Othello (1952)

Orson Welles' Othello was the director's second adaptation of a Shakespeare play, following up his moody, fog-clouded Macbeth. Whereas he shot his expressionist Macbeth quickly and on a low budget, completing the film in a matter of weeks, his Othello was a deeply troubled project, taking three years to complete, and constantly plagued by budget shortfalls — Welles finally finished it with his own money, earned from acting jobs (like The Third Man) taken specifically to provide money for his own stalling film.

These troubles are readily apparent in the film's rough and rushed sensibility. Welles at times seems to be speeding through the famous play's text, delivering the lines at a hasty clip and liberally cutting from the source so that at times, particularly early on, it feels like a condensation of the story, occasionally assisted by a narrator who fills in the blanks and explains the plot. Coupled with Welles' typical post-dubbed dialogue, which always gives his soundtracks an air of spacey disconnection, this clipped pace gives the film a curious atmosphere, with its grand emotions of jealousy and hatred playing out at something of a remove. Welles seems far less interested in the text and the characters than in the opportunity that this classic source provides for cinematic grandstanding and strikingly crafted images.

This is, of course, a visually stunning film: Welles doesn't locate the emotion and the substance of Othello in Shakespeare's dialogue but in the images that Welles carefully chooses to accompany the words, setting the drama amidst moodily lit, theatrically decorated castles and stark, minimalist natural vistas. Whereas Welles' Macbeth was set in a foggy studio wasteland where the background was often nothing but a wisp of smoke and a dense black night sky, he achieves a similarly haunting effect in Othello with natural landscapes, foreboding swaths of sea and sky that churn with the intensity of the emotions embodied by this tale.


The gorgeous opening sequence sets the tone, foreshadowing the tragic end with a funeral procession shot from skewed low angles, the blank sky towering over the solemn figures of the coffin-bearers. The atmosphere is intense and eerily beautiful, and Welles carries this grand, dramatic aesthetic throughout the film. Othello's arrival in Cyprus is stormy and striking, with soldiers on the battlements framed against the unquiet sea, the waves crashing against the rocks beneath them and a dark, cloudy sky hovering above. The cold wind is practically palpable, and the stark, bleak mood is constantly projecting the air of impending tragedy that hangs over this story.

The film's performances are mostly excellent as well. Micheál MacLiammóir's Iago is perhaps not slimy enough, though he does project a blandly sinister flatness that makes him an effectively unassuming villain. Welles himself plays Othello, his face unfortunately darkened in what was still a Hollywood tradition of having Caucasian actors play darker-skinned men. But if one can get past that, Welles' typical forcefulness is very much to be found here, as he captures the glowering intensity and confused emotions of Othello, led to doubt his beautiful Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) by the treacherous plotting of the jealous, ambitious Iago.

Welles makes Desdemona's death scene especially potent, as befits the film's tragically sad climax: Othello wraps a gauzy sheet around his wife's face, her tears streaking the sheet, making wet marks in the cloth as it clings to her features, her mouth gasping against the instrument of her death. Death is at the crux of the film; it starts and ends with the same funeral procession, the same testament to the story's grim destination of murder and loss. Othello's death scene is similarly powerful, the camera reeling and whirling as the Moor, having stabbed himself in his grief and the realization of his mistake, stumbles back to the site of his wife's murder, where she lays sprawled out next to their bed. Welles' Othello is unforgettably potent at moments like this, unfailingly finding the black, shadowy, terrible beauty of the story's tragedy. It is far from a perfect adaptation of its source, and more than Welles' Macbeth it betrays the technical limitations and business woes that followed Welles throughout his career, but for all that it is a compelling, visually inventive work that unmistakeably bears the mark of its director.

Macbeth (1948)

Orson Welles' expressionist, visually stunning version of Macbeth was the director's first attempt at a cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare. Shot quickly and cheaply, the film makes a virtue of its budget minimalism by setting the familiar play within a spartan, eerie wasteland of fog and bare rock. Welles surrounds this bleak, violent parable of power and ambition with swirling fog, twisted trees devoid of leaves, stark expanses of vague nothingness in which only the light-sculpted features of the play's protagonists stand out, as though they are declaiming into a void, spitting out their tormented speeches while already engulfed in the hell that awaits them for their vile deeds.

