"Oh Jerry, let's not ask for the moon. We have the stars."
How Green Was My Valley vs. Citizen KaneCountless film critics and cinema historians have lauded Citizen Kane (1941) as being one of the greatest, if not the greatest, movie of all time. Orson Welles’ groundbreaking journalism expose has taken its rightful place on a star-studded list of masterfully made films that have inspired an immense number of filmmakers and entertained an immense number of people. Although not a huge box office smash when it initially came out in 1941, Kane has seen a meteoric rise in popularity over the years. The innovative cinematography that Welles’ was so known for is showcased exquisitely and still proves to be a reference point for many modern directors who cite Orson Welles as a huge trailblazer. Even after being nominated for nine Academy Awards, Citizen Kane did not walk away with the coveted Oscar for Best Picture.
The film that won this highly esteemed award was John Ford’s melodrama about the inner workings of a hard-working Welsh family, How Green Was My Valley. Valley, starring Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp, and a young Roddy McDowall, was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning five of them. With stellar performances from the entire cast and breathtaking cinematography, it’s easy to see why Valley was a smash hit upon first release. John Ford’s masterful direction is visible in this emotionally sweeping tale – direction that Orson Welles himself highly admired. Simon Callow, author of the book Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu, said that Welles watched John Ford’s groundbreaking western, Stagecoach (1939), over 40 times before he filmed Kane. Welles also called Ford “the greatest poet the cinema has given us.” According to noted classic film blogger and journalist, Jessica Pickens: How Green Was My Valley is the worthy Best Picture winner. Kane is grittier,ground-breaking and controversial, but it doesn’t have the beauty and heart that Valley has. The beauty that director John Ford conveys is breath taking, and some scenes are so full of emotion no words have to be spoken. Posterity has decided to take this wonderfully told, poignant film and forever doom it to exist inside of Kane’s long, far-reaching shadow. Citizen Kane has been deemed the pinnacle of filmmaking for so long that no one even challenges the claim any longer. The British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound has ranked Citizen Kane number one greatest film of all time since 1962, and has only bumped it to number two after Hitchcock’s Vertigo beat it out for the top position. (“The Greatest Films of All Time”). This has been going on for so long that no one even challenges it when different people and critics cite Kane as the greatest. Noted film critic Roger Ebert said this about Kane in 2008: All movie critics are asked two inevitable questions: (1) “How many movies do you see in a week?” and (2) “What’s the greatest film of all time?” Gene Siskel found that it didn’t matter what his reply to (1) was: “I can say one or a dozen–it doesn’t matter. The real answer is between four and ten, but they don’t really care.” The answer to (2), as we all know, is Citizen Kane. When naming that film, I sometimes even joke, ‘That’s the official answer.’ The most respected ‘best film’ list in the world is the one the UK film magazine ‘Sight & Sound’ runs every 10 years. They poll the world’s directors, critics, festival heads, archivists and others. Ever since 1962, the top film has been Kane. Another critic of Welles’ work, and Kane in particular, was famous Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Bergman was not a fan of Welles’ overbearing style and felt he was praised too highly. In an excerpt from the Swedish Daily, Bergman comments on the hype surrounding Kane: For me he’s (Welles) just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of – is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable….And I’ve never liked Welles as an actor, because he’s not really an actor. In Hollywood you have two categories, you talk about actors and personalities. Welles was an enormous personality….In my eyes he’s an infinitely overrated filmmaker. How Green Was My Valley is extremely middlebrow and makes no bones about it. Sentimental films tend to get written off for the express fact that sentimentality is often viewed as a manipulative tool filmmakers use to evoke feelings about saccharine subjects. David Bordwell, film professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, commented on why he felt Valley didn’t deserve all the criticism it was garnering for merely “beating Citizen Kane.” Welles recognized that sentiment did not take away from the brilliance of Ford’s best work, and How Green is definitely in that category. Welles was too big an egotist not to have been annoyed at losing the Best Picture award to Ford, but he probably understood why How Green won better than most people do today. Today, apart from groups of women who go to see heartwarming female-oriented fare, audiences tend to shy away from sentimentality. How Green Was My Valley was a very deserved winner of the 1941 Best Picture award because it encompassed many of the same things Citizen Kane is so often praised for in a very successful and artistic way. The dynamic cinematography, long shots, and fantastic editing are all attributes of Valley, and are done in a much more subtle way that the overt flashiness of Kane. Bordwell also said that at the end of Ford’s life, when he was dying of cancer, he was honored at the Director’s Guild and was asked which movie he wanted to project. He chose Valley, citing it as his favorite film. The belief that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie of all time is very deep rooted and long standing, but hopefully since the Vertigo uproot of 2012, people and critics alike will revisit their opinions and give other films a chance instead of clinging to safe, archaic opinions. |
Bonnie & Clyde: The end of an eraAmerica in the 1960s was a time of much social revolution and unrest. A generation of people born after World War II had come of age and were challenging the conventions that had been in place for so long. The Civil Rights movement was starting, the Vietnam War was proving to divide the country the past wars had united, and high-profile assassinations were becoming eerily commonplace. American society was staggering under the overwhelming shifts happening throughout every aspect of culture.
