page_title: Sources for Citizen Kane
section_title: News on the March
hierarchical_section_title: Sources for Citizen Kane / News on the March
caption_attribution_description: English: Promotional still for the 1941 film, Citizen Kane Image is marked CK-23 at lower right
context_page_description: The sources for Citizen Kane, the 1941 American motion picture that marked the feature film debut of Orson Welles, have been the subject of speculation and controversy since the project's inception. With a story spanning 60 years, the quasi-biographical film examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles, a fictional character based in part upon the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick. A rich incorporation of the experiences and knowledge of its authors, the film earned an Academy Award for Best Writing for Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles.
context_section_description: "Although Citizen Kane was widely seen as an attack on William Randolph Hearst, it was also aimed at Henry R. Luce and his concept of faceless group journalism, as then practiced at his Time magazine and March of Time newsreels," wrote Roger Ebert.
  The News on the March sequence that begins the film satirizes The March of Time, the news documentary and dramatization series presented in movie theaters by Time Inc. from 1935 to 1951. At its peak The March of Time was seen by 25 million U.S. moviegoers a month. Usually called a newsreel series, it was actually a monthly series of short feature films twice the length of standard newsreels. The films were didactic, with a subjective point of view. The editors of Time described it as "pictorial journalism". The March of Time's relationship to the newsreel was compared to the weekly interpretive news magazine's relationship to the daily newspaper.
  "The March of Time style was characterized by dynamic editing, gutsy investigative reporting, and hard-punching, almost arrogant, narration," wrote film historian Ephraim Katz — who added that it "was beautifully parodied by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane."
  From 1935 to 1938 Welles was a member of the prestigious and uncredited company of actors that presented the radio version of The March of Time, which preceded the film version. He was well versed in what came to be called "Time-speak", described by March of Time chronicler Raymond Fielding as "a preposterous kind of sentence structure in which subjects, predicates, adjectives, and other components of the English language all ended up in unpredictable and grammatically unauthorized positions." In News on the March, William Alland impersonated narrator Westbrook Van Voorhis: "Great imitation," Welles later said, "but he's pretty easy to imitate: 'This week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane.' We used to do that every day — five days a week!"
  Welles screened the film for Luce: "He was one of the first people to see the movie," Welles said. "He and Clare Luce loved it and roared with laughter at the digest. They saw it as a parody and enjoyed it very much as such — I have to hand it to them." Welles had met Luce through Archibald MacLeish, and financial support from the Luces helped open the Mercury Theatre in November 1937.
  Callow called the News on the March sequence "the single most impressive, most spoken-of element in the movie". Remarkably, critic Arthur Knight reported in 1969 that the sequence was excised from most prints presented on American television.
caption: Teddy Roosevelt (Thomas A. Curran) campaigns with Kane in the News on the March sequence.
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