Citizen Kane (1941)
Directed by Orson Welles

Film Review

Remarkably, Orson Welles was just 25 when he made Citizen Kane, which is quite possibly the most influential film in history. He had by this time made a name for himself in theatre and on radio with the company he founded, Mercury Theatre. Welles was eager to begin a career as a film director and was planning an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness when he was given an initial draft of a screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz, brother of the acclaimed writer-director Jospeh Mankiewicz.  Welles helped to develop Mankiewicz's screenplay, and the result was Citizen Kane.

Welles was particularly fortunate with the team who worked with him on this film.  Not only did he have a first rate cast - made up of many of his Mercury Theatre colleagues, including Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead and George Coulouris - but he had one of the best cinematographers in the business, Gregg Toland, and Bernard Herrmann (famous for his later collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock) to compose the film's score.   Certainly, Welles played a significant part in defining the film's striking visual style (as can be seen from the films he subsequently made), but much of the technical and artistic brilliance of this film can be attributed to his talented associates.

After Welles, the person who had the greatest impact on Citizen Kane was cinematographer Gregg Toland.  At the time, Toland was a pioneer in the use of deep focus photography, which allows the background and foreground of a shot to be in sharp focus simultaneously.  The technique brings a cold realism and unsettling atmosphere which serves this film particularly well.  Toland and others would use the same cinematographic approach in the numerous brooding crime dramas that would be made over the decade that followed, defining a cinematic style that we now refer to as film noir.

Another device that was to become a popular film noir motif was the use of low-angle shots.  In Citizen Kane, these are used sparingly but very effectively, the best example being the sequence in which Kane's attempts to play god (by using his position as a newspaper chief to help the common man) are exposed as an act of self-deluded vanity.  The low-angle perspective puts the spectator in the position in which he or she should be dominated by Kane, but Kane's failure to persuade us that he is acting from sincere motives merely makes him appear as a tragic tyrant, a man doomed to fail in both his professional and personal life.

The third important film noir device which Citizen Kane employs - and perhaps better than any other film since - is the flashback.  After the (hilarious) faux newsreel introduction, much of what follows is told in flashback, in each case from the perspective of a single character.  The different accounts of Kane's life marry together to make a strangely satisfying whole, the pieces of a cinematic jigsaw that tell the poignant tale of a man who never achieves what he needs to make his life complete.

It is hard to watch Citizen Kane and not be struck by the similarities between Kane and Welles, suggesting the film may have a subconsciously autographical component.  Like Kane, Welles garnered celebrity and success early in his career but would veer towards monomania and increasing isolation in later years.  Kane was in fact based on William Randolph Hearst, a media magnate known for his influence and ruthlessness.   When he heard about the film, Hearst was so incensed that he made every attempt to prevent it from being released, and then when it was released did what he could to prevent it from being publicized.  This could partly account for the fact the film failed to turn a profit, despite some very positive reviews.

Not long after its first release, Citizen Kane disappeared from view and was soon forgotten - for a while.  In the mid-1950s, it was rediscovered and subjected to an immediate reappraisal.  The consensus was that this is not just a masterpiece but possibly the greatest film ever to have been made in America.  It is a view that stands, pretty well unchallenged, to this day.  Citizen Kane shows the expressive power and beguiling poetry of the moving image more vigorously than virtually any other film in history.  It is also an emotionally engaging and deeply ironic portrait of a man who fails to find meaning in his life - an allegory of sorts for the web of existential anxieties that haunt us all. For Orson Welles, his first full-length film was to be the high point of his career as a director. Although there were to be some other notable achievements - The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Trial (1962), Othello (1952) - Welles would never again attain the dizzying heights of his one unparalleled masterpiece.

Film Synopsis

One of the world's wealthiest men, Charles Foster Kane lives alone in his vast private estate, Xanadu, built atop a man-made mountain.  On his death, there is a flurry of interest in the man who was once America's foremost press magnate.  Reporter Jerry Thompson leads an investigation to unravel the significance of Kane's last utterance, the single word: "Rosebud".  He begins by interviewing the people who were most intimately acquainted with Kane - his second wife, his business manager, his best friend.  He reads about Kane's early life in the memoirs of the banker who was charged with his upbringing when he inherited a fortune in childhood.  The more Thompson digs, the more complex Kane's life appears to be.  Will he ever resolve the mystery that was Charles Foster Kane...?