Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane is a film held in higher regard than almost any other film made during any time period. It’s such a well-respected picture, you wouldn’t believe how much hatred and controversy was issued toward it when it saw its initial release in 1941. Let’s leave it simple and say that filmmakers, filmgoers, and even film critics did not want it to be a film America remembers over seventy years later. It took quite a while for the film to undergo a preservation by the Library of Congress into the National Film Registry; to earn the top spot on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Movies list; to be named the greatest movie ever made by legendary film critic Roger Ebert. There has been much more praise for the film, but those are the three items that seem to stand out the most. I must have been ten or eleven years old when I first saw Citizen Kane, and I had not very much memory of it, other than the fact that I really enjoyed it. After being reminded of the film by one of my blogging friends, I decided to hunt it down on a trip to the mall. I bought the 60th anniversary edition, newly mastered and restored, containing the film itself on one disc and a documentary entitled The Battle over Citizen Kane (which I have not yet seen, but I will try to soon) on the other. Even though I enjoyed the film the first time around, it seems I understood and appreciated the mature, deep story more upon a more recent viewing.
Bottom Line: Thoughtful character study is, in fact, one of the greatest American pictures.
“Rosebud.” –Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane
Directed by: Orson Welles
Starring: Agnes Moorehead, Dorothy Comingore, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Paul Stewart, Ray Collins, Ruth Warrick, William Alland
I wouldn’t be spoiling anything to say that the title character dies in CITIZEN KANE. In fact, his last words act as the pivotal point in the story. The film opens with the death of Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), a successful publishing tycoon. You could say it’s a bit of irony that the film’s first utterance is his last: “Rosebud”. Reveal that this is part of a ten-minute newsreel, then cut to a group of men sitting in the theater stunned that the entire newsreel focused on Kane’s death. Yet no one in the theater has a clue as to what the significance of his final words is.
