Citizen Kane (1941 Orson Welles)

This has always featured in the critics' top tens. But I feel the same way about it as I always have. It's not a film I keep running to put on, has a chilly heart. Whilst it is on the one hand a technical marvel (particularly in Gregg Toland's astonishing deep focus photography) the main character is unsympathetic and the linking device of the investigation journalist is actually quite irritating in the way we never see him (it becomes an artifice when his back is always turned to us).

It's very clever of course e.g. the ascending camera to the riggers at the opera, one of whom pinches his nose - 'She stinks'.

Joining Orson (who modestly bills himself last) are Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingmore, Everett Sloane, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Erskine Sandford, Ruth Warrick, Paul Stewart and George Coulouris.

Peek-a-boo!

Bernard Herrman's score (his first) is great as is Robert Wise's editing. Like Ambersons (for me, the better film) it uses RKO's creative design resources well. Again, I was thinking Fellini e.g. the very ending in Xanadu.

Great stuff in Peter's interview book about how Gregg Toland allowed Orson to light the sets (because, coming from theatre, he thought it was the director's responsibility) - Toland wanted to learn something from an amateur. And didn't object to any kind of camera position or request, just got on with it. Derek Malcolm points out - in the Sky Arts Film Noir series - that some of Welles' 'innovations' (e.g. the camera travelling through the window) Welles had actually seen in Fritz Lang's German pictures (M et al).

Also Sloane's story to the reporter about the girl he saw on the ferry:
PB: Who wrote it?
OW: Mankiewicz, and it's the best thing in the movie. "A month hasn't gone by that I haven't thought of that girl." That's Mankiewicz, I wish it was me.

Also those great fades were done electrically not optically - the lights go down leaving the last object lit, then fade into the next scene as the lights go up - he just thought that was the way you do it. It's a great effect, which David Lean borrowed for Brief Encounter.