Citizen Kane

In 1941, a 25-year-old Orson Welles walked into RKO Studios with a contract that gave him unprecedented creative control. The result was Citizen Kane, a film that would redefine what cinema could do. It opens with the death of Charles Foster Kane, a publishing magnate and art collector, whose final whisper is the cryptic word "Rosebud." A newsreel obituary sketches his public life, but a reporter, Jerry Thompson, digs deeper, interviewing the people who knew Kane best. What emerges is a fragmented portrait of a man who built an empire yet died alone in his sprawling Florida estate, Xanadu.

Welles directed, co-wrote, and starred as Kane, tracking the character from idealistic young publisher to embittered recluse. The cast includes Joseph Cotten as his loyal friend Jedediah Leland, Dorothy Comingore as his second wife Susan Alexander, and Agnes Moorehead in a brief, haunting turn as Kane's mother. Shot by Gregg Toland with deep-focus cinematography that keeps foreground and background equally sharp, the film broke technical ground. Bernard Herrmann's score, his first for film, added an eerie, emotional weight. Produced by Mercury Productions and RKO on a budget of $839,727, it grossed only about $2.3 million initially, but its reputation has grown ever since.

William Randolph Hearst, the real-life newspaper baron on whom Kane was loosely based, tried to suppress the film. He banned advertising in his papers and pressured theaters not to screen it. Despite that, Citizen Kane earned nine Oscar nominations and won for Best Original Screenplay. Over the decades, it has topped countless polls, including the Sight & Sound critics' list from 1962 through 2012. It's a movie that keeps revealing new layers, whether you're watching for the first time or the fiftieth. [edit]

Citizen Kane begins with a series of dissolves over the colossal Xanadu estate, where the elderly Charles Foster Kane dies alone in his cluttered mansion. His last word is "Rosebud," whispered as a snow globe slips from his hand and shatters. A newsreel, "News on the March," then offers a sweeping obituary: Kane's rise from poverty to become one of America's wealthiest men, his newspaper empire, his failed marriage to the President's niece, his doomed political campaign, and his scandalous second marriage to an aspiring singer, Susan Alexander. The newsreel notes that Kane's death barely made the papers, and it raises the question: what did "Rosebud" mean?

Reporter Jerry Thompson is assigned to find out. His investigation leads him through a series of interviews, each offering a different slice of Kane's life. First, he reads the memoirs of Walter Parks Thatcher, the banker who became Kane's guardian. Thatcher's account reveals Kane's childhood: in 1871, young Charles is taken from his mother in Colorado after she inherits a supposedly worthless gold mine that turns out to be one of the richest claims in the world. She sends him East with Thatcher to be raised in wealth, a decision that shapes his entire life. Thatcher's diary also recounts Kane's purchase of the failing New York Inquirer at age 25, where he publishes a "Declaration of Principles" promising to tell the truth and serve the public interest.

Next, Thompson visits Mr. Bernstein, Kane's former business manager, now in his 70s. Bernstein offers a warmer view of the young Kane, describing his energy, his rivalry with the Chronicle, and his hiring of talent like the idealistic drama critic Jedediah Leland. Bernstein recounts Kane's courtship and marriage to Emily Norton, the President's niece, and the gradual erosion of their relationship, shown in a famous montage of breakfast scenes where the couple's intimacy fades over the years. Bernstein also mentions Kane's affair with Susan Alexander, which leads to his political downfall when his opponent, Jim Gettys, threatens to expose it. Kane refuses to drop out of the gubernatorial race and loses in a landslide; Emily divorces him.

Thompson then talks to Jedediah Leland, now a frail, bitter man in a nursing home. Leland offers the harshest critique, calling Kane a man who loved only himself. He describes Kane's second marriage to Susan and his disastrous attempt to force her into an opera career, building her an opera house and using his papers to manufacture her success. Leland, assigned to review Susan's Chicago debut, writes a scathing review instead and is fired by Kane, though Kane, in a rare moment of guilt, finishes the review himself and prints it. Leland tells Thompson that Kane "got everything he wanted and then lost everything he had," and that the only thing he truly lost was his childhood.

Thompson's final interviews are with Susan Alexander Kane herself, now an alcoholic nightclub singer, and with Kane's butler, Raymond. Susan describes her misery at Xanadu, where Kane kept her isolated and bored, filling her room with jigsaw puzzles. After her suicide attempt, she finally leaves him, telling him, "He never gave me anything he wanted to give me, he gave me everything I didn't want." Raymond offers only a glimpse of Kane's final years of loneliness and his violent destruction of Susan's room after she left, during which he picked up a snow globe and whispered "Rosebud." Thompson concludes that he cannot solve the mystery, remarking that "Rosebud" might be "a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, a missing piece." The audience, however, sees the answer: as workers burn Kane's discarded possessions in a furnace, a child's sled with "Rosebud" painted on it is consumed by the flames, the sled from Kane's beloved childhood in Colorado, symbolizing the innocence and love he lost when he was taken from his mother.[edit]