Flashback: "Citizen Kane"

   The first time I saw "Citizen Kane" was in the early 1960s in the high school gym. It must've been a 16mm print and I'm sure the sound wasn't very good and I was tired and kind of bored. I think I fell asleep. 
    I saw it a few more times in the years that followed. For a young, evolving cinemaphile, it was inevitable. I don't remember catching it on television back then, but I might have, and there would be an occasional screening at one of the campus film societies in Madison. I took an introductory film course my senior year in college, and I'm pretty sure I saw it there. I didn't fall asleep, but it didn't do anything special for me, either, at least not the way that "M*A*S*H" and "Easy Rider" and "The Wild Bunch" did. 
    Then a funny thing happened. It was 1985 and I was staying with some friends in New York City. It was late at night and everybody else had gone to bed and I was in the living room, where I was camping out on the couch, watching television. I caught part of a West Coast baseball game (Don Sutton pitching for the Athletics), and during a commercial break I was flipping through the channels, and suddenly there in luminous black and white were those heavy iron bars and the distant, mist-shrouded specter of Xanadu: the opening shots of "Citizen Kane". 
    So I watched it again, and I wasn't as tired this time as I had been in high school, and I wasn't really working at watching it, I was just watching it, and for the first time it struck me: This movie is fun. I think for a lot of people, that's what goes missing when they watch "Citizen Kane" - the brazen, impish, kid-in-a-candy-store joy and energy that went into making it. 
    Orson Welles was in his mid-20s when he directed "Kane". He'd already stunned the theater world with his voodoo "Macbeth" and the radio universe with "War of the Worlds", and the studio, RKO, famously gave him a blank check to make whatever movie he wanted to, so he did. He took on the life of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, twisted it to his own specifications, kicked it around for a couple of hours, and had a ball. Hearst, crucially, was very much alive at that point, and did everything in his power to have the film destroyed. He failed, but the movie haunted both men forever. (See the 1996 documentary "The Battle Over Citizen Kane".)
    Part of the deal with "Citizen Kane" is that it comes at you with all this ponderous baggage, a reputation as a groundbreaking masterpiece (which it was) and (subject to debate) the greatest motion picture ever made. More than any other American movie, it's one you're supposed to take seriously.
    But here's the thing. It's also a movie intended to entertain: a precocious, self-indulgent extravaganza, an epic, a film noir, a comedy, a creative goof and a deviously fictionalized biopic. It's Orson Welles playing with what he himself called the world's biggest train set. It's a work of genius, sure, but try not to take it too seriously. Imagine it's just a movie, and assuming you're not too tired while you're watching it, you might even find it's, you know, fun.