One of the greatest mirrors and reflections of the changes happening in the country was the great golden city on the hill, Hollywood. The old screen gods were getting older, their age showing in the oftentimes-harsh light of Technicolor, and new ones were springing up to take their place. Filmmakers looking to capitalize on the newfound unrest were shattering the old, longstanding taboos of sex and violence. The New Hollywood movement, also know as the American New Wave, officially started in the late 60s, but the unmistakable changes began much earlier with the slow but total erosion of the Production Code, a restrictive moral code that dictated the content in films released in America. The Production Code was finally eradicated in 1967. The decade was ushered in with one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most controversial thrillers, Psycho (1960). This film, from the very opening scene, pushed the boundaries of what had previously been shown on-screen. The racy content was meant to titillate and shock viewers, with instances of Janet Leigh in varying states of undress to the infamous shower scene. Hitchock’s masterpiece just barely got past the censors but set the precedent for a new type of filmmaking in Hollywood. Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is a crime drama and pseudo biopic of the infamous Depression-era gangster duo, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, winning Best Supporting Actress and Best Cinematography. The landmark film turned criminals into sympathetic anti-heroes and pushed boundaries never before broached. The climactic shootout scene at the end of the movie is legendary for its painfully explicit portrayal of gun violence – previously unseen on film. The American Film Institute placed Bonnie & Clyde number 42 on their “100 Years… 100 Movies List,” cementing its place in eternal pop culture history. On December 8th, 1967, Time magazine released an issue with the cover announcing, “The New Cinema: Violence… Sex… Art” with a picture from Bonnie And Clyde. Inside the magazine is an article entitled “The Shock of Freedom in Films” that declares Bonnie and Clyde to be a “watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend.” The article went on to talk about how by pairing critical controversy with mainstream success, Bonnie and Clyde was proving that Hollywood was going through a period of great artistic achievement based this widespread experimentation. The two main characters in Bonnie and Clyde are distinctly antihero with no fluctuation whatsoever. Movie audiences were used to seeing the subtle metamorphosis of the antihero into hero and grew accustomed to this pattern. Humphrey Bogart became famous with antihero turned hero movies such as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. Film critic Pauline Kael, in an article defending Bonnie and Clyde against critics, said: Our best movies have always made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life; they bring to the surface what, in its newest forms and fashions, is always just below the surface. The romanticism in American movies lies in the cynical tough guy’s independence; the sentimentality lies, traditionally, in the falsified finish when the anti-hero turns her. In 1967, this kind of sentimentality wouldn’t work with the audience, and Bonnie and Clyde substitutes sexual fulfillment for a change of heart. The distinctly brutal and beautifully tragic aspects of the film are masked in the strangely comic execution, pairing almost ludicrous banjo music with borderline slapstick violence. The comic tone the film takes early on betrays little of the graphic violence that is to be portrayed later on. Kael went on to talk in her article about going to a screening of the film and hearing a woman in front of her gleefully exclaim to her companions “It’s a comedy. It’s a comedy,” before growing quieter as the film progressed. Everyone knows what happens to Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, there is no twist ending in their story. Stacy Peebles of the Journal of Film & video stated: The title characters were beautiful, ruthless, and doomed, and they died onscreen in a way that was radically different from the brief and bloodless expiration that viewers had anticipated. Instead, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as Bonnie and Clyde rolled and jerked in gory slow motion as a multitude of bullets sprayed their bodies, and American film gained a new and lasting phrase for its lexicon of violent cinematic death. The Hollywood that made the film Bonnie & Clyde possible was going through many intense changes. Geoff King, author of New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, said the changes that were facilitating this American New Wave cinema movement were happening on both the production and consumption levels. King went on to say that these changes alone could not wholly contribute to this movement, and a lot of the credit goes to the financial crisis Hollywood saw themselves in with the falling audience that haunted cinema in the 1960s. Niche films began to be made targeted solely to “adult” audiences, and huge lavish productions such as The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, and Cleopatra. Bonnie and Clyde came out at the tail end of Hollywood’s illustrious, star-studded golden age, a period that began in the 1930s and ended in 1970. In a society being torn apart by civil unrest and war, Hollywood redefined itself yet again with a new generation of filmmakers, ideas, and stars that heavily impacted the direction American cinema would continue to take. |