Welles is mostly faithful to the text of Shakespeare's play, shifting some words and characters around here and there, and somewhat emphasizing the religious subtext of the story, but mostly remaining true to the language and the story. Macbeth (Welles) is moved to murder the king by a prophecy given to him by three witches, further encouraged in the deed by his scheming, ambitious wife (Jeanette Nolan). His crime gets him the crown, but he's overcome by paranoia and madness, growing ever more bloodthirsty and reckless as he desperately defends his ill-gotten title. The story is a classical study of the corruption of power, and Welles revels in the blustery speeches and stormy psychological subtexts, all of it delivered with the familiar disembodied sound that often characterized Welles' approach to dialogue — he recorded all of the speech separately, so that the actors are simply mouthing their words, and the dubbed, echoing quality of the sound contributes to the film's strange, haunting feel.

It's visually that Welles really makes his mark on this material. The chintzy sets and shoddy theatrical props of this production were doubtless necessitated by budgetary limitations, but Welles uses his limited means with purpose. The castle through which Macbeth stalks looks more like a cave, the bare rock walls warped and full of holes in which all light disappears, the ceilings low and craggy overhead. The film's atmosphere would be well-suited to a horror movie, with fog draped around the dark, minimal set, reducing visibility to a small circle of empty space in which Macbeth paces like a trapped rat, his face often blown up in dramatic closeups that capture every bead of sweat dripping from his skin, every quiver of his lips and every wild, bulging expression in his eyes. The backgrounds are blurry and sketchy, a few warped trees sticking up out of a wasteland, crudely carved rock everywhere, while the faces of the actors are crisply delineated with bold, high-contrast lighting, their eyes often shining out of the darkness of their shadowed faces.


The frequent close framing of the actors places the larger-than-life emotions of Shakespeare's text front and center. Even the minimal scenery, so gloomy and gothic, seems to reflect the warped inner psychology of Macbeth and his wife, their paranoia and evil writ large upon their surroundings. Welles poses Lady Macbeth as a seductress, a femme fatale, urging her husband on to his murderous, treacherous deeds. In the crucial scenes where she convinces him to kill the king, Welles frames Macbeth in the foreground with his wife slyly positioned to his side, whispering in his ear, casting charged glances his way. She's Eve and the serpent all rolled into one form, her last-act attacks of conscience notwithstanding, and at one point her face glides into the frame at the fringes, behind a towering closeup of Macbeth, like a sinister sprite perched on his shoulder, whispering evil in his ear.

The minimalist aesthetic at times seems to mock the protagonist. When Macbeth is crowned king, a silly-looking square crown, at once flimsy and bulky, is placed upon his brow, with his glowering face beneath it. He marches out before his assembled troops and subjects for the first time as their king, and the music too mocks him, accompanying what should be his grand entrance with a jaunty tune more suited to a court jester than a king. Later, at the climax of the film, as Macbeth's foes amass beneath his ramparts to unseat him, the king runs back and forth across the bare stone of his courtyard in a crown designed to resemble the Statue of Liberty's spiked headband, thus ironically juxtaposing the vicious tyrant with the symbol of American democracy.

Macbeth's famous final act soliloquy — "full of sound and fury/ signifying nothing" — is delivered against an abstract image of smoke roiling and spinning in slow motion, a foggy void that's set to devour the murderous king, to end his time of strutting upon life's stage. Welles' visual interpretation of this material is often subtly clever like this, expanding the text with a truly cinematic sensibility. Welles cuts from Macbeth looking at a twisted tree branch and musing about crows to the image of the two murderers who Macbeth has sent after Banquo, crouched on a tree limb, their shadowy forms looking very bird-like as they wait for their victim to pass by so they might descend on him. The sound design is also exceptional, with Welles ascribing piercing, harrowing import to a few key sounds on the otherwise hollow, disembodied soundtrack: after the king's death, especially, the loud knocking of Macduff (Dan O'Herlihy) at the castle door reverberates impressively, a foreboding sound of doom, and there's a similar force to the screech of the owl that so frightens Lady Macbeth that she grasps at her chest as though she's been stabbed by the sound. Welles' Macbeth was not appreciated in its time, but in fact it's a stunning and visually inventive adaptation.

