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"A Mercury Production by Orson Welles." Rise and fall of the emperor, out of Colorado snow and into the misty mausoleum by way of Wall Street, a barn-burning burlesque of Great Man biopics. Charles Foster Kane the baby-faced Tamburlaine, viewed through an avalanche of refractions: Little boy lost, upstart, newspaper magnate, reformist candidate, failed Svengali, magisterial hoarder, plume of smoke. Rough sledding for the faceless reporter out on assignment, investigating the meaning of a certain final word and bumping into one low ceiling after another. "1941's biggest, strangest funeral" is an interrupted sentimental journey, the visionary mind laid bare in all its megalomania and solitude as a flowing spectacle. (Fellini in 8½ understands its circusy side.) Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten) is Jiminy Cricket with his bad review unfinished in the typewriter, Bernstein (Everett Sloane) with his unfading remembrance of beauty is only one of the many victims of memory, humanity's "greatest curse." The President's niece (Ruth Warrick) exits stage left amid scandal, the toothachy soprano (Dorothy Comingore) agonizes through aria upon aria until she's a fizzing light bulb, at the nightclub she remembers all of it with a corroded smile. The labyrinth is a central locus in the language of cinema, Welles presents himself as its Minotaur, somber and giddy. "Shangri-La? El Dorado? Sloppy Joe's?" A voracious work ("Still eating?" "Still hungry"), a cavernous overlaying of Murnau and Fitzgerald and Freud and cubism (Picasso's Portrait d'Ambroise Vollard is practically reproduced). The camera that seeks also deforms, Gregg Toland's sprawling tracking shots and depth of focus stand side by side with shock cuts and warped vantages and a most astonishingly discordant soundscape, the myth assiduously erected is inevitably dismantled. "I know I've played at the game, like a mouth in a blue flame, lost in the end just the same..." An endless fountain of inspiration for Resnais, Ruiz, Coppola, Roeg and countless others. For Welles, just a beginning. With Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Agnes Moorehead, Erskine Sanford, Paul Stewart, Fortunio Bonanova, and William Alland. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |