Citizen Kane - 1941

Directed by Orson Welles
Screenplay by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz
Cinematography by Gregg Toland
Music by Bernard Herrmann

Starring : Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, Dorothy Comingore, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, William Alland, George Couloris

Citizen Kane is Orson Welles's greatest achievement -- and a landmark of cinema history. The story charts the rise and fall of a newpaper publisher whose wealth and power ultimately isolates him in his castle like refuge. The film's protagonist, Charles Foster, was based on a composite of Howard Hughes and William Randolph Hearst - so much so that Hearst tried to have the film suppressed. Every aspect of the production marked an advance in film language: the deep focus and deeply shadowed cinematography; the discontinuous narrative, relying heavily on flashbacks and newsreel footage; and the ensemble acting forged in the fires of Welles's Mercury Theatre. Every moment of the film, every shot, has been choreographed to perfection. The film is essential viewing, quite possibly the greatest film ever made and, along with The Birth of a Nation, certainly the most influential.

Technical Information

Camera : Mitchell BNC
Film negative format (mm/video inches) : 35 mm
Cinematographic process : Spherical
Printed film format : 35 mm
Aspect ratio : 1.37 : 1

In America in the Dark, David Thomson writes that Citizen Kane is "the key work of the first American director to identify comprehensive fraud as a topic central to his culture."

The movie is unquestionably great even if the Hearst similarities did not exist. Its use of unusual angles, dramatic lighting, unusual transitions and tracking shots, and deep-focus shots is sensational and the narrative is more "circular," to borrow a description from Roger Ebert’s fine review, than linear. Indeed, the movie begins at its story’s end, the death of Charles Foster Kane, whose last word is "Rosebud."

The movie received 9 Oscar nominations, but only one for the screenplay, which was shared by Welles and Mankiewicz. Its performers, including Welles, came from the Mercury Theater and had never before acted in a movie. Welles took a relative modest salary for the film, but obtained almost complete creative control over the movie, which was reportedly without precedent in Hollywood.