The Stranger

The Stranger is an unusual and somewhat awkwardly realized noirish thriller that was the third proper directorial feature of Orson Welles. It's a post-war suspense film about an escaped Nazi who disguises himself as an ordinary high school teacher in a small town in Connecticut. An officer for the war crimes commission, Wilson (Edward G. Robinson), is tasked with tracking down the elusive Franz Kindler (Welles), a mastermind of the concentration camps who, in the aftermath of World War II, has erased all trace of his identity and settled into suburban conformity. He's even marrying local girl Mary (Loretta Young), a naïve beauty whose father is a well-respected judge. Wilson arranges for the release of a lower-level Nazi prisoner, Meinike (Konstantin Shayne), in the hopes that the underling will lead them to the otherwise vanished Kindler. In the film's briskly paced but evocative opening — which Welles had wanted to be much longer, but the footage got cut by the studio — Wilson's detectives track Meinike through a South American port, where deep shadows are populated by silhouetted figures smoking on balconies, and mysterious women weave through back alleys passing messages between the men who hide in the shadows. This exotic opening sequence is a bit of clever misdirection, though, because at the end of it, Meinike finally gets in touch with the contact he'd been seeking, and finds out that Kindler is not hiding in some grimy, out of the way South American town, as so many Nazis did after the war, but is in fact in the quiet, normal little town of Harper, a place as quintessentially American as any place can be.

Welles immediately cuts from South American intrigue to North American small town life, creating a jarring disjunction in mood and style between the expressionist shadows of the opening and the brightly lit streets of Harper, a place that seems to have nothing to hide, no shadowy errands being conducted within its pleasant borders. As Mary says, cheerfully getting ready to walk home alone one night, "in Harper there's nothing to be afraid of." That's a big part of the film's essence, the infiltration of American suburban safety and security by the sinister evil of Nazism. Kindler's presence in this cheery, sunny little town is an affront to the idea that there's nothing to fear on America's pleasant home town streets.

As compelling as this theme is, the script is often clumsy in conveying it, and as with a lot of Welles' post-Kane studio-compromised works, the film has a lot of rough edges. Mary is the biggest problem, and Young is not given much to do with her performance. She remains loyal to her husband even as she starts learning troubling details about this man she loves, and starts seeing indications of the violence he's capable of. She reacts to each new revelation with renewed dedication to him, so her part basically consists of weepy declarations of love and devotion, until later in the film she begins breaking apart, shrieking and fainting constantly. At one point, after learning that the man she knew as Charles Rankin is actually the Nazi Franz Kindler, she runs through the nighttime streets, tearfully insisting, "he's good, he's good," locked into denial. It's an unfortunately one-note role that limits the woman in the story to either blind devotion or hysteria.


Welles and Robinson have much meatier parts, and the film focuses on the tense battle of wills between these two titanic actors. Though the script sometimes tends towards moral speechifying, their performances are strong enough to overcome the blunt nature of the words they're delivering. The real pleasure, though, comes from a few of the quirky bit parts. Meinike, the Nazi underling who kicks off the whole plot, is a fascinating figure, a sinister-looking creep who has, apparently, found religion while awaiting trial for his war crimes. He's tracking down his old boss hoping to convert him, it turns out, and the scene where he drops to his knees in the woods with Kindler and prays is oddly striking. Welles also gets some folksy humor out of Mr. Potter (Billy House), the rotund general store owner who puts on a visor to denote his seriousness every time he plays a game of checkers with his customers.

The film's most memorable scenes are the ones in which Welles and cinematographer Russell Metty allow an expressionist, shadowy noir style to infiltrate the mundane town of Harper. Hoping to shake Mary out of her delusions about Kindler, Wilson shows her footage of the concentration camps on a projector, and Welles includes real images from the camps — the first time this was done in an American film. Welles only shows selected shots from the camps, mostly keeping the cameras trained on the faces of Mary and Wilson, the flickering light from the projector flashing on their faces. The emphasis is on their reactions, the haunted look in Mary's eyes as she sees the horrifying piles of bodies and the evidence of the gas chambers. At one point, Wilson stands in front of the screen, casting his silhouette over the images, and then Welles cuts in for a closeup in which the images are eerily laid across his face. At a pivotal moment at the end of the scene, the tape stops with a loud clicking noise, startling Mary out of her awed reverie — and likely the film's audience with her.

