Innovative, aggressive, and fascinating, "Citizen Kane" electrified a complacent industry

Rating: 10/10 (11 August 2005)

"Citizen Kane" was a dazzling movie debut for Welles, a twenty-four-year-old infant terrible whose brilliant work for stage and radio had already made him famous
RKO had given him carte blanche, and with the collaboration of writer Herman Mankiewicz and photographer Gregg Toland, he had produced a masterpiece
"Citizen Kane" is the story of Charles Foster Kane, a rich young man who decides to build a newspaper empire and in doing so sacrifices his professed high ideals on the altar of yellow journalism His personal, political ambitions are ruined when his extramarital liaison with a young singer becomes public knowledge and his efforts to make her an international opera star bring him nothing but ridicule Having alienated his friends and wives and lost a good part of his fortune, Kane spends his last years alone in the enormous art-filled palace he has had created in Florida
Told primarily in flashbacks, the film begins with Kane's death: after dropping a paperweight that simulates a snowfall when it is turned upside down, the old man whispers a single word, "Rosebud," and dies Immediately a strident Mach-of-Time newsreel begins, reviewing the highlights of Kane's career as the camera had recorded them over the years It is, however, an unsatisfactory record of a man's life, and a group of journalists decide to probe deeper in an attempt to discover the truth about Kane Perhaps, they speculate, the word "Rosebud" offers a clue... Then ensues a series of interviews with the key people in Kane's life, each of whom relates the man's story as he or she knew it...
The portrait that eventually emerges is one of a grasping, vain, selfish, and ambitious man... "He never gave you anything," an old friend recalls bitterly, "he just left you a tip." In the film's final moments, workmen in Kane's palace are seen destroying unwanted junk One of the items they toss into the furnace is a child's sled; as it burns, the word "Rosebud" can be seen painted on it
The story of Charles Foster Kane is engrossing but not particularly profound The movie is a superb piece of film-making, nonetheless, because the techniques employed, although not necessarily new, had never before been used together to such startling effect Welles and Toland made brilliant use of deep-focus photography and of an arsenal of lighting effects
In the course of the film, flashbulbs pop, spotlights play, the sun's rays pour down into darkened rooms, beams of light are emitted by a movie projector, lightning flashes, and smoke, fog shadows, rain, and snow all contribute to the almost tangible atmosphere Quick, dramatic cuts occur throughout In one famous sequence, Welles employs six fast scenes to portray the disintegration of Kane's first marriage: each shot shows Kane and his wife at the breakfast table, but in each they are clearly more estranged until, in the final shot, they sit in silence as she reads a rival newspaper
Toland's constantly moving camera is somewhat obtrusive, but it is nevertheless mesmerizing In the famous sequence at the opera housethe occasion of the second Mrs. Kane's disastrous debutthe camera shows the anguished vocal coach in the conductor's box and then moves upward to the flies, where one stagehand expresses his critical opinion of the performance by holding his nose Welles' use of sound, ranging from thunder to a cockatoo's screech, reflects his experience in radio
There had never been a picture like "Citizen Kane." It openly satirized a wealthy and powerful living American, it deliberately antagonized Hollywood's ruling elite, and it bravely ignored conventional cinema technique Innovative, aggressive, and fascinating, "Citizen Kane" electrified a complacent industry Welles dominated Kane He had become, in a single stroke, the most admired, envied, praised and detested man in Hollywood Unhappily, the movie industry never learned to utilize Welles' quixotic genius, and his career never rescaled the heights it had reached in 1941