I haven’t ever counted them all, but I am sure I have about 200 movies on VHS, plus collections of TV episodes (mostly Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lois and Clark – yes, your humble host at this page is a closet geek.). In contrast to that, I own 4 DVDs, three of which I received for Christmas. The fourth one is CITIZEN KANE. For anybody just starting a DVD collection, I cannot recommend this new release highly enough.
Forget about the fact that it has been voted, rightly or wrongly, as The Best Film Ever Made on Planet Earth dozens of times by many different organizations. If it isn’t the best (and for me, it isn’t) it is certainly in the top ten. And even if you don’t think it belongs in the top ten, you have to admit that it is a beautiful example of extremely creative filmmaking. On that level alone, it deserves a place in every DVD-philes collection.
The print itself is the best I have ever seen and brings new depth to Welle’s frame compositions and camera angles. If you’ve only seen this film on television, you have not seen it yet. The latest video release is wonderful, but the DVD is much sharper.
With some films, you wonder why anybody would bother include a commentary track (does anybody really care what the director of AMERICAN PIE was thinking at the time he made that piece of trash?), but with a film like CITIZEN KANE, you could have 20 different commentary tracks by 20 different people and still not exhaust the opinions about the film. It is unfortunate that Orson Welles, the film’s director and star, is no longer with us to give us his side of the issue, but the DVD contains what I consider the next best thing – two separate commentaries by two very intelligent film fans: critic Roger Ebert and director and Welles biographer Peter Bogdanovich.
I have not listened to the Bogdanovich film yet, but since he is the director or one of my favorite unsung classics – TARGETS (1968) – I will be getting to him soon. But the Ebert commentary was so insightful, so fun and so full of wonderful information, I felt like I should have paid tuition to hear it. He points out many things about the film that I have never noticed before, and I have seen KANE at least 20 times. Ebert is an intelligent guy who loves movies, and even if I don’t always agree with him about the merits of certain movies, I always like to hear what he has to say.
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