I suppose he had a private greatness, but he kept it to himself.

Citizen Kane begins with an audacious touch that suits the outsized egos of both its creator and its subject. The opening title bills the film as a “Mercury Production by Orson Welles.” 1941 was more than a decade before François Truffaut began to advocate the “auteur theory,” the notion of the director as the primary “author” of a film, but it clearly conformed to (and, in part, inspired) Truffaut’s ideas. Orson Welles’ hand is on every frame of this film, along with the revolutionary touch of his cinematographer, Gregg Toland.

Kane is a clean break with the Hollywood conventions of the time in terms of both structure and style. This is truly modern film in the way we currently understand the term. (more…)

Whatever walked there, walked alone.

Day three of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

Somewhere along the way, Hollywood forgot how to tell a ghost story. It happened without much fanfare, so I can’t say when, but certainly the success of Halloween had something to do with it. That isn’t to begrudge John Carpenter his success, but it set the pattern for the modern horror film that has since calcified into rote repetition. Any form of psychological terror has been jettisoned in favor of a geek show spectacle of masked super-killers leaping out of the shadows to disembowel horny teenagers.

The emergence of the PG-13 horror film recent years, much be-moaned by the gore-hounds, has restored some of my hope that the traditional ghost story might make a comeback. However, except for The Others, The Sixth Sense and possibly The Ring, there hasn’t been much to cheer about in that regard.

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This does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly.

Day two of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

The Day the Earth Stood Still is a film that has, in some ways, outlived its reputation. It is certainly a cut above other films from “flying saucer” sub-genre of science fiction. An intelligent script, Robert Wise‘s capable direction and a better than average cast all combine to make this a high-quality production. The film’s only real weakness is that its message of “mankind had better learn to get along or else”, which was definitely bold for a film made during the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s, now seems like rather juvenile wish-fulfillment. The idea of advanced aliens coming down to solve our problems for us was an early staple of science fiction but is now a best-forgotten cliché.

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