COMMENTARY : Boyhood Favorites Still Leave Critic Reeling : Revisiting ‘Citizen Kane,’ ‘Spartacus’ and ‘Breathless’ Confirms Why He First Loved Them

The experience of re-seeing a favorite movie after a long absence is not to be entered into lightly. It’s not unlike attending your 20-year high school reunion: a lot of paunch, both physical and spiritual, has intervened between who you were then and who you are now.

What, after all, if the movie doesn’t measure up to your memories? Does this mean your initial responses were out of line or, worse, does it mean you no longer have the capacity to respond?

The deepest satisfaction, of course, is when we re-see a favorite movie from childhood, or from our college years perhaps, and experience again what first drew us to it. But even then there’s a loss: the deepened, “mature” vantage point that the years have given us cannot entirely compensate for the first flush of revelation.

Three movies of crucial early importance to me--each in very different ways--have recently been re-released in sparkling, newly restored prints: “Citizen Kane,” “Spartacus” and “Breathless.” (All are still in local revival; “Breathless” plays at the Nuart through Thursday.) In all three cases, it’s been at least a dozen years since I’ve seen them, and my recollection of the last time is hazy. But I can still remember what it was like to see them for the first time.

My experience with “Citizen Kane” does not quite fall into the categories I’ve just described, since my introduction to it at around age 12 was not, I am embarrassed to admit, the unalloyed bliss-out so many others have described. Living just outside New York City, I was in a position to swoop down on one of the frequent “Kane” revivals at places like the Museum of Modern Art or the Thalia (the only theater on dry land, by the way, to slope upwards). When I finally caught it, on a double bill with the also unseen-by-me “The Magnificent Ambersons,” I was dazzled but, alas, strangely unmoved. My notions of movie art in those days didn’t jibe with “Kane’s” almost screwball velocity and daring; I thought it too much fun to be a masterpiece. I found “Ambersons” more emotionally profound--still do. But “Kane,” in the way it looked and moved and sounded, was so completely unlike any other movie I’d ever seen that its failure to transport me became one of the great puzzles of my “formative years.”

This preteen part of my life was, to lift a phrase from a movie critic friend, my “pre-taste” period. I loved “La Grande Illusion” but I also wept at the end of “David and Lisa.” Even “Cleopatra,” with its monumental colonnades and wide-screen cleavage, lugged its way onto my home-brewed 10-best list. If you grow up to be a film critic, one of the taste tests you learn is this: There are movies that profoundly affect you because they are great art and there are movies that profoundly affect you because they are great schlock.

My problem with “Kane” was that I couldn’t reconcile the daring of Orson Welles’ stylistics with what I perceived to be the film’s schlocky, cornball essence. As Holy Grails go, Rosebud seemed penny dreadful--not the stuff that “art” is made of. I never quite shook off these prejudices in subsequent viewings, although I was always awed by the film’s technique. Finally I took a lengthy holiday from “Kane” altogether--the reunions were just too jarring. But the movie’s recent 50th anniversary provoked another look-see, and it was as if the response I expected to have 25 years earlier finally kicked in.

It’s always suspicious when you come around to a received opinion after years of resistance. I had been frustrated in reading about “Kane” as a kid because it was usually described as a deep-toned metaphysical treatise, and that didn’t connect with the crackerjack movie I saw.

It still doesn’t, but what I was unprepared for in seeing the film again is how extraordinarily moving it is. Part of its power, of course, is connected to what we now know of Welles’ career; his tragedy matches Kane’s. But the pyrotechnics that outfit “Kane” no longer resemble gorgeous affectation; the shadows and hollows and echo chambers complement Kane’s furious aloneness. As a portrait of the isolating power of megalomania, it now is immensely touching to me. It always seemed technically precocious but now it seems precociously wise too. It’s an archetypal American tragedy, as instantly recognizable in our own era as in Welles’ and as infinitely reproducible as that shot of Kane reflected endlessly in his mirror.

“Spartacus,” which I saw for the first and last time all the way through when I was 9, was a favorite of mine at a time when “Hercules” was all the rage in grade school. Seeing it again, it’s easy to recognize what I enjoyed so much: Kirk Douglas’ iron-man heroics, the way he dunked his slave-master’s head in a vat of gravy, the sinewy gladiator combat with Woody Strode, the prissy snarls of its famous, ringleted cast (Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton). It was one of the few movies from that era that seemed to hold together in the mind for me; I was conscious even then of how well the story was told.

The storytelling looks particularly good today because so few filmmakers know how to tell one anymore. In the current studio demographic/star trip movie era, a comprehensible story line is often the first casualty of war. “Spartacus” was never great, of course, but the same thing that appealed to me in 1960--the great big cartoonish beauty of heroism--is, on a more high-falutin’ and socially conscious level, what I still respond to 31 years later. To enjoy it again in the same ways is to locate within oneself the awe-struck kid sitting front-row center at the neighborhood movie palace, thrilled to be thrust into a wraparound antiquity. When the movie was over, it was difficult for me to sort out whether the nostalgia I felt was for the film or for myself. Maybe a little of both.

My first viewing of Godard’s “Breathless,” in the mid-’60s in a Greenwich Village repertory house wreathed in espresso fumes, had a special excitement. I was a Bogart freak at the time, and “Breathless” was Bogie-drenched. Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel, on the run from the cops, took the time to smooth his lips out in the Bogie manner. (The moment when he stares up at the poster of “The Harder They Fall” was almost primal for me.) Like “Kane,” “Breathless” came freighted with a lot of high-art baggage, and, like “Kane,” it turned out to be a lot of fun. Godard’s longueurs and lickety-split ellipses should have been intimidating to someone corn-fed on the draggy American movies of that era, but I was with the film all the way.

Seeing it again, I think I understand why. Godard’s technique was a modernist riff on many of the hard-boiled American movies, including Bogart’s, that I loved watching on TV reruns. And Godard keyed the audience into his gamesmanship by always staying a few beats ahead of us. He was saying to us: If you want to keep up with me you’ll have to think like a filmmaker too.

The pleasures of a Godard movie have always been of a special sort, because he uses technique to comment upon technique. This can be rarefied and maddening, as it has been for much of his inimitable, don’t-look-back career. But in a movie like “Breathless,” the romance between Belmondo, dragging deeply on his chunky Galoises, and Jean Seberg, unforgettable in her New York Herald Tribune T-shirt, is all-of-a piece with Godard’s romance with the movies. “Breathless” is one of the most youthful films ever made and, if you were young enough when you first saw it, the experience of seeing it again is like a reconnection to a time when anything seemed possible--even in the movies.

I’m not suggesting that one should revisit old movies as part of some sort of personal-growth experiment. What I’m getting at is a process more mysterious than that. Certainly there are movies--like, in my experience, “L’Avventura” and “Last Tango in Paris”--that one has to see again beyond the blush of youth in order to experience anything like their full impact.

But, if there is any value in re-seeing favorite old movies after a long absence, it is to confirm why we first loved them. For in that love is a confirmation of what attracted us to movies in the first place. Maybe it was just a gesture, or a look on an actor’s face, or a strange landscape. But, whatever it was, it signaled the possibilities that the movies could hold for us. As grown-up moviegoers, we still hold out for those signals, and for possibilities fulfilled.