Where do I begin?...

Rating: 10/10 (18 April 2016)

and how do I end a review of this film? Well bear with me while I try.
Why is Citizen Kane a great film and yet so hard to review? Because it is like a big ball of yarn with the ends of many threads sticking out. You can just yank on any thread, start writing, and go on forever. Let me start with its style, which is discussed in great detail in the late Roger Ebert's excellent commentary on the DVD of the film. Its unusual photography, editing, scene transitions, etc. are why it is shown in film school.For example, the lap dissolves in the scene with Joseph Cotten in the old-folks home were very unusual. The scene of Cotten talking dissolves into a flashback scene with Kane, and half-way through the dissolve, we see Cotton on the left side of the screen and the Kane flashback on the right side, and that is held for several seconds. It is a dissolve into a split screen by means of very clever lighting. The lights fade out on the right side of the Cotten scene, and they fade up on the right side of the Kane scene. That technique had never been done before, and I've seen it in only one or two movies made after that.
Then there is the story, the theme of which seems to be uttered by the reporters near the end of the film, as they give up searching for the meaning of Kane's last word - "Rosebud". They say Kane was a man who, though one of the wealthiest men in the world ,lost everything he ever had, even though he died rich. And so the story we have been watching is, on the surface, just that. The final scene showing you Kane's possessions that are considered of no value by auditors being tossed into the flames of an incinerator - one happening to be a sled with the name "Rosebud" on it, the sled Kane was playing on the day he became a rich man - as a child through a quirk of fate.
I used to be in the camp that believed that the snow globe was representational of Kane's nostalgia for his boyhood home and maybe for the sled. I no longer believe his attachment to the piece has anything to do with his pre-wealth youth. I think it reminds him of a time much later than that. That snow globe actually was a possession belonging to Susan Alexander before Kane ever met her, sitting on her dressing table in her small apartment. Kane picked up the globe during his rampage in her bedroom in Xanadu when she left him. Holding that globe abruptly put an end to his destruction of her bedroom. Why? I think it links back to the evening when they met and Alexander had no idea who he was. That night Charles Foster Kane was just a "schoolboy" who could wiggle his ears and do shadow puppets to impress a thoughtful and attractive young lady. This courtship was a period in their relationship that we can assume was not influenced by his money. For that one evening, he wasn't the richest man in the country. No other relationship that Kane had, once he was wrested from his sled as a child, began in that same manner. All the other people surrounding Kane as an adult were near him because of, or with full knowledge of, his wealth and power. Jed Leland was a friend from his college days. Mr. Bernstein was an employee. The first wife, who was met and courted on a buying tour of Europe, would know who Charles Foster Kane was when they met. Only Susan Alexander came into his life completely carefree of his wealth. And she brought with her that snow globe.
While holding the snow globe as he lay dying, Kane isn't thinking about the cabin in Colorado or his sled - even if that is the scene depicted in the snow globe. (What an odd coincidence that she would own a snow globe with a cabin and sled in it when they met. That is a bigger "huh?" than who heard Kane's last words.) Kane is thinking about this very personal artifact that belonged to Susan Alexander, the woman who, in spite of a toothache, offered some kind assistance to a stranger one night long ago.
Why does Kane whisper "Rosebud" on his death bead and not "Susan."? I don't know. Perhaps it is just where his mind wandered while reminiscing about that evening in a young woman's apartment when he was detoured from going to the warehouse that stored the artifacts of his youth.
What are the other threads you could pull on and write paragraphs about? Kane's parents and why his mother did what she did, apparently never seeing her son again once she turned him over to be raised by bankers, somehow seeing this as an act of love. Then there is the issue of memory and how people are not what they seem to be - the apparent sycophant Mr. Bernstein seeming to have a great deal of wisdom and depth in his old age that you would not have foreseen when he was young - he talks about a girl he saw on a ferry 40 years before and how a day hasn't passed that he hasn't thought of her. How Kane liked being "the voice and defender of the masses" but maybe didn't like the idea that maybe someday those masses would organize and demand their rights, as Jed Leland had said on his way out of Kane's life. And on it goes.
I'm sorry if this review is a bit disorganized, but "Citizen Kane" is not linear storytelling, or any other kind that I can identify with one word, yet it is storytelling at its best.