Orson Welles
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There Will Be Blood (2007)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by Citizen Kane (1941)
Themes Visuals
We're variously reminded of Greed, Citizen Kane, Days of Heaven, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and even Werner Herzog's oil-fire documentary, Lessons of Darkness — all better movies on similar themes.
Then again, Day-Lewis' oversized turn is right in line with Paul Thomas Anderson's oversized ambitions in creating a modern-day masterpiece, a movie so audacious that it flagrantly apes Citizen Kane during its final half-hour and recalls The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at regular intervals.
He references other films--CHINATOWN and CITIZEN KANE most notably--yet this too is a way of showing the timelessness of the examined themes.
Altman’s contributions to modern filmmaking, especially of the American independent type, are so vast and so liberating that it would be almost as limiting for a serious young American director to try to avoid them as it would have been for a silent filmmaker to work without reference to D. W. Griffith or a studio director of the ’40s and ’50s to avoid referencing Citizen Kane.
It evokes passing comparisons to everything from "Giant" to "Citizen Kane" but it's impossible to pigeonhole.
Plainview's only goal in life is to become enormously wealthy, and he does so, reminding me of " Citizen Kane " and Mr. Bernstein's observation, "It's easy to make a lot of money, if that's all you want to do is make a lot of money."
Jodorowsky's Dune (2013)
Directed by Frank Pavich
influenced by Touch of Evil (1958), Don Quixote (1992), Citizen Kane (1941), F for Fake (1973)
Visuals Themes
The film's first shot, inspired by the three-minute opening of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, would send the camera "traversing the whole universe" until it landed on the Dune planet.
The movie features ample explication of his designs, including an opening shot designed to top Orson Welles's " Touch of Evil " and a spectacular Harkonnen fortress that, artist H.R. Giger admits, wasn't actually in the novel.
The director planned to stake his claim on greatness from the movie’s opening shot, a Touch Of Evil–inspired long take that would begin in the far reaches of the galaxy and appear to track all the way down to ground level.
He’s mesmerizing when he describes his camera following a “spiritual” insemination after a castrated man’s wife turns a drop of blood into semen, or when he rhapsodizes over his intergalactic take on the turbulent journey through Tijuana at the start of Welles’ “Touch of Evil” – an influence that probably made him think of using Welles in his own movie.
A beautiful dream, ruined, is the theme of Pavich's film and of two other movies about unfinished movies: the 1965 The Epic That Never Was, detailing Josef von Sternberg's attempt to film Robert Grave's I, Claudius with Charles Laughton as the Roman emperor, and the 2002 Lost in La Mancha, outlining Terry Gilliam's troubles with filming Don Quixote, which was to star Jean Rochefort as Quixote and Johnny Depp as Sancho Panza.
Who could possibly rally the egos of H.R. Giger (Alien concept artist), Orson Welles (Citizen Kane), Mœbius, Salvidor Dali (renowned Surrealist artist), Mick Jagger (Rolling Stones frontman), Dan O’Bannon (Writer of Alien), David Carradine (star of Kung Fu), Pink Floyd and Magma to tackle one of the world’s most seminal science fiction novels Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965)?
John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)
Directed by Chad Stahelski
influenced by The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
Visuals
John Wick: Chapter 2 also has a very good humor about itself, with details such as the hotel’s sommelier really being a gun dealer, showing the inner workings of the international phone and banking network that gets set in play as soon as a contract is taken out on a life, words and phrases suddenly flashed on the screen, and a wild sequence set at an art exhibition that becomes an obvious tribute to Orson Welles’ hall of mirrors in The Lady From Shanghai.
He and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, who were behind the first film, crib from sources as diverse as Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai and video games, but they consistently find entertainingly unlikely ways for their title character to survive or vanquish his foes.
Their final battle amid a museum installation of mirrors plays like a gonzo and grisly twist of the classic climax of the 1941 noir, “The Lady From Shanghai.”
