An Expert On What People Will Think

Rating: 10/10 (25 April 2007)

The problem with writing about a film like Citizen Kane is that with 809 previous comments on the boards here, there is little that hasn't been said already. The best you can do is not look at any others and express your own thoughts your own way.
I've always felt the real reason that William Randolph Hearst so bitterly resented Orson Welles's masterpiece is that it got really too close to his own soul for him to be easy. Most folks who talk about Citizen Kane go for the obvious target, Welles's depiction of Marion Davies (Susan Alexander) as a no talent gold digger. In fact Welles himself in later years said he thought he was unfair to Davies then in Dorothy Comingore's performance.
What Welles showed in Charles Foster Kane was the insincerity of his beliefs. The key line in Citizen Kane I've always thought was what Joseph Cotten said that his friend Charlie Kane had a lot of opinions, but didn't believe any of them. To this day serious biographers of Hearst still wonder exactly what he did believe when the day was done.
Citizen Kane came up with a host of Oscar nominations, but only took home one award for original screenplay for Welles and Herman Mankiewicz. Original it certainly was in concept and execution.
The role that was written by Welles and Mankiewicz and directed by Welles for Welles is one of the greatest roles ever written for any film actor. The technique of Citizen Kane is always discussed, the flashbacks told from many points of view for the audience to get a grasp of what the title character was all about. What's not discussed is Welles himself.
What he does in fact is give several performances of the same man in one film. Welles reinterprets Kane five or six times depending on whose flashback we're seeing. He's a scared child being taken from his parents, he's a rich frat boy and incorrigible scamp as seen by George Couloris the J.P. Morgan like banker, he's an idealist and crusader as seen by his business manager Everette Sloane, a man with no core set of beliefs who will do anything to bend the public to approval by his closest and maybe his only real friend Joseph Cotten, a lonely man with a compulsion for real love by Dorothy Comingore, and as an aging tyrant by butler Paul Stewart. Welles makes every one of these Kanes come alive and each relates to the other.
The names of all those I've mentioned in the cast before were from Welles's Mercury Theater Company, nearly all went on to substantial movie careers. Others from the cast who did are Ray Collins, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick, and Erskine Sanford. I don't think any other film comes close to introducing so many talented players to the screen.
The film begins with the aged Kane's death and that single word 'Rosebud' which sends everyone scrambling to find out just what he had on his mind in his final moments on earth. Those searching never do find out, but you the audience does and the unveiling of Charles Foster Kane's inner soul is something once seen and never forgotten.