Cubs BCB After Dark: The World Baseball Classic is here

It’s a new week here at BCB After Dark: the hippest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. We’re so glad you decided to stop in. We’ll waive the cover charge. There are still a few tables available. The hostess will seat you now. Bring your own bevergae.

BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.

Last week I asked you if the Cubs should sign free agent Wilmer Flores after the injury to Tyler Austin. Flores is still inexplicably on the market and 53 percent of you think the Cubs should sign him. The rest of you think the Cubs should pass. So it was a close vote.

Here’s the part where we listen to jazz and talk movies. You’re free to skip that.

I know a lot of you prefer jazz performances that are actually songs that you’re already familiar with. I get that. That’s what I preferred when I started listening to jazz and what I still prefer from time to time.

So here is pianist Christian Sands doing his take on “Yesterday.” Don’t any of you tell me you aren’t familiar with it.

Joining Sands is Yasushi Nakamura on bass and Jonathan Barber on drums. This was recorded for Seattle public radio KNKX in 2018.

I was feeling pretty blue and needed to get into a different headspace on Saturday so I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to the movies. I went to see Crime 101. Very good movie. I recommend it. We can talk about it in the comments if you wish.

But now back to your regularly scheduled stuff.

Since I have now seen all ten films in the most recent BFI Sight & Sound critics poll of the greatest films of all-time, I decided last week to do a quick countdown where I write a little something about each one. My intention was to write two short capsules about each film twice a week, giving me five editions to complete the ten films. Last week I wrote about Jeanne Dielman and Vertigo, the top two films in the 2022 poll. 

The problem is that that means tonight I have to write about Citizen Kane, which finished third in the most recent poll. Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to write a short blurb about Citizen Kane? I suppose I could have said “Everyone thinks its the greatest film of all time and maybe they’re right.” Honestly though, I couldn’t. Maybe someone else could, but I couldn’t.

But having written all this about Kane, I think it would be unfair to Tokyo Story to just tack on a short capsule about it at the end. It would get lost and it’s too good a movie for that. So I’m just doing one film tonight and I’ll try to put Tokyo Story (1953) and In the Mood For Love (2000) next time. Or maybe I’ll just get to Tokyo Story. We’ll see.

3. Citizen Kane (1941). Directed by Orson Welles. Starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten and Dorothy Comingore. 

In every once-a-decade BFI Sight & Sound critics poll of the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane finished first in every poll between 1962 and 2002. That cemented the idea in the minds of the public that Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made. It’s even become a shorthand in film criticism, with “Citizen Kane” meaning the best. For example, one critic sardonically called the 1992 film Shakes the Clown the “Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies” which is one of my favorite lines of movie criticism ever. 

Way too much has been written about Citizen Kane. Not only are there books devoted to it, there are books about the books written about Citizen Kane and the controversies contained therein. It’s at the heart of the debate between legendary film critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael over the auteur theory, as well as later scholars who took up one side of the cause or another. (Sarris was for it, Kael was against it.)

It’s hard to understand how Citizen Kane got ingrained in the public mind as the greatest film of all time because there are a lot of great movies. The best explanation I’ve got is because RKO was the weakest of the “Big Five” movie studios, they were the first one to desperate enough to sell their better films to the studios’ “Great Satan” of the 1950s—television. So a generation of later critics, scholars and directors grew up on the film. Citizen Kane was the first truly great movie they ever saw and because it was on television, they saw it several times and were able to learn from it. You could argue the entire New Hollywood movement of 1966 to 1980 were people who studied at the foot of Citizen Kane on the late-night movies.

Even before Sarris and Kael started arguing over the film, who got credit for the film was controversial. Legendary screenwriter and overall curmudgeon Herman Mankiewicz co-wrote the screenplay, but he always claimed that he wrote the whole thing and Welles just slapped his name on it. Recent scholarship indicates that this is untrue and the two men had a fairly even influence on the final script. But many have also given credit to cinematographer Gregg Toland, editor Robert Wise and even music director Bernard Herrmann. To be clear, there was a massive amount of talent working on Citizen Kane and the end result shows it, no matter who you want to give credit to. I give credit to Welles for assembling the team, but no one person working on the film could have done it without all the others. Even in assembling the team, Welles had help from his production partner John Houseman.

I have not even gotten to the controversy around William Randolph Hearst, who was still alive in 1941 and was ostensibly the subject of the film. This is probably more true for the stuff that Mankiewicz wrote than what Welles wrote as it was Mankiewicz who held the grudge against Hearst. Welles saw Kane as more of a composite of many men. To be fair, Hearst was one of them.