Wick has to run a gauntlet of them—including Cassian—before tracking down Santino to an art gallery where, amid hundreds of mirrors, windows and multi-colored strobe lights (which, despite all the flamboyance, still can’t hold a candle to the closing sequence from “The Lady from Shanghai”), he must annihilate yet another small army of opponents with guns and martial-arts moves, including D’Antonio’s chief enforcer, a mute named Ares (Ruby Rose), who is presented as something special but proves, in the final analysis, to be both inept and totally incapable of matching John blow for blow.
Or that a long set piece in an art museum is based on the mirror-maze shoot-out in Orson Welles’s “The Lady From Shanghai”?
The movie’s brilliant climax, set in a labyrinthine hall of mirrors in blatant tribute to Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai,” proves the extent to which the filmmakers know their stuff.
Suggested by a Dostoevsky novella, but set in an entirely created world in which only the language makes any reference to the place moviegoers will reenter once they exit the theater, and paying homage to the likes of " Brazil ," Orson Welles ’ "The Trial," and "Eraserhead" within its first five minutes, "The Double" insists upon its bona fides with a will and makes you like it.
Richard Ayoade is the writer and director of this oddball film which is based on the 1846 Dostoevsky novella The Double and brings to mind Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Orson Wells' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial .
I thought of Orson Welles' Kafka adaptation "The Trial," in which Anthony Perkins runs in place as the world around relentlessly persecutes him without explanation.
And while the film may be based on Dostoyevsky, it’s just as much in debt to Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, an absurdist nightmare of prison cell apartments and inhumane authorities seeking to trap the only seemingly sane man alive.
Starting off at break-neck speed with a Mexican-based opening sequence that is grandiose, luscious and just downright absorbing (while also paying homage to Touch Of Evil ), Spectre then follows this up with a number of captivating action set-pieces that just about match the opener, but never top it.
There are echoes here of Orson Welles’ Touch Of Evil in a roving sequence which runs for minutes without cutting before culminating in explosive fashion.
Spectre opens in Mexico City — a Day of the Dead festival in full swing — streets crowded with partying skeletons, and director Sam Mendes celebrating the dead in his own way with a nifty Orson Welles tribute: A Touch of Evil-style tracking shot that has no obvious edits for at least five minutes as it follows Bond (Daniel Craig) and a gorgeous brunette (Stephanie Sigman) from the costumed parade route into a hotel, up in a crowded elevator to a well-appointed room where she settles seductively on a bed — only to watch him zip out onto a roof ledge with a quick shirt cuff adjustment, and murder on his mind.
This, after a promising start, when director Sam Mendes (“Skyfall”) delivers a terrific pre-title sequence straight out of Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil,” as Hoyte Van Hoytema’s camera tracks through Mexico City’s Zocalo square, where thousands dressed in skeletal costumes are celebrating the Day of the Dead.
With Spectre — the twenty-fourth James Bond picture and the fourth and probably final one to feature Daniel Craig as 007 — director Sam Mendes takes a tip, perhaps unwittingly, from Hitchcock, as well as from Orson Welles's Touch of Evil: The picture opens in Mexico City with a regal, ambitious, Wellesian tracking shot that begins in the midst of a Day of the Dead parade and eventually finds its way to Craig's Bond, standing in the crowd.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Visuals
They may be unfair, but I prefer Orson Welles' method in The Magnificent Ambersons, one of the obvious inspirations for the Tenenbaums.
Inspired by Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" and stories by J. D. Salinger, Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson locate their family story in a tall New York house.
It seems unfair to compare most any movie to Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers or to Touch of Evil, but this one begs for such through, for example, specific reference to that latter, also 1950s Welles thriller.
The writer-director incorporates a scene from the 1958 Orson Welles classic Touch of Evil to show where he's at in terms of crime drama, meaning get ready to have the rug pulled out from under you.
But neither the dank criminality nor the clip from Touch of Evil makes In Bruges noir any more than the hints of surrealism make it Fellini.
The Master (2012)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by Citizen Kane (1941)
Characters Themes Visuals
Hoffman's portrayal of a man with iconic aspirations, in love with the sound of his own voice as he drops pearls of wisdom, recalls Ernest Hemingway, or Orson Welles in "Citizen Kane."
