Whenever Citizen Kane comes to town (as it is tonight at the Heights Theater, in glorious 35mm), people are usually surprised to hear me say that this is my favorite movie. Everyone has a favorite movie, but when I mention this one is mine, I get odd looks–you really like The Greatest Film of All Time? This certainly adds to the reputation I have for being a pretentious jerk who can’t enjoy fun movies, which is perhaps true. But I tell you, Citizen Kane is fun, so much fun.

Kane was meant to be fun. It was meant to be a rollicking entertainment, much like Welles’ great stage productions: thrilling, heartbreaking, sexy, heroic, romantic, tragic… all the things I assume you find in superhero movies, except in this case the superheroes are young actors who often wear make-up that is intended to make them look old. They’re having a blast making this movie, and if you can go in thinking of this as a romp, as a critique of power and the arrogance of old age, as a story of a hope and then disillusionment, you’ll enjoy yourself. I was lucky: I first saw Kane when I was 10, and didn’t know I was seeing the G.O.A.T.; I was just watching a bizarre black and white movie at a monstrous movie palace that was a far cry from the sterile, cinderblock mall theaters I was used to.

On that first magical viewing, Kane wasn’t a story so much as an experience, a marvel of insane black-and-white cinematography and odd, often contorted faces, and those rooms, the dark and shadowy rooms where secrets were kept. Cramped offices, expansive mansions, seedy bars, apartments filled with bric-a-brac. So little of it takes place outdoors–it’s all a movie set, adding to its fractured reality. And sadness, so much sadness—I’d never seen this in a movie before, other than maudlin Disney films like Old Yeller or the crocodile tears of Star Wars, when someone dies but usually comes back to life somehow, either as themselves or some weird ghost whose destiny is to coach the living. The only thing that made sense to me at that age was to compare Kane to The Little Prince, because as much as I loved Saint-Exupery’s story, it was the saddest thing I’d ever experienced. In Saint-Exupery’s book, the Little Prince visits despondent adults on their barren asteroids, watching them grind through their existences, leaving the young boy baffled at the isolating worlds of adulthood. In Kane, so, too, does the reporter Thompson wander to these figurative asteroids, trying to get the bottom of Charles Foster Kane, the saddest and most foolish adult there was. And in the end: fire.

Seeing that movie then was like having a secret, a secret of a wonderful story. There were no VCRs yet (or at least none for sale in my small town of Mt. Pleasant, Michigan) and it wasn’t on TV. Also, this was also not a secret any friend of mine at age ten would appreciate. But I thought about it for a long time, turning it over in my head. God, how I wish you and everyone else new to Citizen Kane could see it in the same way.

Kane is funny, a great parody of newsreels and the power of the mainstream press, and with Bernard Herrmann’s crazy score, the choreography of movement in every scene, it has an energy that is simply infectious. Welles was at his most charming and most ponderous–he’s not a modern actor, he’s a booming thespian, and it works perfectly here. And the way in which youth confronts age and power is, to me, one of its great attractions.

Consider this scene: the Walter Parks Thatcher Memorial Library, as hilarious a send up of the arrogance of wealth you’ll ever see. The reporter Thompson, trying to understand Kane, visits the place to see if Thatcher, the guardian who adopted Kane as a child, has any insight in his diaries. Look at this place: a massive marble statue of the “great” financier Walter Parks Thatcher, who presides over a poor librarian, who works in a lobby big enough to hold a dozen elephants (standing on top of one another), beneath the towering statue of Thatcher, an unpleasant man to look at in life, much less in marble. Through a slowly opening steel door, she leads Thompson into another giant room, where a guard has gingerly removed the one volume that exists there, and placed it, with barely muted excitement, on the table where the reporter will sit. In this room is the door through which they entered, a distant safe holding the manuscript, and a window so high all it is capable of doing is creating a noir-like atmosphere of light cutting through darkness, no way for anyone to look out, or in. Thompson is instructed that he may only read a certain section pertaining to Charles Foster Kane. Why would he read anything else? The diary is slim, and there’s only one volume–this man’s life barely fills what looks like around 200 pages, but is housed in a marble edifice that could hold thousands of books, which will be ignored for generations.