Welles also makes inventive use of the town clock tower, which is an important locale because Kindler has a hobby — Wilson describes it as a "mania," because even the hobbies of Nazis must be creepy — of fixing antique clocks. Once Kindler repairs the long-malfunctioning clock, the deep, chiming bells that go off every once in a while sound a foreboding note, an aural signature, a reminder of the Nazi mastermind's presence in the town. The clock tower is also the site of the brilliant, chaotic climax, in which Wilson and Mary confront Kindler inside the tower, leading to an unforgettably prolonged death scene for the Nazi mastermind, who gets impaled on the sword of an angelic figure who makes the rounds of the clockwork mechanism, chasing a gargoyle-like devil. The symbolism and the irony are obvious, but the result is still affecting and haunting. The same can be said for the film as a whole, which is clunky and uneven but still deeply fascinating and, as usual with Welles, inventively staged.

The Third Man

Harry Lime. Harry Lime. Harry Lime. The name is spoken so frequently in Carol Reed's The Third Man that it becomes a mantra, a way of signifying the continuing importance of a man whose absence defines the film and drives its plot. The war is over, and as the pseudo-documentary introduction describes it, the city of Vienna is in turmoil, bombed-out and divided, split into sectors by the victorious Allied powers (just getting ready for the colder war to follow) and rife with corruption and black market dealings. The pulp fiction writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in the city at the behest of his friend Harry, who has offered him a job, but virtually the first thing that Holly learns when he arrives in Vienna is that Harry is dead, the victim of a strangely suspicious traffic accident. Harry's left behind Anna (Alida Valli), the beautiful girl who loves him, plus a string of business associates who seem very shady and evasive, and a dogged police inspector (Trevor Howard) whose interest in Harry's illegal activities hasn't quite faded now that the man himself is beyond his jurisdiction.

So Holly — who Anna instinctively and repeatedly calls Harry, evidence of Harry's ubiquity and also a suggestion that she's already beginning to think of this newcomer as a possible replacement — stumbles into a shadowy, foggy Vienna where sinister dealings are obviously happening down every dark alley and in every night club. The people Holly meets, his friend Harry's former associates, like the solicitous "baron" Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch), radiate menace and sinister intentions, drawling out seemingly banal dialogue that barely disguises the unspoken threats and insinuations hiding just behind their friendly surfaces. It's instantly obvious that something strange surrounds Harry's mysterious death, something much more sinister than the traffic accident that everyone insists it was, and Holly becomes particularly obsessed with discovering the identity of an unknown "third man" who carried his friend's body away from the accident along with the baron and his fellow conspirator Popescu (Siegfried Breuer).

Interestingly, this mystery, which gives the film its title, ultimately seems incidental to what's really going on here, and isn't even resolved explicitly within the film. The film's first half is driven by mystery and investigation, but the specifics of this mystery don't seem nearly as important as the general sense of tension and intrigue generated by Holly's attempts to discover the truth. The script, adapted by Graham Greene from his own novel, crackles with suggestive, potent dialogue, particularly in the exchanges between the mourning Anna and Holly, who is clearly falling in love with his dead friend's girlfriend even as he probes deeper and deeper into the sordid truth about Harry Lime. Although Harry himself is the central, unseen presence for much of the movie, Anna and Holly (with his strange name so resonant with Harry's) get most of the screen time, dealing with Harry's absence and trying to make sense of life now that he's gone. In one great scene, a tearful Anna asks Holly to tell her things about Harry when he was younger, and Holly tells a series of incomplete, faltering stories that amount to moments and glimpses rather than full scenes in themselves. It seems even when he was alive, Harry was a somewhat enigmatic figure, difficult to understand or describe. (Much like the "third man," who is described by the one person who saw him as entirely normal and non-descript.)


Of course, in the movie's final third it turns out that everything is not as Holly and Anna had thought, and after being an unseen presence/absence for over an hour, Harry Lime himself finally makes his first appearance, incarnated in the smug smirk and cheery eyes of Orson Welles. Harry's first appearance is iconic and unforgettable, first as a shadow in the night, a pair of shoes standing in the shade of a doorway, the rest of his body vanishing into the surrounding shadows. Then a light comes on and illuminates his face, and there's that playful smile, those twinkling eyes, devilish and rakish, a sinister face hovering in the darkness. Having an actor as powerful and iconic as Welles play Harry, and holding back his first appearance for so long, really intensifies the effect. The audience is as stunned as Holly is, in a way, because just as Holly is shocked to find his friend alive, the audience, who might have suspected as much, is simply shocked by the impact of Welles' arrival and the oversized charm that he brings to Harry.