The film itself sometimes gets lost in all this mythology. But stripped of all this extraneous stuff, Citizen Kane holds up as a great movie. Yes, we all know the plot by now and I hope you know what Rosebud is, other than the ultimate movie macguffin. I’d say the true genius of Welles was putting together all these incredibly talented people and letting them go to town. There’s also a terrific cast, most of whom were imported from Welles’ Mercury Theater group. It’s Joseph Cotten’s first film and he was one of the most underrated actors in Hollywood history. Dorothy Comingore was terrific in Kane and she should have had a big career, except Hearst targeted her for revenge for her portrayal of Susan Alexander Kane, whom everyone assumed to be Marion Davies and for whom Mankiewicz also had a grudge against. Even Welles admitted that they “did Marion Davies dirty” as Davies, far from being a talentless mistress, was actually probably the most talented comedic actress of the silent era. In the end, Hearst’s newspapers kept Comingore from getting many parts and then ended her career her career when the blacklist came about a few years later. 

Of course, it wasn’t much of a stretch for Welles to play the brilliant but insecure and megalomaniacal Charles Foster Kane. 

It’s hard to separate Citizen Kane the movie from Citizen Kane the template of what a great movie is supposed to be. But yes, it is a great story about the rise and fall of a great man. Welles let Toland go nuts with the deep focus and camera angles and it gives Citizen Kane a look unlike any film before or really since. Wise managed to assemble all the parts in a then-revolutionary non-chronological way that still made sense to the audiences of the time.

Would I put it in my top ten? Definitely. Even beyond it being a great film, it was a revolutionary film in the creative control given to Welles. At a time when most major films were churned out by the studio system, Citizen Kane showed that a film from a major studio didn’t have to be assembled like a car an assembly line. Even if you don’t buy the auteur theory (and I have my doubts), Citizen Kane showed that a film could at least reflect the vision of one person. (Films directed by Frank Capra, Howard Hawks and John Ford were also starting to show their personal vision apart from the studio control around this time.) 

Would I still rank it number one? I don’t know. If you ask me which one I’d rather watch right now, I’d say Vertigo, which argues for it being number one. I think The Godfather and Casablanca are candidates for my number one as well. The most recent Sight and Sound poll has Citizen Kane at three and I think that’s a fine place for it. But if you want to insist that it’s still the greatest film of all time, you’ve got a pretty strong case. 

Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.

The World Baseball Classic starts its sixth edition on Wednesday night when Team Japan takes on Team Australia at 9 pm Central time. That’s Thursday afternoon in Tokyo.

We here at Bleed Cubbie Blue are all big fans of the WBC. Yes, there are some problems with it and its final form is definitely a compromise between several competing interests, but it’s also some of the most fun you can have watching a baseball game. It’s also about the only thing baseball can do these days, other than the World Series, that breaks through into the greater popular culture. People were talking about baseball three years ago when Shohei Ohtani struck out Mike Trout to win the 2023 WBC. It was a major story places other than MLB Network. It should be clear by now that if there’s one thing that people throughout the world like, it’s friendly international competition. Despite the limits on pitch counts and the like, the World Baseball Classic also delivers some top-flight baseball talent.

The World Baseball Classic features 20 teams this year divided into four pools. Pool C, which kicks off the tournament in Tokyo, features Japan, Australia, South Korea, Czechia (Czech Republic) and Chinese Taipei (Taiwan). The five teams play a round-robin tournament and the top two teams in each pool advance to the quarterfinals. There’s also more at stake as the twop two teams from the Americas will qualify for the baseball tournament at the 2028 Olympics, other than the United States, which automatically qualified as the host country.

Pool A will be played in San Juan, PR, and will feature Panama, Cuba, Canada and Colombia in addition to the hosts. Pool B is located in Houston and will feature the US, Mexico, Italy, Great Britain and Brazil. Pool D is in Miami and will have Venezuela, Kingdom of the Netherlands, Dominican Republic, Israel and Nicaragua.

Also, while it doesn’t look like the details for the seventh WBC have been finalized, in the past the top four teams in each group automatically qualify for the next tournament. This was a huge deal in 2023 when the underdog Czech Republic team, who needed some upsets in qualifiers just to make the tournament, beat China and automatically qualified for this year’s tournament. China was forced into the qualifying rounds where it was knocked out by Colombia and Brazil. This is the first time China does not field a team in the WBC.

So enough of what I have to think about the WBC. Let’s hear what you have to say about it.

Thanks for stopping by tonight. We’ve enjoyed having you and we hope you enjoyed spending the time with us. Be sure to get home safely. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow evening for more BCB After Dark.