Daily Inspiration Quote by Patrick Macnee

Macnee’s jab at Citizen Kane lands because it pokes the softest part of film culture: the reflexive piety around “the greatest movie ever made.” He opens with a shrugging “I mean,” and the blunt “everyone says,” treating the canonical consensus like a tired party trick. That casual deflation isn’t ignorance; it’s a performer’s impatience with received wisdom, the kind that turns taste into obedience. “It isn’t that great, anyway” is less a verdict on the film than on the ritual of praising it.

The name-drop pivots the quote from contrarianism to authority. “Orson Welles I knew well” isn’t just proximity; it’s a way of reclaiming Welles from the museum label. Knowing Welles “of course” implies that the speaker has a backstage pass to the myth, and that the myth is incomplete. The subtext: cinephiles love Kane because it’s legible as Great Art, safely enshrined, easy to cite. Welles’s later work is messier, harder to access, and tangled in the story Macnee actually wants to tell: Hollywood’s habit of celebrating genius only when it can be packaged.

The sting comes in the line about “other incredible films that no one would let him make.” Macnee reframes Welles not as the wunderkind who arrived fully formed, but as an artist repeatedly blocked by money, studios, and gatekeepers. The real target isn’t Kane; it’s a culture that fetishizes the one sanctioned masterpiece while ignoring the career that institutional power kept from happening.