The movie I've watched more than any other would be John Landis' "Animal House."
Let me qualify that -- "Animal House" is very likely the movie I've sat through more times than any other. When I was a kid, it seemed like we had to watch "The Wizard of Oz" at least twice a year (I was traumatized by the flying monkeys, they still make cameo appearance in my nightmares).
But I've intentionally watched "Animal House" a bunch: start to finish, maybe 20 to 30 times. I've shown it to classes and broken down some of the scenes. I try not to quote it, but recognize when others do.
I was 19 years old and in college when it came out. I went to toga parties that were inspired by it. "Animal House" is a cultural marker for my generation, like "Hang On Sloopy" might be for someone a little older than I am. While I could no doubt write a couple thousand words about "Animal House" and its particular place in the zeitgeist, I usually don't think much about it. It's enough that "Animal House" is funny in the specific way in which it is funny.
It is an important movie, but not a great movie.
"Citizen Kane" is probably the great movie I have watched most often. I don't remember when or how I first watched it, but when I did I was aware of its reputation for greatness. And that was very likely the reason I watched it.
I went through a period in my teens and early 20s when I wanted to educate myself about film, so I began to programmatically watch all these movies I heard were great.
While my movie fandom compelled me to see movies like "Animal House" and "Apocalypse Now" and "Pretty Baby" and "Grease" in theaters, I also spent a good deal of time seeking out older movies like Alain Resnais' "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" and Yasujiro Ozu's "Tokyo Story."
(Nobody believed it then or now, but the reason I had a subscription to the Playboy Channel in the early 1980s was because, very late at night, it played great foreign films. I taped movies like Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura" and Marco Ferreri's "La Grand Bouffe" off the channel.)
While it's possible and maybe even likely that I had seen "Citizen Kane" on television in the '60s or early '70s, on Jan. 17, 1976, "Saturday Night Live" ran a skit that played with the idea that "rosebud" wasn't quite the last word out of dying Charles Foster Kane's mouth.
Chevy Chase played Jed Leland, Dan Aykroyd played Kane, Laraine Newman played the nurse who'd overheard the dying declaration, and I got the joke so I must have at least been familiar with film's cryptic ending.
But I didn't watch "Kane" until after I'd seen "Animal House," around 40 years after its release, which means I saw something different from the audiences who'd watched it when it came out. They received it as a movie, as an occasion to get out of the house. They might have been on a date. They were looking for diversion. They came to it in the same spirit I came that first time to "Animal House."
And I was looking for some sort of edification, to know a film that had been acclaimed "the greatest of all time." I came to "Kane" with expectations.
Before I knew "Citizen Kane," I knew its director, Orson Welles. He was a Hollywood celebrity, less witty than Paul, but a formidable black-swaddled bulk on the end of Johnny and Merv's talk show couches. He hawked cheap wine and fish sticks. He was famous for having terrified a nation with his radio version of "The War of the Worlds" and for having, at 25, directed "Citizen Kane." He did not have the grace to go quietly or crack up spectacularly; he just hung around being ridiculous.
Welles was a failure with a certain gravitas, who exerted a curious power over the Hollywood that refused to finance his projects. There is a way of reading "Kane" as a prescient autobiography -- while Kane is famously based on real-life publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, Welles (and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz) imbued fictional Kane with many Wellesian qualities and congruities. Like Kane, Welles was around 8 years old when he lost his mother, though Welles' mother died and Kane's mother sends him away.
Both Welles and Kane were afflicted by what we these days might identify as toxic ambition (though audiences in 1941 might have seen it differently). Both were wunderkinds. Mankiewicz also drew on Welles' megalomania for inspiration for the Charles Foster Kane character.
...
"Kane" is a great movie, with all the baggage that comes with that (who wants to watch great movies when we could have more fun rewatching "Animal House?") but it would not have made a great novel. It is not always coherent. What is the question to its final "Jeopardy" answer -- uttered by a dying Kane, who answers in an empty room (with only the audience there to hear) -- of Rosebud? Is it what drove Charles Foster Kane to become what he became? The reporter played by William Alland can't figure it out. Neither can any of the great man's former intimates.
"I don't think any word can explain a man's life," Alland finally admits. Duh.
We watch the excesses of Xanadu, all the treasure and junk amassed by voracious Kane during his lifetime, being cataloged and sorted. And his childhood sled Rosebud being flung into an incinerator.
This is an elliptical image; the sled usually is taken as a symbol of Kane's lost childhood.
But we should remember that "Citizen Kane" is a hit piece, a barely disguised attack on William Randolph Hearst, the press magnate turned politician, who once, the story goes, had the drunken Welles forcibly expelled from one of the parties he hosted for the Hollywood elite at his estate at San Simeon.
Welles made "Citizen Kane" in retaliation, hiring Mankiewicz in part because the writer -- who had also been given the heave-ho from one of Hearst's parties -- knew a lot of the old man's secrets (there is an alternate theory of "rosebud" that can't be safely alluded to in a family newspaper). Hearst hated both of them.
A couple of years ago, David Fincher's "Mank," about Mankiewicz and the making of "Kane," revived the stubborn question of who deserves the larger share of credit for writing "Kane." "Mank," written by Fincher's father, was inspired by Pauline Kael's famous 1971 essay "Raising Kane," which forcefully argues that Mankiewicz, not Welles, was the essential genius behind the film.
I like "Mank" a lot, but find it difficult to imagine people who aren't already steeped in the lore surrounding "Kane" finding it interesting. It's an inside baseball project, a Hollywood movie about a famous Hollywood movie that is still assumed to have been the work of a singular genius named Orson Welles (who never lived up to the early promise demonstrated by the film).
"Mank" is a clever movie, and it's tempting to read it as a screed against so-called auteur theory -- the idea that the director of the film can be considered its sole author -- directed by one of our foremost auteurs.
To really get "Mank," you have to know "Kane" better than I did when I got the joke underpinning the "SNL" skit. To appreciate "Mank," you need to understand the techniques cinematographer Gregg Toland developed to shoot it. You should know about Mankiewicz's reputation as a ruined talent, and the way writers like William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald were broken on Hollywood's wheel.
You should know a little film history, and about how Mankiewicz, as Kael wrote, "spearheaded the movement of that whole Broadway style of wisecracking, fast-talking, cynical-sentimental entertainment onto the national scene." Movies with so many prerequisites usually appeal to a narrow demographic. Or at least a lot narrower demographic than "Animal House." (Or "Cocaine Bear.")
It's silly to designate any one movie as the greatest ever, but we should recognize "Kane" as one of the most important Hollywood films ever made and one that, more than 80 years on, retains a capacity to entertain a wide audience.
On the most superficial level, it's a gorgeous film, with a silver-cream luster punctuated by opaque and impenetrable blacks. If its story seems obvious to modern audiences -- it is at heart a middlebrow Freudian fable that says nothing more profound than the lives of the rich are as lonely and empty as any -- it still manages to say it beautifully.
Without minimizing Mankiewicz's contribution -- and he probably was the sole author of the screenplay -- what's genuinely great about "Kane" is not the story it imagines, but how it is realized. The genius is in the execution: the brashness of Toland's revolutionary deep-focus camera as it sweeps over baldly artificial sets, a great leaping joy at having discovered untapped possibilities in a medium that had prematurely settled on a vocabulary of gesture and musical cues.
"Citizen Kane" is a great movie mostly because it is a great magic trick, an alternate universe we can visit and inhabit and will retain a certain power and gravity even after all those who made it, and all of us who've watched it, are gone.
Like all art, it's not what it says or how true it is; it's how it says its truth.
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