The story of a boy who lost his sled

Rating: 4/10 (29 June 2013)

Citizen Kane is a great film—the greatest of all time. Not by a long shot. It's a fantastical "boy's handbook" on how to obtain power and influence people with an attendant cautionary voice preaching throughout that such a road often leads to an end of the line tragedy: a soulless, emotional void and the regret of love lost. The reductive moral in operation here being, guess what?! "Money isn't everything." The grand mystery of Kane's one word deathbed utterance of "Rosebud," is the great man's heart-rending memory of a sled he cherished during his poor rural boyhood.
The characters in this film are nothing more than paper cut-out stereotypes: the driven entrepreneur and policy maker, the blue blood, society wife, the low class blonde floozy. Joseph Cotton as Jedediah Leland, Kane's long time friend/nemesis, is the stand in for Kane's unrealized alter ego and conscience. A maudlin Victorian sentimentality keynotes the entire saga.
The storyline purportedly is based on the life of William Randolph Hearst and plot elements can certainly be linked to Hearst. Hearst reportedly reviled Welles' pictorialization of him as public and private man. It has recently come to light that Hearst's wrath had a much more tantalizing and intimate genesis. "Rosebud," some sources claim was Heart's affectionate reference to the genitalia of his longtime mistress, Marion Davies and this appellation was known only to Hollywood insiders and Hearst and Davies alone. Welles had the audacity to undress this secret before the world and Hearst was furious at Welles' prank. "Rosebud," over time has indeed become an esoteric buzzword.
Welles, it can be said, was a man with a determined vision, one that would not be contradicted or subject to compromise or concession. While this tenacity served him admirably, gifting him with a cinematic eye that enabled him to engender his films with creative lighting and camera angles, his talent for storytelling was compromised by an antique, naive worldview so blatant here in Citizen Kane. Orson Welles was a much better actor than filmmaker as his performances in "The Third Man," "The Stranger," and "Touch of Evil" bears out.
Orson Welles' greatest creation was the legend of his own genius.