RedFive said:
captainsolo said:
The thing about Kane is this: no one wanted to push the envelope at the time. Welles pushed anything and everything he ever came into contact with. They thought he would do great in Hollywood. He sat around and couldn't get a project off the ground for over a year. So, you can definitely say that he came tearing out of the gate. However, they gave a young Orson Welles full control of the production. Kane is simply undiluted Welles on crack, with a great writer and brilliant and innovative people who actually wanted to do more than the same 9-5. Also, one must mention the fact Welles was usually on Benzedrine at this point in time. That's what makes it stand out. And all of the primary gushers for the film wouldn't even consider letting the man make another film. It took decades for it to even be considered as good, let alone even be shown.
I get all that, and I consider it one of the few all-time greats as well, but it's still a movie about a newspaper mogul, and that can only not be boring for so long before it gets boring.
I get all of that too... but I think context should be carefully handled when rating a film.
Best for its time? Or best ever? I think, perhaps, we should have a list of most influential or most historically relevant, or best in its time movies apart from the "best ever" list. Yes, Kane was groundbreaking in its day and dared to take on Hearst in such a way that everyone involved in the project should have been committed. That's great. But also, at the end of the day, a film is a film and not the people who made it or the way or reasons that they did. In those terms, I think the notion that no one has made a better film than Citizen Kane in the past 70 years to be ridiculous.