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Citizen Kane

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Citizen Kane is the first film directed by Orson Welles, and is loosely based on the life of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Produced in 1941, the film deals with the inability of Mr. Kane (played by Mr. Welles) to love. Instead Kane has only "Love on my own terms."

Kane dies in the opening scene of the film; the remainder of the film details Kane's life of aquisitions, property, and riches, along with a marked lack of compassion for his wives. The movie is told through flashbacks being related to a reporter trying to improve a newsreel on Mr. Kane's life; the newsreel is regarded as functional but not especially profound, and the reporter is searching for the meaning behind Mr. Kane's last word, 'rosebud.'

What is revealed has been described by Jorge Luis Borges, in a 1941 review, as a "metaphysical detective story. [Its] subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man's inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined. . . . Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and reconstruct him. Forms of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum. At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by a secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances."

The film combines revolutionary cinematography (by Greg Toland) with an Oscar-winning screenplay, and a lineup of first time silverscreen actors, associates of Mr. Welles' from his stint at the Mercury Theater, such as Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead.

During the filming, Welles prevented studio executives of RKO from visiting the set. He understood their desire to control projects and he knew they were expecting him to do an exciting film that would correspond to his The War of the Worlds radio broadcast.

On hearing about the film, William Randolph Hearst offered RKO Pictures $800,000 to destroy all prints of the film and burn the negative. When RKO refused, Hearst was so angry that he banned every newspaper and station in his media conglomerate from reviewing or even mentioning the movie. This struggle was, itself, turned into a movie, RKO 281.

Many critics consider the film the best film ever made; the American Film Institute ranked it #1 on its 100 Greatest Movies list; it has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry; and the film is consistently in the top 5 on the Internet Movie Database.

The Oscar for Best Writing, Original Screenplay was shared by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz as the only one awarded for the film. It was nominated, however, for another eight awards:

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