KANE Detail

 Recently, before the Musk man took over Twitter, there was a posted request from a film fan that got plenty of attention. A young woman posted: "Give me a tiny detail in a film you absolutely love that you're pretty sure no one else notices."

Well, I posted one -- but I am positive I am not the only person who noticed it. However, I noticed it for the first time two years ago. It's in the sci-fi horror thriller, ALIEN. I saw ALIEN the first day it opened nationwide. I've seen it numerous times since. But it wasn't until my umpteenth viewing a couple of years ago that I noticed a bit of foreshadowing. It's at the beginning of the story. We're inside the space craft and we pods. Crew members are asleep in the pods. The pods opens and the crew members awaken. As they are scantily clad, we can see torso movements as they breath and awaken. 

Ash's torso does not move. That's a brilliant little detail in 1979's ALIEN.

There's another detail in another classic that I've seen several times. It's in the 1941 film, CITIZEN KANE. All classic film fans are familiar with the famous end scene. There's a close-up on Charles Foster Kane's mouth as he utters "Rosebud" and then a snow globe falls from his hands.

Again, this was a film I'd seen several times yet always assumed that snow globe was an artifact from his emotionally fractured boyhood. Then I watched it one afternoon on TV -- and gasped. I noticed it in the scene where the married Kane meets the unmarried Susan and goes into her apartment to offer her help with her toothache. They chat. The scene cuts to the image of Susan in a full length mirror as she speaks. To the left on her vanity...in front of a framed photo...is the snow globe! After that scene, there's a circular visual motif we see in CITIZEN KANE. In street lights shaped like the snow globe. In stage lights.

Look at this scene:

And there you have it. For me, films are like literature. You can revisit works by Shakespeare, Dickens, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, James Baldwin and discover new things, have new realizations. It's the same with films -- if you truly pay attention.