So, the results of Sight and Sound's poll are in and "Citizen Kane" yet again tops the Critics' Ten Best list, as it has done every time the survey has been carried out since 1952.
Orson Welles' 1941 debut feature, made when he was younger than Ryan Phillippe is now, also topped a parallel Sight and Sound poll of international film directors, that has only been going since 1992.
It's a temptation to want to see any champion displaced (second place for the critics was "Vertigo", while the directors went for a combo of "The Godfather" and "The Godfather Part 2") and it'd certainly have been a bigger story if something – anything – had come from behind to take the crown.
But I voted for "Kane", so I'm as responsible as anyone else for its continuing enshrinement. If any film has to be hailed the greatest ever made, it strikes me that "Kane" is as good a candidate as any. And since these lists are about consensus rather than individuality, all they really mean is that we all agree "Kane" is a great movie.
The rest of my list, in alphabetical as opposed to preference order, was: "Apocalypse Now", "Blue Velvet", "A Canterbury Tale", "Inferno", "The King of Comedy", "Let's Scare Jessica to Death", "Notorious", "The Shining" and "To Have and Have Not". Some of these titles cropped up on a lot of other people’s lists, though none made the top tens; other titles only got votes from me. Of the 631 films on the critics' list, 408 received only one vote.
In "Twelve Monkeys" (which no one voted for), there's a brilliant speech about "Vertigo" (which scored highly) as the Bruce Willis character muses that films can't change but the experience of seeing them can never be the same. That's why it's useful to do this experiment every ten years, to see if the consensus has changed ("Raging Bull" and "The Searchers", top ten titles in 1992, are relegated, while "Sunrise" and "Singin' in the Rain" crash the charts).
But individually, feelings change far more often: if I'd done my list a week, a day or even an hour earlier or later, it might have been 75% different, though my guess is that 75% of the directors represented would have been there.
It's an especially close call as to which my favourite Kubrick, Michael Powell or David Lynch films are. I might have found room for a John Ford Western, though it'd be a question of my mood that moment as to whether it would be "The Searchers", "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" or "My Darling Clementine". In my horror specialty, I might have passed over "Jessica" (a personal favourite) and "Inferno" for, say, the George Romero "Dead" trilogy (if the "Godfather" films are one choice, so are they) or "A Bucket of Blood".
If I'd been asked as a ten-year-old, I'd have picked: "Batman" (1966), "Carry on Regardless", "Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 AD", "The First Men in the Moon", "The Magnet", "One Spy Too Many", "Thunderbirds are Go", "Tiger Bay" and "2001: A Space Odyssey". Oddly, the last title has been on the critics' top ten for two polls running, so perhaps the consensus is catching up with where I was in 1969.
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