While Dodd is clearly modeled on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, The Master is not particularly interesting as a veiled depiction of that much-disputed quasi-religious movement (much as Citizen Kane does not derive its primary powers from its parallels with media baron William Randolph Hearst).
Like “Citizen Kane,” “The Master” invites frame-by-frame analysis.
There are certainly passages of the sort of “Citizen Kane” ambition you expect from Anderson here, not least in the memorable leading performances by Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix and the magnificent wide-screen cinematography of Mihai Malaimare Jr., a new collaborator for Anderson.
Interested in neither satire nor Citizen Kane-esque excoriation of a public figure, the picture seeks instead to present belief systems and seekers of truth as ridiculous before the sharpness of knowledge gained through experience.
On paper, there's a lot that could by said by this scenario - on paper, the film is saying it - it could explore the psychic dislocation of the American male in the years after World War II; it could study the sociology behind the self-help movements that began around that time, partially in response to that same dislocation; it could be a critical but not condemnatory look at the founding of the disproportionately influential cult of Scientology that sort of forms the inspiration for The Cause (The Master is "about" Scientology to roughly the same extent that Citizen Kane is "about" William Randolph Hearst); it could examine the appeal of pseudoscientific philosophy in the middle of what was meant to be the most rational century of human history.
Travolta, who has been working up a movie idea of his own, and has a near-encyclopedic recall of great movies (from Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil" to "Rio Lobo"), smells a great opportunity.
It pays homage to scrappy "B" movies, Orson Welles' great noir Touch of Evil, and the films of Howard Hawks (Rio Bravo), who no doubt would have been the first one to enjoy Get Shorty.
At one point, he takes in a screening of Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil," and the boyish delight he gets from its climax suddenly makes him look 20 years younger.
The caging recalls that of Iago, at the end of Orson Welles’s “ Othello ” (1955), and, as “Outlaw King” arrives at its weltering climax, a frenzy of mudbound slaughter, the echo is of Welles’s “ Chimes at Midnight ”(1967).
Enter the Dragon (1973)
Directed by Robert Clouse
influenced by The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
Visuals
You can find more reflections of the Bond series in the music of Lalo Schifrin and in the villain's artificial, Dr. No-like hand and his Blofeld white cat; and you'll see literal reflections of Orson Welles's "The Lady from Shanghai" in the climactic mirror scene.
And that it borrows heavily from a half-dozen other round-eye action films, especially "The Lady from Shanghai" with its replicating mirror sequence, the borrowings coming damn close to plagiarism.
I dislike the gimmick, at least at this length; staying on a single take creates a sense of hanging in midair as we wonder when we’ll finally hit the ground, and it works beautifully for a single scene like the opening of Spectre or Touch of Evil (1958) , the Orson Welles film that inspired all subsequent one-take sorcery.
“Touch of Evil” opens with the most famous “long take” in cinema history.
This technique has been used in several films whether for long sequences, as in the opening of Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” (1958), or entire films, like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” (1948) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s more recent “Birdman” (2014).
The King (2019)
Directed by David Michôd
influenced by Chimes at Midnight (1965)
Plot Themes Characters
In one of several nods to Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (aka Falstaff), Falstaff becomes the moral center of the movie and the fictional figure stringing together bits of history and scraps of storylines from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I and II and Henry V. (This film’s Battle of Agincourt at times resembles Welles’s Battle of Shrewsbury.)
For fellow members of the Shakespeare on Film Fan Club, it complements Orson Welles’ 1965 film Chimes at Midnight and its take on the Henry plays.
There will never be a greater movie Falstaff than Orson Welles, the star and brightly burning center of his own 1965 Chimes at Midnight.
Also sidestepping a poorly attempted replication of the ultimate version of his character (Orson Welles in “Chimes at Midnight,” that is) Edgerton as a larger-than-life, irritable yet subtle Falstaff wisely reminds Hal the reality of his situation: “A king has no friends.
“The King” tells a version of their story that falls somewhere between “Henry V,” most recently filmed to great and glorious effect by Kenneth Branagh, and Orson Welles’ 1960s compression of the “Henriad” plays about Hal and Falstaff, “Chimes at Midnight.”
