Word: kanes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...minor flaws in all but one of Orson Welles' extraordinary films are particularly maddening because they are unnecessary. Since 1940, when Citizen Kane synthesized Horatio Alger and the "film noir" into a critical success, he has used the same ideas, the same flashback techniques, and even the same evil Prometheus as his protagonist. But these methods could not make the the story of a pathetic border sheriff in Touch of Evil as interesting as the life of Charles Foster Kane. Mr. Arkadin has a more heroic figure than the sheriff, but Welles' personal triumph in the title role cannot compensate...
...Kafka's The Trial, the story of a man victimized by the impersonal hostility of a bureaucratic world he never made. Viewers of the early rushes, including Directors Anatole Litvak and Jules Dassin, say they witnessed the birth of a classic. Twenty-one years after his Citizen Kane won him the title of boy genius and doomed him to a lifetime of trying to hold on to it, Orson Welles seemed to be making a comeback...
Waddling Exile. In between Kane and Kafka, Welles took two wives (Rita Hayworth and Incumbent Paula Mori), gained a couple of hundred pounds, and directed seven pictures. His wildly impressionistic Othello, and Macbeth in Scottish burr, were called moody masterpieces in Europe, but failed miserably in the U.S. Aside from brief bits of acting (most memorably in The Third Man and Compulsion), Welles did little more than perpetuate his public caricature. Smoking sequoia-sized cigars, he waddled like an exiled giant through Europe, looking gloomily for a future and nostalgically at the past...
That singular quality of certain films to attract violent criticism and equally strong support, is not a mark of greatness; it is, rather, an indication that technical or stylistic innovations have been strikingly exploited, or that an extreme statement has been made. Citizen Kane and L'Avventura, a classic and a mediocre trump-up, fall into the first category. Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux and Stanley Kramer's new work fall into the latter...
...stands, this double bill lasts about one hour too long. By leaving after Citizen Kane, you will miss an epic longueur and still have a chance to see a film that can hardly fail to please almost anyone...