Citizen Kane (1941), is probably the world's most famous and highly-rated film, with its many remarkable scenes, cinematic and narrative techniques and experimental innovations. It is ranked in every poll as one of the ten outstanding films of all time. Its director, star, and producer were all the same genius individual — Orson Welles (in his film debut at age 25!), who collaborated with Herman J. Mankiewicz on the script and with Gregg Toland as his talented cinematographer. The film received unanimous critical praise even at the time of its release, although it was not a commercial success (partly due to its limited distribution and delayed release by RKO). The film established Welles' lasting reputation in one brilliant flash of screen creativity. Had he made only this film, history would still have accorded him a prominent place beside the best of Hollywood's directors.

It was the recipient of nine Oscar nominations with only one win — Best Original Screenplay (Mankiewicz and Welles). The other eight nominations included Best Picture (producer Welles), Best Actor and Best Director (Welles), Best B/W Cinematography (Toland), Best B/W Interior Decoration, Best Sound Recording (John Aalberg), Best Dramatic Picture Score (Bernard Herrmann with his first brilliant musical score), and Best Film Editing (Robert Wise). With his four Academy Awards nominations, Welles became the first individual to receive simultaneous nominations in those four categories.

Welles was a young man of 24 when he left New York City for Hollywood in 1939. He brought with him to California confidence gained from theater work and a brief but sensational career as a radio dramatist, experience which would enter significantly into the realization of Citizen Kane's innovative sound track.

Involvement in radio came after apprenticeships at age 16 with the Gate and Abbey Theatres in Dublin, Ireland, followed by acting jobs in theater companies in the United States headed by Katharine Cornell and John Houseman. In 1936 Welles began to take roles on popular radio programs, among them The Shadow, and in 1937 he and Houseman created the Mercury Theatre for the purpose of producing stage plays and radio dramas.

It was the Mercury Theatre's radio production of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds in 1938 that turned Welles into a somewhat notorious celebrity. In a docudrama fashion, Welles created a masterpiece of psychological manipulation through the artful arrangement of sounds. By imitating newscaster styles and familiar radio reportage methods, Welles convinced many listeners, already anxious about world events abroad, that what they were hearing was not drama but an actual invasion from Mars. The Halloween eve broadcast, intended merely as a frightening joke, proved through the panic it caused Welles' formidable dramatic skills. He served as both director and narrator of the production.

RKO, impressed by Welles' sensational radio and stage successes in New York, offered the young director a motion-picture contract which promised unusual creative freedom. This freedom allowed Welles to bring with him to Hollywood many of the skilled Mercury Theatre actors and to use them in a film project whose mosaic structure, startling cinematography, and expressive sound track would once more prove his directional genius. Citizen Kane, too, showed Welles in the central role to be an actor of the rarest talent.

Not everyone fully understood or appreciated Citizen Kane when it was first released on May 1, 1941. The fractured nature of the storyline, plus the investigative and open-ended approach to biographical analysis, left many filmgoers puzzled about Welles' intentions. Accustomed to the well-made narrative, film audiences found Citizen Kane a jolting experience.

Story Form

Citizen Kane is in large part a psychological mystery and the initiating clue (what Alfred Hitchcock referred to as the "MacGuffin") is "Rosebud", the final word spoken by Kane at the moment of his death. In sending a newspaper reporter to interview principals in Kane's life with the hope of discovering Rosebud's meaning and its relevance to Kane's grandiose existence, the mystery is allowed to unfold in a series of flashbacks.

This approach is a modern one, based on the assumption that external analysis of a human being's life is subjective at best and, while every subjective view and biographical detail are pieces in a larger puzzle, the meaning of life is too complex to ever be fully understood. It is the investigative process that makes Welles' film interesting rather than the conclusions. "The point of the picture," Welles said, "is not so much the solution of the problem as its presentation."

Welles' imaginative treatment of a screen biography also held ironic implications. The desire to uncover through journalistic investigation the meaning of Rosebud, to find in it perhaps the hidden source of Kane's drive and egomania and to expose it to the world, can be easily correlated with the journalistic practices by which William Randolph Hearst, the publishing magnate, built his empire.

This special irony develops after a film editor expresses dissatisfaction with a March of Time-styled account of Kane's life and decides to probe more deeply by going after the meaning of Rosebud. The editor selects one of the reporters, Thompson (William Alland), and tells him to get in touch with everybody who knew Kane. "Rosebud, dead or alive," the editor says, "it'll probably turn out to be a very simple thing."