As I get older, one of the things I love about Kane is the power of its youth. This is a film made by young people–Wells 26; screenwriter Mankiewicz was 44 (older but not an old man, though drinking aged and eventually killed him); the cast of the Mercury Theater, which Welles founded with whom he peopled this film, were all young kids for the most part. The energy in the first half of the movie, of Kane buying his newspaper and shaking it free from its hidebound old men is a perfect metaphor for the making of Citizen Kane, as Welles and his band of merrymakers came in and shook up RKO in a similar fashion. I can imagine many of the stuffed suits in the movie industry reminded Orson Welles very much of Walter Parks Thatcher, and I’m sure he reveled in sending up the biggest stuffed shirt in America, William Randolph Hearst.

But as the young man behind the myth, Welles had also suffered. By 26, when he made Kane, he had seen his father descend into alcoholism, lose his fortune, and then his mother die from hepatitis when he was nine-years old. He had a guardian, who worked with the drunken father to raise Welles, and part of that meant spending time in a boarding school that Welles supposedly adored. But even the best boarding schools can be awful places at times, and Welles must certainly have spent a good deal of time reminiscing about those early years when he had a home with his mother, long forgotten brother, and sober father in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Though it is looked upon as something that seems to have sprung directly from the mind of Welles, Citizen Kane is a film of wonderful collaboration, which you can admire on the screen. (Welles contributed to this myth, Pauline Kael tried to explode it, as did David Fincher in the inexplicably awful Mank.) Welles worked with geniuses left and right: from Gregg Toland, the cinematographer who taught him about camerawork (and whose name appears on the same title card as Welles the director–who else would do that?) to actors Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Cotten and Everett Sloane, to Herman Mankiewicz and Bernard Herrmann. All of these people added little touches to their roles, Sloane’s Bernstein at once a sycophant and yet perhaps the wisest of the old men; Moorehead’s voice breaking as she calls her son to her for the last time; the art direction, by the incredibly named Van Nest Polglase, is astounding–forget Xanadu, the offices of the Inquirer, the sparse cabin where young Charles grew up, Susan’s cramped apartment… everything looks lived in completely, places where our characters engage with themselves, with the world, with their own imaginations.

Sadly, a once every-ten-year poll in the British magazine Sight & Sound, ranking the supposedly great movies of history, has saddled Citizen Kane with the title of “The Greatest Film Ever Made” for almost fifty years until Vertigo upended it nearly a decade ago (the next one’s coming out in 2022). But the damage is done–no one’s going to talk about Vertigo as the greatest, but they will continue to burden Kane with this title. This is in part because fewer people care about these stupid lists, which is good. I’m curious as to whether or not these critics who put it on their list love Kane as a movie, or if they’re weighing in on its place in the cinematic firmament. Sure, it works there, too–most film noir owes its look to Gregg Toland’s cinematography, the French New Wave adored Welles, the broken narrative’s been copied again and again. But when I say Kane is my favorite, it’s because of my personal connection with it… and the fact that, to this day, and after probably two dozen viewings, it remains tremendously entertaining and moving to me. It reminds me of time spent with my father, of the various theaters in which I’ve seen it, such as the Temple in Saginaw and the Oak Street Cinema, Trylon microcinema (where I was fortunate to project it on 35mm) and now the Heights Theater, all in Minnesota. And the various times I’ve watched it at home. I’ll end up buying the new Criterion Blu-ray and watching it at home, late at night, and fall asleep dreaming of the mysterious beach party with the tents and the screaming animated birds, the roasted pig, and the hysterical laughter–or terror–of some distant woman.

Once, a long time ago, before there were film polls in English movie magazines, someone saw this movie, at a theater when it opened in 1941 or on TV, maybe late at night, and they’d perhaps never heard of it before. And they were astounded–it’s always incredible to see something great you’ve never heard of before, it makes life seem so full of possibility. Maybe one of these lucky souls counted this as their favorite movie, tried to tell people about it and then, maybe at first, got excited when it was named “the greatest”. My favorite film is the greatest! But that couldn’t have lasted long, because now the recommendation sounds to friends like it’s coming from a know-it-all. It makes the film itself a chore, an assignment. And that’s sad.

So I beg of you: watch the movie. Try and forget its burden and see it as a film of youth, raging against the machines, burning down the houses so they can build their own. Go see it on the big screen where it can envelope you as movies so often can in the dark, with strangers. Once it wasn’t the Greatest Film of All Time. Maybe someday it’ll be someone’s favorite movie. Again.