The Henry plays have been adapted to the screen before, including Welles’s dazzling “Chimes at Midnight” (he plays Falstaff) and Gus Van Sant’s liberal appropriation (or bowdlerization) for “My Own Private Idaho.”
The Irishman (2019)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced by Touch of Evil (1958), Citizen Kane (1941)
Themes
But much like Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, The Irishman deals with themes Orson Welles tapped in his 1958 masterpiece Touch of Evil: that in order to get at some profound truth — about the meaning of life or the passage of time — sometimes an artist has to tell a few lies.
The movies have always found it easier to age a young man (think Orson Welles in Citizen Kane or Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain), but it struggles to work the other way.
The Irishman feels like Martin Scorsese‘s Citizen Kane .
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced by Citizen Kane (1941)
Visuals
But there are plenty of other tributes – the iconic opening was inspired by a Scrooge McDuck comic (seriously), the final shot loudly echoes the closing scene of Citizen Kane, and the most beloved single moment (in which an exhausted Indy simply pulls out his gun and shoots an extravagant swordsman) could’ve sat snugly in a Hope and Crosby Road picture.
It is the apotheosis of its genre, the Citizen Kane of pulp action–adventure, definitively summing up all that came before and setting the indelible standard for all that comes after.
Note Spielberg's homage in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark as the Ark is loaded into a warehouse—a parallel to the final scenes of Welles' masterpiece.
Up’s visual scope is its own constant marvel, giving us generous helpings of imaginative wonder sprinkled with familiar bits of the pop-culture past (the opening newsreel is reminiscent of Citizen Kane, and Paradise Falls’ odd formation is taken almost directly from the 1925 silent version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World).
Look beyond the breathtakingly beautiful 3D animation and you’ll find everything from clever homages to “Citizen Kane” and “The Wizard of Oz” to characters so richly rendered they seep into your soul.
Written and directed by Pete Docter (who co-wrote WALL•E) and Bob Peterson (with some writing assistance from Tom McCarthy of The Station Agent), Up also boasts a tour-de-force opening, evoking Citizen Kane, King Kong, and The Wizard of Oz in its first five minutes alone.
Up begins in a movie theatre with newsreel footage (shades of Citizen Kane) of the fictional explorer Charles Muntz (Plummer), whose heralded career is sullied when his findings are questioned and he heads back to South America, never to be heard from again.
A series of colorful vignettes on love, fidelity, and adventure, Up is emotionally and aesthetically hieratic, conflating from its very first, Citizen Kane -referencing sequence—in which a young Carl Fredrickson (voiced by Edward Asner), eyes agog, watches a black-and-white newsreel celebrating the rise and fall of famed explorer and personal hero Charles Muntz—the act of watching movies with the ecstasies and banalities of living.
Femme Fatale (2002)
Directed by Brian De Palma
influenced by The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
Characters
By asking Romijn-Stamos to project the smoldering, evil persona of a woman like Barbara Stanwycks character in Double Indemnity or Rita Hayworths mysterious seductress in The Lady from Shanghai, De Palma expects the impossible.
Other references include " Citizen Kane " (the Hulk tears apart a laboratory) and " The Right Stuff " (a jet airplane flies so high the stars are visible).
Still, there is a vocal contingent that believes that Joseph L. Mankiewicz, despite all of his achievements, stands in the shadow of his older brother, Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who collaborated with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz and his brother Herman (co-author of "Citizen Kane") were responsible for many of the finest scripts ever produced.
Mankiewicz (1909-1993) came from a family of writers; his brother Herman wrote " Citizen Kane ."
According to some cinematic lore, Mankiewicz was competing with his brother Herman who wrote Citizen Kane, another narrative about grand dreams and great failures, and All About Eve was a response to this.
Many critics have noted that the only aspect of All About Eve that prevents it from being mentioned in the same breath as Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard is the pedestrian nature of its visuals.
His customary dress is a silver bowling jacket on the back of which is a large scorpion, a reference, as someone mentions, to the fable related by Orson Welles's devious protagonist in Confidential Report (aka Mr Arkadin).