Hope your Monday was good. At least better than last Monday anyway. I watched a Big Damn Important Movie last week. This one:
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| ... and the Goblet of Fire |
There are certain works which always elicit strong (usually negative) reactions: The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, 2001, It's a Wonderful Life, Citizen Kane, any Hemingway, current Oscar and Nobel Lit nominees, etc. Your opinion of this particular Big Damn Important Movie is unnecessary, but I wouldn't stop you expressing yours even if I could. After all, they're like a$$holes - everyone has at least two, some have more than a dozen, and I'd be a fool to try to block it. So have at. Spread those opinions around like so much leftover halloween candy. (worst mixed metaphor ever?)
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| The edition of the aforementioned big damn important movie I viewed ~ SQRL, a sailor on the bourgeois sea |
This isn't a review. We've all seen it or at least heard or read the arguments for and against it. Instead, a few observations:
- Gregg Toland's cinematography is still fresh and exciting. He sought out Welles to shoot for him - figured he would get to experiment with filming if he worked with a director who didn't know anything. He was right. Some scenes look like they could have been filmed this decade. Deep focus technique was new in 1941.
- Welles's two other great films, IMO, were The Magnificent Ambersons and A Touch of Evil, and both were shot by Toland proteges Stanley Cortez and Russell Metty. Same sort of experimental, restless camerawork as Toland's. Say what you will about the movies, but they look great.
- William Randolph Hearst obviously hated it but probably never saw it. One of his biggest concerns was that his mistress Marion Davies was being smeared, but Welles and Mankiewicz based the Susan Alexander Kane character on a couple of other figures from Welles's youth: Gladys Wallis, wife of billionaire Samuel Insull, and Ganna Walska, wife of Harold F. McCormick. Both were promoted to succeed by their wealthy husbands, but neither was exceptionally talented, Walska couldn't even sing in key. Insull built the Chicago Opera House (the Lyric)just to showcase his wife's singing. Mank had to write a review of Wallis's performance, and that's pretty much the scene in CK with Joseph Cotten passed out drunk on the typewriter.
- Hearst did indeed collect a lot of art that he never looked at, and he did have a zoo at Hearst Castle. He also allegedly murdered someone on a boat.
- Milicent Patrick grew up around Hearst Castle because her father was superintendent of construction there, working under architect Julia Morgan. Morgan was a badass. Patrick, born Mildred Elizabeth Fulvia di Rossi, changed her name, got out from her parents' grasp, worked as one of the only female animators for Walt Disney, and created monsters for Hollywood films, the most famous of which is the Gillman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
- Spielberg seems to have loved the last shot enough to use it for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
- Alan Ladd shows up in the last five minutes of the movie, uncredited. All the reporters' faces at Xanadu are fully in shadow, but you hear his voice saying two lines to William Alland:
Ladd: Or, Rosebud? How about it, Jerry?
Female Reporter: What’s Rosebud?
Male Reporter: That’s what he said when he died.
Ladd: Did you ever find out what it means?
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| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Citizen-Kane-Alland-Stewart.jpg |
EOY so let's look at the AFI and BFI best of all time lists. A bit embarrassed I've seen only 79 of the AFI 100 and 51 of the BFI. Let's argue about stuff.
https://www.afi.com/afis-100-years-100-movies-10th-anniversary-edition/
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time
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