PRECISION STRIKES
MY FAVORITE MOMENT IN CITIZEN KANE HAS nothing to do with deep focus or low angles or antique sleds. It’s the scene where Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), Kane’s kindhearted business manager, recalls a day in 1896 when he spotted a girl with a white parasol on a ferry about to dock as his own was pulling away. “I only saw her for one second,” he muses. “She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.” Bernstein is an incurable romantic, but he’s learned—as only one can, the hard way—that a momentous encounter doesn’t need a lot of time, or a lot of talk, or even a shred of context, to become enshrined in the memory. Sometimes one second is enough.
And sometimes, in the case of a movie, one scene is plenty. When performer and material are simpatico, screen time hardly matters; our sojourn with them is no less resonant for its brevity, and quite often more so. As long as we’re on Kane, consider Agnes Moorehead’s fleeting appearance as the future tycoon’s near-somnambulant mother, signing him over to a banker’s custody with no outward emotion, but suggesting the source of her fugue state by resolving to send the boy where his father “can’t get at him.” Many critics including Roger Ebert have suggested that Moorehead gives the film’s greatest performance, despite putting less than four minutes on the clock, as it were. Why, then, must our fealty to a star system—one that periodically changes its face but never loosens its grip—prevent us from fully acknowledging the contributions of sub-supporting actors, or thinking of them in more nuanced terms than that of the cameo, with its connotation of guest stars winking their way to a fast paycheck?
Indeed, I couldn’t tell you whodunit in Hawks’s , but my mind’s eye returns to Dorothy Malone’s amorous—singing “La Marseillaise” defiantly as tears stream down her cheeks. Unsurprisingly, we seem to get the tangiest micro-performances whenever the reigning caste of movie stars is at its most stolid or self-regarding. The late ’80s and early ’90s—a time when Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Cruise held sway at the box office—gave us such vivid personages as Dean Stockwell’s gatekeeper to a nocturnal netherworld in ; Forest Whitaker’s youngblood pool shark, blithely outhustling the hustler in ; Donald Sutherland’s velvet-voiced purveyor of intrigue in ; and Tom Waits’s philosophical beggar (“kind of a moral traffic light”) in . Justly or not, the best-remembered scene in the 1992 film version of is one that did not exist in Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play: Alec Baldwin’s vitriolic motivator explaining the rules of the new office sales contest, in which third prize is unemployment.