That's even truer in the subsequent scene, later in the film, where Harry finally gets his first lines — and is revealed not as the loving boyfriend idealized by Anna or the fun, steadfast friend described by Holly, but an amoral sociopath who willingly snuffs out lives just to make some money. Harry feels no guilt that the black market medication he was selling killed many and drove others mad. As he and Holly ride a ferris wheel, he looks down and speaks as though he's a god, as though other people are simply abstract dots to him, their lives and deaths of no import to his schemes. Harry is a real product of the war, a lowlife echo of the Nazi indifference to life and the god-like delusions that drive some men to believe their desires are more important than the very lives of others. Harry is a demon, a charming demon, and the sinister vibe of his friends is echoed in his own demeanor. His first conversation with Holly is infused with just-barely-unspoken threats and telling looks. He maintains a casual air as he opens the ferris wheel's door and tells his good friend that he has a gun, that he could eliminate him if he wanted to. And then, when Holly tells Harry that the police have dug up the latter's grave and found the man buried inside it — essentially telling Harry that his problems wouldn't end by getting rid of Holly — Harry's demeanor changes entirely, and he once again becomes solicitous and charming, the menace in his voice replaced by syrupy good cheer and friendly offers. He's good old Harry again, the merry prankster Holly had earlier described in those fragmentary stories from the good old days.

The film climaxes with a crawl through the sewers, in which the witty dialogue and insinuations are replaced by a nearly dialogue-free chase sequence in which Harry is pursued by an army of police with dogs and flashlights, with Holly accompanying them. The sewer sequence is a marvel of noir style, all striking angles and shadows, occasionally pierced by the blinding white light of the pursuers. Harry's face, now not so dashingly confident, is striped by shadows in the dark of the sewer, his eyes wide with fear as he runs this way and that, hemmed in and cut off everywhere, attempting with mounting desperation to find a way out. His earlier smirk is replaced by a grimace of terror. In the sequence's most unforgettable image, a wounded, crawling Harry reaches for a sewer grating, and Reed cuts away to the street above, where Harry's fingers stick up through the grate, waving around like stalks of grass in the wind, which whistles by on the soundtrack, the eerie only noise. It's a haunting ending for a legend who was disappointingly revealed as just another corrupted man, a sad echo of the war's evils.

Films I Love #53: Touch Of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

Orson Welles' 1958 masterwork Touch of Evil came late in the generally accepted timeframe for the first wave of film noir, a form that especially thrived in the 40s and early 50s, but it is undeniably one of the pinnacles of the genre. It's a movie that's fraught with contradictions and compromises, like many of Welles' films, so often subject to meddlesome studio interference, multiple versions and budgetary constraints. It is on the one hand tightly, even meticulously, constructed, with each shot staged and composed as though for a photograph or a painting. Few directors controlled foreground and background as effortlessly as Welles, and nearly every shot features elaborate relationships between figures and objects, creating unforgettable visual resonances. And yet despite this formal rigidity, the film feels loose and spontaneous, as though all its complex compositions were simply fortuitous accidents. Its soundtrack is obviously overdubbed, which only enhances the artificality of Welles' aesthetic; voices seem to be at some remove from the people supposedly speaking, their voices drifting in through the dense fog that enshrouds the tiny desert town where the film is set. The plotting is also rough and ragged, dealing with various intersections and intrigues along the Mexican border following a car bomb explosion. The corrupt and corpulent American detective Quinlan (Welles) investigates, but his attempts to wrap the case up quickly, possibly even pinning it on the wrong guy, are hampered by the suspicious Mexican narcotics officer Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston, thoroughly if entertainingly unconvincing as a Mexican).

The loose, rambling plot allows plenty of room for entertaining diversions, as well as for subplots focusing on characters floating at the periphery. Among the many fantastic performances, Janet Leigh is languidly sexy as Vargas' wife Susie, who he continually places in harm's way with oblivious ease while he dedicates himself wholeheartedly to his work. Welles also lingers with the character of Tanya (Marlene Dietrich), a former flame of the washed-up Quinlan, who has declined so far by now that she doesn't even recognize him anymore. There's also a memorable cameo by Dennis Weaver as a twitchy, goggle-eyed motel manager, the kind of surreal touch that often makes the film seem like a bizarre nightmare. With this film, Welles took a rough B-movie plot and elevated into a grand and mesmerizing epic, a morality tale about corruption and self-righteousness.

