Citizen Kane (1941)

"If I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a great man."

At the age of 38 I've finally seen this film, and feel a little bit more cultured than I was. It's far too dense with signifiers and crammed with meaning to add much to the decades of critical discussion after just one viewing, yes, but at least I can say what I thought. Essentially, it's exactly as good as people say it is. Sometimes you can go into a film with sky-high expectations and end up a little deflated that it turns out to be merely excellent rather than sublime. I suspect my expectations were lowered a little by the fact that Citizen Kane no longer tends to sit at the top of all these "Top 100" lists as it used to but, well, it should. 

Yes, the whole "rosebud" thing turns out to be a fairly facile revelation about the loss of childhood innocence, but there's a lot more going on than that. Plus the direction is incredible courtesy of a young Orson Welles, and his performance as Charles Foster Kane is spellbinding: a man of depth, wit and charisma and who never quite lets you in. 

The script, too, is as philosophical as a nineteenth century novel, with a line on memory that's redolent of Proust and a clever examination of the newspaper industry's loss of innocence, paralleling Kane's own. Most clever, though, is that Kane is only ever seen through the memories of others, never on his own terms; perhaps we have the cinematic equivalent of the unreliable narrator.

Oh, and at last I get the references in the White Stripes' "The Union Forever".

This is a truly great film and worthy of far more than a hurried blog post written on the 16.09 from Birmingham New Street to Coleshill Parkway. If you haven't seen it, you should bloody well do so.

The Third Man (1949)

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Yes, it had to be that quote. Predictable but necessary.

This film is, essentially, superb. It tends to suffer somewhat from the overly high expectations one tends to have for films as critically acclaimed as this, but I won't discriminate against it for that. The film didn't choose to be so hyped. In truth, this film may not be quite amongst the best ever made but it is, nonetheless, utterly superb.

I won't recount the intriguing plot with its twists and turns and the gradual reveal of the story of Harry Lime, played with splendid charisma by the great Orson Welles. But the script paints as dark a picture of human nature as one would expect from the typewriter of Graham Greene. Vienna is made to look awesome by Carol Reed in its monochrome splendour, and the cast is superb. This is a Vienna still under occupation by the four powers, where even minor aristocrats resort to the black market to survive. This once-great imperial city has fallen very far indeed, with its grandiose Habsburg architecture seeming to mock it. 

Above all this film has atmosphere, pervaded as it is by a sense of doom and pessimism. And above it all floats that zither tune. This is a film that everyone should see.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

“A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon. Words fail me, gentlemen.”

This is the last review I’ll be doing in this strange, alcohol-fuelled, work-free interregnum between Christmas and New Year and, indeed, my last review of 2011. In 2012 I’ll go back to the usual schedule, continuing with the Buffyverse and (mostly) a film on Saturdays. I’ll also be reviewing certain programmes pretty much as they air in the UK- Doctor Who, obviously, but also, starting next week, Sherlock. In the meantime, here’s a fun little movie review that I didn’t have to think too hard about.

This is the perfect movie to watch if you have a certain sense of humour and you don’t want anything too heavy; it spends ninety minutes doing nothing but mocking its own tropes. Phibes (played, with the expected brilliance, by Vincent Price) has an absurd lack of any real motive for his ridiculously over-theatrical crimes, and that every little intricate little thing goes to plan is utterly unrealistic, but all of this is gleefully thrown in our faces; the film knows exactly what it’s doing. That Phibes is just a take on a certain archetype is shown near the end as he reveals his true, horrifying, Lon Chaney-esque face, and starts playing the organ in an obvious reference to Universal’s silent version of Phantom of the Opera. Yep, this is more of that metatextual fun that I love so much.

The police are hilarious, too; nice, decent, but with all the plodding incompetence that tradition leads us to expect from the Yard. For all that Trout (a great performance from Peter Jeffrey) is a thoroughly decent, put-upon chap (his interactions with his superior are the funniest thing about the film, mainly because his superior is only saying what the audience thinks!), he cocks every single thing up at every single opportunity.

All of the surgeons are subject to a certain amount of mockery too, and none more so than Terry-Thomas’ lecherous old man.  This is not a film that exactly treats authority figures with respect; in fact the gleeful grotesqueness of the various methods of dispatch is the film’s main selling point, as the audience has fun trying to guess how the theme of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, revealed quite earlier on, will show itself in the murders. The chap being impaled by a brass unicorn is the best, but many of them are quite horrific, especially the frog mask. Given the otherwise light tone of the film, there’s something particularly nasty about this one.

Still, it’s a superbly entertaining, and rather undemanding, piece of entertainment. One thing, though; who was Vulnavia?