[Though] I expected The Trial to be bad, I went to it truly hoping for the best. And, in fact, though I expected it to be bad, bad as a mannerist painting can be bad, bad, for instance, as Welles's Othello is bad, I had not been expecting the worst; I had not expected that it might be boring. Orson Welles boring! And boring to stupefaction. (p. 162)
It is possible, perhaps, to dismiss Citizen Kane as little more than a bag of tricks, good tricks but tricks nonetheless; yet, although much of that film's excitement does derive from the sheer exuberance and audacity—real audacity—of its exploration of the medium's techniques, to regard the work as only this is, I think, considerably to underestimate it. But one may concede the case of Citizen Kane, and still there is The Magnificent Ambersons, a less perfect work, perhaps; also, I think, a finer one. Beginning with its apparently random and casual collection of nostalgic images of bygone styles in clothes and motorcars, like so many snapshots from a family album, the film quietly deepens and extends itself into an almost achingly sorrowful picture of a vanished style of life, and of irrecoverable loss, and, in so doing, manages to achieve what Citizen Kane, in all its brilliant eclecticism, never does: a unified style of its own. And it is style as practiced by a film-maker capable of raising style to the level at which it becomes indistinguishable from genius.
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