TOERIFC: Someone To Love

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's selection is courtesy of Ray from Flickhead. Visit his site to see his thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

Towards the end of Henry Jaglom's Someone To Love, Orson Welles, playing an unnamed father figure who arrives mysteriously on the scene to dispense wisdom and prophecies of doom, asks the film's main character Danny (played by Jaglom himself), "why have you imposed this peculiar misery on your friends in a noble institution like the theater?" It's tempting to extend Welles' question, to expand upon it, to ask Jaglom, why have you imposed this misery on your audience? Because Jaglom's film is undoubtedly among the most painful cinematic experiences imaginable, an extended two-hour prediction of the most self-obsessed sitcoms that would arise in subsequent decades to take over the airwaves. Like a particularly unfunny and maudlin episode of its spiritual successor Friends, Jaglom's film spends virtually its entire running time wallowing in the miseries, insecurities and whiny banter of a group of aging show business types, all of them gathered in a dilapidated theater on Valentine's Day by Danny, who wants to create some kind of film/performance art/psychology hybrid by experimenting on his friends and acquaintances. His conceit — and by extension, Jaglom's — is that there is something about his generation, these aging boomers who grew up in the 60s, that makes them particularly susceptible to the condition of loneliness and an inability to make lasting romantic connections. So he gathers together everyone he knows who is going to be alone on Valentine's Day and invites them to a party, which in fact turns out to be some kind of group therapy session where he asks them all about why they're alone, how they feel about being alone, what they think causes them to be alone, and so on.

Yes, it's exactly as aggravating as it sounds, and exactly as solipsistic. Jaglom's work isn't funny enough to be a comedy, and it isn't exciting enough to be a drama, and its characters aren't developed fully enough for it to really work as the kind of Cassavetes-style fly-on-the-wall realism to which it so desperately aspires (Jaglom even namechecks Cassavetes at one point). The result is that nothing really cuts too deep, or makes one laugh, or creates any interesting tension. There are occasional ideas and lines of dialogue that have some heft, a frisson of intellectual vigor and insight into the lives of these people. At one point, Danny delivers a great speech about how the biological origin of loneliness must be intended to drive us towards each other, just as the feeling of hunger drives us to eat. At times like this, Jaglom cuts to the core of the issues he's dealing with, really engaging with his themes at a primal level. The same can be said of Welles' entire cameo appearance, both because Welles is such a powerful actor that his mere presence elevates any film, and because Jaglom gives this father figure some of the film's best material: an edgy, probing investigation of the effects of feminism and the sexual revolution on the nature of modern romantic relationships.

So it's not like the film is intellectually or emotionally bankrupt. There's undoubtedly substance to Jaglom's inquiry into romance, and one senses his sincerity. But he tends to bury his insights in a morass of chatter and nonsense, in a neverending torrent of regurgitated clichés. This might be bearable if the silliness and banality of the dialogue emerged in some way from the characters, if it felt organic to them, but the characters are mostly such flat, cardboard constructions that it's hard to get any sense of them as people at all. Moreover, most of the acting is at such a stagey, mannered, contrived level that it's constantly breaking the fourth wall, even when Jaglom isn't intentionally breaking it by hauling up all kinds of camera equipment onto the stage and having his actors speak to the camera as part of the film within the film. All this artifice is just another hurdle to leap in trying to get closer to Jaglom's ideas and characters (a futile effort, I'm afraid). Even Danny and his afraid-to-commit girlfriend Helen (Andrea Marcovicci), ostensibly the main characters, don't really develop beyond a very surface level: their whole dramatic arc throughout the film can be summarized as Helen being afraid to give up her independence by letting Danny spend the night in her apartment, and by the end making a slight concession that she may change her mind someday. Jaglom is after profound themes and big ideas, but he approaches them through the most mundane route, through the kinds of utter trivialities that could only be of interest to the most committed of solipsists.