Thompson's investigation begins in the Thatcher Library where the first flashback occurs as the reporter reads a manuscript written by Walter Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris), Kane's legal guardian. The flashback traces Thatcher's first associations with Kane as a child, then jumps ahead in time to show disputes between Kane, now a 25-year-old newspaper publisher, and Thatcher over how to run the newspaper.

Additional flashback visualizations take place while Thompson visits: Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), Kane's business manager; Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotton), one of Kane's top reporters and at one time Kane's friend and confidante; Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), Kane's second wife and a failed opera singer; and Raymond (Paul Stewart), the head butler at Xanadu, Kane's palatial estate.

During the course of the flashbacks, glimpses of Kane's hidden personal life emerge to add to the public knowledge already exposed in the newsreel compilation. Discovered in Thompson's progressive investigation are details of a fragmented childhood, Kane's precocious emergence as a newspaper publisher, increasing material wealth, marriage to a prominent young socialite, political ambitions cut short by a scandalous exposé, the sad investment in Susan Alexander's opera career, the final loneliness in the overly lavish Xanadu. Critical events are seen from different perspectives as the characters recall with open candor affiliations with Kane.

Theme

There develops in the course of the flashbacks clues to the value of Kane's life rather than an explicit understanding of Rosebud's relevance. Thompson himself never learns that the word referred to is the name of a sled with which Kane was playing when Thatcher came to take the boy from his mother; only the viewer discovers its meaning when in the final shots of the film the toy is tossed onto a fire as workmen clear Xanadu of its clutter.

While the sled provides the clever structuring device around which the psychological mystery unfolds, it also becomes in the end the principal reference point for Welles' multilayered theme. As Gregg Toland's camera tracks across Kane's massive collection of possessions, one sees a life defined symbolically by an obsession for objects. The camera movement is a materialistic journey back in time, beginning with the gaudy possessions of later life and proceeding to the simple, homey objects of his brief childhood years on his parents' farm. Rosebud is the final object, the end and the beginning of an existence rooted in the search for an elusive happiness through materialism.

In developing this theme Welles and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz directly correlate Kane's psychological needs with object possession. As Kane's personal life deteriorates, and as he becomes increasingly lonely and unhappy, the objects not only proliferate but grow larger in size.

Welles draws a portrait of an individual desperate for love, but incapable of finding it because he cannot himself love. Charles Kane's value system is one centered on the belief that love can be bought, along with successful opera careers and public adoration. Kane is wrong in every case. Leland verbalizes this aspect of the theme when he says to Thompson: "Love. That's why he did everything. That's why he went into politics. Seems we weren't enough. He wanted all the voters to love him too. Guess, all he wanted out of life was love; that's Charlie's story, how he lost it. Y'see, he just didn't have any to give."

Treatment

In treating Citizen Kane's story of bourgeois unhappiness, Welles appropriated a variety of cinematic styles, genres, and techniques. It is this evocative, rather than realistic, assimilation of story elements that made the film a revolutionary work of art. Welles mixes newsreels with subjective points of view, expressionism with realism, and satire with tragedy to hint at the essence of a single life.

Citizen Kane's admixture of styles and techniques, its very abruptness, grew from the bold assumption that enigmatic characterizations were possible within the motion picture. Every element of cinematic expression is put imaginatively to work to achieve this end: cinematography, settings, sound, lighting, music, editing, performance.

Cinematography

Much attention has been focused on the brilliance of Gregg Toland's photography in realizing Welles' goals. Working almost entirely within the studios of RKO, Toland and Welles were able to experiment with new approaches to frame composition. Welles consitently placed his actors in foreground-middleground-background patterns so that compositions carried a sense of visual depth. The triangular, deep-focus arrangements (so greatly admired by André Bazin and later an influence on television directors) allowed character interaction without editorial fragmentation; numerous scenes were played out in single takes, or with minimal change of camera angle.

A model illustration of the uninterrupted scene occurs when Kane's political opponent, Gettys (Ray Collins), announces in Susan Alexander's apartment that he intends to disclose the extramarital affair in order to save his own career. The painful announcement is filmed with long camera runs and in deep-focus composition so that all the principal characters in the drama are emotionally bound to the momentous event: Kane, his wife, the mistress, the political boss.

Toland drew on new lens technology, faster film stocks, and improved lighting instruments to produce sharply defined shots that often revealed a character or object within inches of the camera and other characters positioned far in the background.

