetite than no object can fill. He spends like mad to try and fill it; he buys more statues than anyone can count, builds an opera house for his wife (who doesn’t want it), builds a house no one could feel at home in, and only grows more emotionally calcified, as his fundamental unhappiness cannot be resolved by the only means he knows of resolving it.

It’s why he latches onto Susan in the first place. She hardly knows who he is, is delighted by his joking around and charmed by his manner, and as such represents an innocence, a simple happiness that he, now wealthy and powerful beyond measure, deeply desires. But of course, such happiness cannot be bought, and that’s what Kane cannot or will not accept. The night he met Susan, he was on his way to a warehouse to examine his mother’s belongings “in search of my youth.” He might well have found Rosebud the sled had he gone, but would that really have made any difference? The sled itself is just another object among the millions of objects he possesses. It’s no substitute for a soul.

It’s a script full of brilliant lines and moments, from the early quotation of Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan” (probably my favorite poem), to Bernstein’s wonderful memory of the girl in white or his reflection on old age (“it’s the one disease you don’t look forward to being cured of”), which took me rather a while to appreciate, to Leland’s great cynical reflection on memory (“the greatest curse that’s ever been inflicted on the human race”) or his summations of Kane:

“I suppose he had some private sort of greatness. But he kept it to himself. He never gave himself away. He never gave anything away. He just left you a tip.”

“That’s all he ever wanted out of life…was love. That’s the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane. You see, he just didn’t have any to give.”

Elsewhere, there are brilliantly pointed jabs at yellow journalism, vanity (I forgot the great bit where Kane is screaming at Gettys, threatening to send him to Sing Sing, and Gettys closes the door on him, muffling his pathetic cries), the notion of greatness, the real value of wealth, and so forth. There’s also this moment, which sends a chill down the spine today:

There’s more than enough greatness in Citizen Kane to overcome its weaknesses. I maintain, as I’m pretty sure I have since I first saw it, that isn’t the greatest film of all time, but just as Plan 9 wears its own superlative title well, Kane has enough brilliant elements to make the case for its own exalted stature. I won’t say it isn’t that good, only that other films are even better.

Score: 94