Roger Ebert’s one and only favourite movie of all time: “I’ve seen it 75 times at least”
When someone asks you what your favourite movie is, do you pick the film that makes you look the most intelligent and worldly, or how about the one that you’re not as proud to admit you’ve watched about 30 times?
Favourite movies are such a personal thing, and revealing the one you hold closest to your heart can feel like an incredibly revealing act, like someone has pried open a part of your brain, and in the case of film critic Roger Ebert, it’d be the face of Orson Welles and the word “rosebud”.
His iconic 1941 film Citizen Kane is considered one of the ultimate achievements in cinema, pioneering new storytelling techniques and subsequently paving the way for damn-near every movie that has come after it, with Welles, who was just 25 at the time, writing, directing, and starring in a project that would absolutely change cinema.
I mean, when the Guardian reviewed the movie upon its release, its large impact immediately became clear. “Citizen Kane is like no other film that you have ever seen. It uses camera and microphone as though their functions had been discovered for the first time. Perhaps they have. It is so vast in content, so economic in style that watching it, you can never afford to relax,” wrote CA Lejeune, 85 years ago.
Almost a century later, the film remains revered, its beautiful cinematography still groundbreaking and its elegant dalliance with various genres – biopic, mystery, suspense, political drama – simply unforgettable. Ebert adores the movie, and in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he picked it as his all-time favourite. “I’ve seen it 75 times at least,” he said.
Reflecting on his love for the movie in a 1998 review, Ebert sang the praises of the timeless film. “It is one of the miracles of cinema that in 1941, a first-time director, a cynical, hard-drinking writer, an innovative cinematographer, and a group of New York stage and radio actors were given the keys to a studio and total control, and made a masterpiece.”
He continued, “Citizen Kane is more than a great movie; it is a gathering of all the lessons of the emerging era of sound, just as Birth of a Nation assembled everything learned at the summit of the silent era, and 2001 pointed the way beyond narrative. These peaks stand above all the others.”
So, for its transformative effect on cinema, Ebert has continuously come back to Citizen Kane. In fact, in another article celebrating its 50-year anniversary, he detailed just how intensely he has studied the movie over the years. “I’ve seen Kane at least 50 times on 16mm, videotape and laserdisc. I have gone through it a scene at a time, using a stop-frame film analyser, at least 25 times in various film classes and at festivals.”
Citizen Kane is an indelible masterpiece, and Ebert believes its power will live on. “50 years later, it is as fresh, as provoking, as entertaining, as funny, as sad, as brilliant as it ever was,” he wrote.