Unusually sharp camera angles added their own metaphorical commentary, depicting through low-angled camera positions Kane's early arrogance, and, later, in the long-angled, wide-perspective compositions at Xanadu his complete alienation.

Lighting and Sound

Welles, who admitted to John Ford's influence, is noticeably theatrical in use of lighting and sound. As in Ford's The Informer, light and shadow contrasts provide psychological decoration for the story. Patches of light emphasize characters within otherwise dark, exaggerated spaces. An expressionistic aura pervades the film from its first long, misty shots of an obviously hand-painted, cardboard rendering of Xanadu to the final somber scenes in the palace's hollow interiors.

Sound is similarly theatrical and expressionistic. Voices loom larger than life; crashing sound effects serve as dynamic transition devices; Bernard Herrmann's melancholic music ominously underscores every dramatic innuendo . Welles is so thoroughly sound-conscious, a carry-over from radio work, that simply listening to the film conveys Kane's story with surprising clarity. Visual montages of newspaper headlines, for example, are accompanied by verbal readings of the information.

Other radio influence is evident. Character actions are often verbalized as though the script has been written entirely for sound rather than for the motion picture. The scuffle between Kane and Thatcher that takes place when the lad resists leaving his parents' farm is acted out with voice as well as action. When Kane arrives at his newspaper office with his bride-to-be, Emily, waiting in a carriage outside, similar vocal reinforcement of action occurs. Upon discovering Emily's presence outside, a newspaper employee, standing by a window, says with excitement: "Hey, look out here ... !" Another employee responds: "Let's go to the window!" Sounds of footsteps follow as the employees rush to get a glimpse of Kane's fiancée.

The extensive use of sound holds significance for the debate that has developed on the relative contributions of Welles and Herman Mankiewicz to Citizen Kane's screenplay. Strong evidence of radio styling suggests close collaboration between the sound-wise Welles and Mankiewicz, a seasoned screenwriter of visual orientation who had been working in Hollywood since 1926.

Editing

While sound and visuals are vital elements in Welles' daring cinematic style, editing virtuosity also plays an important part. In one of the film's most famous sequences the disintegration of Kane's first marriage is conveyed in a breakfast montage that begins with husband and wife seated at a small, intimate table and concludes with the two in wide separation. Dialogue continues throughout the succession of images as though a single conversation. This glib presentation of an eroding marriage is simultaneously pointed and satiric.

The most striking editing device in Robert Wise's abstract reconstruction of the story is that of sound-image overlap. A line of continuous dialogue connects scenes that are often years apart. Kane's romantic commitment to Susan Alexander, for exmple, is conveyed in a single dissolve which shows the young woman continuing a song begun for Kane on the evening they first met. The song continues but the dissolve produces a telling change of time and scenery, with the aspiring singer's earlier drab living quarters having been replaced by elegant surroundings.

Acting

The remarkable assimilation of cinematic techniques is matched by Welles' undeniably brilliant performance in the central role of Charles Foster Kane. Transition from youth to old age, from ebullience to disillusionment is handled with unfailing physical and psychological credibility. Welles' performance, like Citizen Kane as a whole, is a mixture of realism and theatricality.

Reactions

The impending release of Citizen Kane was met by efforts within William Randolph Hearst's camp to have the film suppressed. Louella O. Parsons, a Hollywood gossip columnist for the Hearst chain, attended a preview showing at RKO in January 1941, and afterward informed her boss that Welles had created a questionable biography of the newspaper mogul's life. Attempts to keep the picture out of circulation failed, however, and the Hearst people played out their disregard for Welles and RKO by refusing to publish advertisements for the picture.

Initial critical response to Citizen Kane after its premiere at New York City's Palace Theater on May 1, 1941 was intense: The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther argued that Welles and Toland had "made use of all the best devices of pure cinema". John Mosher at The New Yorker said simply, "Something new has come to the movie world at last."

A precise estimation of Citizen Kane's influence on cinematic art is not possible. One can only make note of the fact that Welles' first work continues to generate the same kind of excitement as on its release decades ago. Film critic Dwight MacDonald has maintained that the single most important test of any work of art is that of revisitability — whether old and new pleasures can be found on return visits to reexamine the piece. Accepting MacDonald's criterion as valid, Citizen Kane stands as one of cinema's most enduring achivements.

(from On Film: A History of the Motion Picture)