May 6th, 2015 is the one hundredth birthday of the great Orson Welles, and tonight, even though it’s not quite his birthday yet, TCM is airing Citizen Kane and Magnificent Ambersons back to back. After that it’s Orson in Jane Eyre and then Too Much Johnson, his short from 1938. Fellow Morlock Kimberly Lindbergs gave us a great piece on Welles yesterday (which you can read here) so this post isn’t about Welles, really (except in small part), it’s about the first director you love and where you go from there. You see, Welles was the first director that I really, truly fell in love with. Several followed and I can trace the course of my journey clearly still. You never forget your first.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
When I started reading about movies in the encyclopedia way back around the age of six or seven, I immediately starting seeing certain titles crop up again and again. Citizen Kane was one of them and I took note that, starting with the 1962 Sight and Sound Poll, it was always ranked number 1 (prior to that, in the 1952 poll, it had been The Bicycle Thief, aka, Bicycle Thieves). That fascinated me well enough but what happened when I finally saw it wasn’t what I thought. Given that these were the dark days before VCRs or even cable, seeing Citizen Kane took longer than expected. I had to either wait for it to show up somewhere or wait for technology to allow me to watch it whenever I wanted. It took long enough that technology became the answer and I first saw it by renting it on tape. Now I said that I didn’t expect the reaction I had when I first saw it and here’s why: I was already well on my way to being a stereotypical cynical teenager who didn’t like much of anything. You know the routine: See a highly praised classic movie, shrug your shoulders, say something like, “What’s all the fuss,” and pat yourself on the back for being so intellectually superior. So, too, with Citizen Kane, I thought for sure I’d play the usual know-it-all contrarian and declare that it was no big deal. Instead, I found myself saying, “Wow, I can totally understand its reputation. That was fantastic!” Then I saw Ambersons, then The Lady from Shanghai, then pretty much every other Welles movie I could find. Then I started reading every bio out there and watching every interview.
Soon, I found myself seeking out other directors whose movies I’d read about and found myself latching on to all the obvious ones, the ones you would expect someone starting to study film to latch onto: David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, and so on. And this was at a time when they were all still putting out movies, except for Hitch whose last movie, Family Plot, never had a follow up I could look forward to but I did enjoy watching the AFI Lifetime Achievement award get presented to him in 1979. But I didn’t necessarily love them all, even if I liked the work. David Lean was different. Like Welles, his work really hit me square in the chest. From Great Expectations to This Happy Breed and Brief Encounter to Bridge on the River Kwai, it seemed every Lean I watched I loved. In the late seventies I looked forward to his take on Mutiny on the Bounty when I read that he was working on his own version but that eventually fell through the cracks (Roger Donaldson took over direction and it’s a version I like very much, Lean or no Lean). I transferred my enthusiasm to A Passage to India but, even though I thought it was very good, never quite grabbed me like my other Lean favorites, Brief Encounter and Bridge on the River Kwai.
Then I started moving on to the directors that seemed more associated with good, solid Hollywood cinema and two really stuck out for me, William Dieterle and Michael Curtiz. Once I saw Portrait of Jennie, directed by Dieterle, I had to see more. By the time I saw The Devil and Daniel Webster, I knew I’d found an instant lifelong favorite, in both movie and director. With Michael Curtiz, the first entry was obvious, Casablanca, but it was his thirties movies, like Doctor X, Mystery of the Wax Museum, Captain Blood, The Kennel Murder Case, and The Adventures of Robin Hood that made Curtiz the first director to truly challenge Orson Welles as my all time favorite. To this day, I think I love them both equally.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The thing that happened with Curtiz is what happened with many directors I’d read about. I’d see their biggest movie and then discover that they did so many other movies that I liked better. One of the biggest examples of that phenomenon was the case of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. In the film books of the seventies and eighties, all I read about from those two was The Red Shoes. It was as if that was the only movie they ever made. I saw it, naturally, and liked it very much but didn’t find myself so head over heels that I immediately wanted to seek out everything else they did. Then one day I saw Black Narcissus and, wow, I was taken aback. Next up was I Know Where I’m Going and then, finally, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Even now, I can remember my reaction: I was floored. I still consider Blimp one of the best movies I’ve ever seen and rank the work of Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook in the movie as two of the best performances I’ve ever seen. And, seriously, Livesey’s may actually be the best.
From there, the cinema as a whole just kind of took over. There are dozens of other directors, from Chaplin to Renoir and Ozu to Scorsese, whose work I love and admire and have relished over the years. But if I had to call out my first true love, it would be Welles, then Lean, followed by Dieterle, Curtiz, and finally, Powell and Pressburger. That would be my top five (or six if you count Powell and Pressburger separately) and they are largely responsible for my continuing love of the cinema. It may not be the most interesting list of directors in the world, or the most diverse (hell, they all directed English language movies for one thing), but they’re my first loves. They’ll stay in my heart forever, no matter how many other directors follow.