Citizen Kane

*

This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1989.

"You may have heard of this one: from 1962 to 2002, Orson Welles’s mammoth debut topped the Sight & Sound critics' poll as the greatest film ever made. Still in bronze position, this triumph of American cinema endures as an epic interrogation of delusion and greed, mass media and political power."

— MUBI's take

Citizen Kane
Everybody's Talking About It! It's Terrific!
Genre: Drama Directed By: Orson Welles Produced By: Orson Welles Written By/Screenplay: Herman J. Mankiewicz Orson Welles Starring: Orson Welles Joseph Cotten Dorothy Comingore Everett Sloane Ray Collins George Coulouris Agnes Moorehead Paul Stewart Ruth Warrick Erskine Sanford William Alland Photography: Black-and-white Cinematography: Gregg Toland Distributed By: RKO Radio Pictures Release Date: September 5, 1941 Runtime: 119 minutes Country: United States Language: English Budget: $839,727 Box Office: $1.6 million

Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film by Orson Welles, its producer, co-screenwriter, director and star. The picture was Welles's first feature film.

Plot

When a reporter is assigned to decipher newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane's (Orson Welles) dying words, his investigation gradually reveals the fascinating portrait of a complex man who rose from obscurity to staggering heights. Though Kane's friend and colleague Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), and his mistress, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), shed fragments of light on Kane's life, the reporter fears he may never penetrate the mystery of the elusive man's final word, "Rosebud."

Why It's Terrific!

1. While Citizen Kane may not be the first movie to use techniques as deep-focus photography, visible ceilings, miniatures, exaggerated set design, extreme low angles, multiple points of view, nonlinear orderings of flashbacks, and overlapping dialogue... the film gathered them together in a particularly breathtaking, fluid, and consistent combination, with a result that looked and sounded extremely different from other pictures being made at the time.
   • Citizen Kane uses a convoluted flashback structure to examine different aspects of the wealthy and influential American whose life was plagued by unhappiness and who died with his dreams unfulfilled. At the time, this was an audacious take on the American success story. And the fact the Welles created the titular role for himself said something about his ambivalence about his own desires and motives.
   • Welles was entranced with filmmaking tricks, and Citizen Kane is a compendium of models, miniatures, mattes, optical printing, animation, sets from King Kong and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and nearly every other possible device. Welles and his editor Robert Wise used tons of trick cuts, with another editor noting that there were no straight cuts in the whole film.
2. Incredible cinematography from Gregg Toland which continues to hold up to this day. In addition to that, Welles' background on the stage helped him achieve the brisk editing style seen in the film; lighting and free-form sets glide almost imperceptibly between scenes. In addition, Toland developed a method of deep-focus photography that kept every element of the frame sharp. Items in the extreme foreground and background are in simultaneous, razor-sharp focus. While this has been used before, advances in lens and lighting technology allowed it to become more prevalent after this film. In addition, Welles and Toland amplified the ways it could be used. The deep focus doesn’t just look beautiful; it serves the story and the way audiences experience its telling.
   • The shot with Kane's mother signing her son over to another guardian is a great example. In a house, the adults conduct their business in the foreground of the frame, while through a window far in the background one can see young Kane, in crisp focus, playing in the snow. By enabling the audience to see the boy and adults simultaneously and sharply in a single frame, separated by distance yet still connected by focus, Welles is in effect directing the audience to consider the signing’s emotional effect upon the boy. Welles could have cut between the two or not shown the boy at all, among other choices. But the final choice was strong, specific, and of a piece with the style of the film overall.
3. It's full of clever special effects, though they're often difficult to spot, due to the film's genre. Painted backdrops, model shots, optical effects, and in-camera tricks abound. One beautiful example is the seemingly simple crane shot into the rafters above the stage where Susan Alexander Kane is making her ill-fated opera debut. As the camera rises, objects in the frame disguise two vertical wipes so that what looks like a single shot is actually three shots. By the time the camera reaches two stagehands far above, one of whom holds his nose in an instant opera review, the image has moved from a shot of people on the stage, to a shot model of the rigging, and back to a shot of real people. The effects are so seamless that most viewers would never even notice there were any.
4. The passage of time is a strong theme of the film. Near the beginning, Kane's death followed by a newsreel that tracks his entire life, and the film itself is filled with clever visual and aural techniques that bring the audience back and forth through time. A standout would be the breakfast montage, a two-minute sequence of economical (and entertaining) storytelling that shows Kane and his first wife in a series of interactions at their breakfast table. As the clips go forward through the months, their marriage disintegrates from happy, teasing, sexual banter to dreary, nagging disconnection. As much as the witty dialogue contributes to the effect, the visuals express all that’s needed, via shifting makeup, facial expressions, and costumes, as well as the characters’ positions in the frame growing ever farther apart.
5. The film was meant to be a dig on William Randolph Hearst, thinly disguised with a Hearst counterpart whose political ambitions were ruined by his affair with an actress, for the marketplace to notice.
6. The film's structure owes something to 1933's The Power and the Glory about a thwarted unhappy industrialist, but Welles borrowed liberally from other sources (i.e.: Time magazine and March of Time newsreels), adopting their snappy, jaundiced, superficial take on celebrity. He also went through lots of Hollywood scandals, changing details enough to protect him from legal retribution. And as previously mentioned, the titular Charles Kane is loosely based on William Randolph Hearst.
7. Aside from the amazing editing work from Robert Wise, there’s also the composing from Bernard Herrmann and producing work from John Houseman.
8. It’s influence was phenomenal, as within the next few years movies of all types started to include ceilings, deep focus and overlapping sound.

The Only Bad Quality

1. The cockatoo scene in the third act towards the end feels rather forced. Not only will it scare certain viewers off-guard, it serves no role in the plot whatsoever. But other than that, It is therefore the only bad thing about this movie.

External Links

• Citizen Kane at the Internet Movie Database
• Citizen Kane on Rotten Tomatoes
• Citizen Kane on Letterboxd

Comments

Loading comments...