Jules Feiffer, a dabbler in film and a masterful cartoonist and playwright, has pretty much perfected the kind of inquiry that Jaglom is after here. In his script for Mike Nichols' bracing Carnal Knowledge, and in countless cartoons for his now-ended weekly newspaper strip, Feiffer has traced the antagonisms and insecurities and self-erected barriers that plague the relationships between men and women in the modern age. Jaglom's dialogue constantly recalls Feiffer, and it's not a favorable comparison. These characters, who speak in self-aware psycho-babble and jittery self-analysis, are the kind of people who Feiffer would satirize and deflate, with merciless wit, in his best cartoons about the gender wars. Jaglom, on the other hand, doesn't want to poke holes in his characters, maybe because he's one of them, so he spends the bulk of his film indulging their whims, listening to their whining, allowing them to spill their utterly prosaic souls. And then, in order to have it both ways, he ushers in Orson Welles to take the piss for a while, to call them out for being whiny and annoying and self-obsessed. It's a welcome change of pace, and Welles basically says everything that any impatient viewer was probably shouting at the screen well before the hour mark, but it doesn't quite take the edge off the film's overall indulgence of such solipsism.

Ultimately, though, what hurts the film the most is not that one is forced to spend so much time with people who only want to look in mirrors, but that Jaglom lacks the cinematic panache — or the inclination — to do something interesting with this cast of bland characters. He's a poor man's Woody Allen, a poor man's Eric Rohmer, a poor man's Jules Feiffer. He's got all of Allen's neuroticism and insecurity, without the humor and visual craftsmanship. He's got Rohmer's inclination towards endless talk, without the French master's wit, emotional subtlety and pictorial sense. He's got Feiffer's archetypal themes and subjects without the insight and satirical bite. Worse, his filmmaking itself is amateurish and uneven. His cutting is inept, displaying all the distracting attributes of a theater director working in film: especially, the awkward reaction shots in which people, supposedly watching something happening nearby, seem to be in an entirely different room or maybe a different building. Sometimes Jaglom's looser moments, mostly involving the camera crew within the film, evoke Cassavetes with the informality and spontaneity of the aesthetic. More often, though, Jaglom's visual sense is stagebound and unimaginative, a perfect complement to his banal writing. It's impossible to watch this film without thinking of all the better films in this general style that one could watch instead. These comparisons are perhaps unfair to Jaglom, but mostly they're a function of boredom: if he'd given his audience something interesting to watch or to think about, they wouldn't have to think about other, better films instead.

Citizen Kane

In lieu of anything more substantial I might have to say about one of the most famous and critically analyzed films of all time, I'm going to limit myself to the progression of its opening, the two minutes of introduction leading up to the film's well-known first word of dialogue: "rosebud." Curiously for the opening of this most famous of films, the silent montage that introduces Orson Welles' first feature Citizen Kane is not quite as iconic as so many other images from the film have become, it has not seeped so thoroughly into pop culture — perhaps because its tone, if not its technique, is so distinct from the bulk of the film. The scene is introduced with economy, restraint, and moody static visuals that suggest a horror film to come: the dark, foreboding castle on the hill, shrouded in wispy tendrils of fog, captured in a series of shots that suggest movement not through fluid motion but by blending one static image into another, each new shot slowly inching in closer until, two minutes later, the camera is actually inside the bedroom of this castle's mysterious, dying owner. In a sense, Kane does become a horror film eventually, or a monster movie even, with Welles lurching around in increasingly thick layers of caked makeup as his bellowing newspaper tycoon ages into a bitter, melancholy old man — but it's not until the finale that the film returns to the quiet, elegiac tone of the introduction.

The series of images of the outside of the castle culminates in a shot of the window to Charles Foster Kane's bedroom, and Welles enacts a remarkable 180-degree change of perspective by subtly fading between this image and its mirror opposite, a shot from inside the room in which the window occupies the same position, except that Kane's bed blocks the lower portion. This fade is so subtle, so effective, that its psychological effect — the reversal from looking in to looking out, the closeness to and curiosity about Kane cultivated by this sudden switch — is felt long before more careful examination of the shots reveals how it was achieved. Even more fascinating is the series of fades that shifts from this long shot to the inside of a snow globe and then out again, to the hand holding it and then dropping it, all leading towards that startling shot in which the maid rushing into the room is fleetingly captured in the reflection from the shattered glass. From the very beginning of the film, in two minutes and just twenty shots, Welles announces his technical artistry, establishes the sad, lonely death of his protagonist, and creates a baseline of emotional quietude that undergirds the film even if it seldom reappears in concrete form.