9 / 10
Official trailer
Citizen Kane is the 1941 RKO production that twenty-five-year-old Orson Welles directed, co-wrote, produced, and starred in. Welles plays Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher modeled on William Randolph Hearst.
The plot follows a newsreel reporter named Thompson investigating the meaning of Kane’s dying word, Rosebud, through interviews with the people who knew him. Joseph Cotten plays Jedediah Leland, Kane’s college friend and theater critic. Dorothy Comingore plays Susan Alexander, the singer Kane marries and tries to make a star. Everett Sloane plays Mr. Bernstein, Kane’s business manager.
Ray Collins plays the political rival Jim Gettys. Welles wrote the script with Herman J. Mankiewicz. The cinematographer Gregg Toland’s deep-focus work is the film’s most-imitated technical achievement.
Most canonized classics feel like homework to me, and Citizen Kane is a thrill. Welles was twenty-five and acting like nobody had told him what a movie wasn’t allowed to do, and that cockiness is all over the screen, in the deep-focus frames and in a structure that refuses to tell a life straight. It’s a 9 from me, a film I admire and enjoy in equal measure, with a sag near the end that keeps it off the top.
The film made approximately one million six hundred thousand dollars in initial release against an eight hundred thousand dollar budget.
Hearst’s newspapers suppressed coverage. It did modest business. The film won one Academy Award (Best Original Screenplay). Later decades reframed Citizen Kane as the standard against which other American films were measured. The 1962 Sight and Sound critics poll placed it first. The film held that position for fifty years until Vertigo displaced it in 2012.
The Structure
The Rosebud framing is the film’s most-copied structural choice.
Thompson interviews five people. Each interview produces a flashback. The flashbacks overlap and contradict each other. The audience pieces together Kane’s life from accounts that disagree about him. The structure resists the resolved-biopic format that 1941 audiences expected. The film doesn’t tell Kane’s story chronologically. It tells the story of how the people who survived Kane constructed his story.
The Rosebud reveal at the end is famously withheld from the investigating journalist. Thompson never learns what the word means. The audience sees the sled burning in the furnace. The information that completed the investigation reaches viewers but not characters. The structural choice argues that the meaning of a man’s life isn’t the kind of thing that fits in a newsreel summary. The reveal works because the film has spent two hours establishing how much the audience doesn’t know about Kane while pretending to be a biography.
That sled going into the furnace gets me. Thompson leaves with nothing, we leave knowing what Rosebud was, and Kane is still a stranger to both of us. I think it’s the smartest ending trick of its era, because it answers the question and leaves the man unexplained.
For Writers
A biographical story told through unreliable witnesses is more honest than a chronological one. Citizen Kane structures Kane’s life as competing accounts by people with reasons to remember him differently. The technique acknowledges that no one knows another person completely. The lesson is that biography is reconstruction. Reconstruction done openly produces a richer portrait than the omniscient narrator pretending to know everything. Let the witnesses contradict each other. The truth is in the gap.
The Deep Focus
Gregg Toland’s cinematography is the film’s most-studied technical achievement. Deep focus keeps foreground and background equally sharp. The technique requires specific lens choices, lighting, and sometimes split-focus optical effects.
The 1941 audience had been trained on shallow-focus framing where the camera tells you what to look at. Citizen Kane lets the audience choose where to look within a composition. The technique demands more from the viewer and rewards the attention.
The clearest examples are the boyhood Kane scene (Kane plays in the snow outside while his mother signs him over to Mr. Thatcher inside), the political rally scene (Kane delivers his speech while Jim Gettys watches from a high box), and the breakfast montage tracking the deterioration of Kane’s first marriage. Each composition uses the depth of the frame to tell the audience something the characters don’t say. Welles’s successors would imitate the technique for the next eighty years.
The boyhood scene is the one I’d show anyone who doubts the fuss. A boy plays in the snow outside while his mother signs him away to Mr. Thatcher inside, and nobody has to say a word about what’s being lost. Welles trusts me to find it in the frame, and I get a kick out of being trusted.
For Writers
Visual composition can carry meaning that dialogue can’t reach. Citizen Kane uses depth of field as a writing tool. The audience understands relationships through how characters are positioned in space. The lesson is that prose writers have a parallel tool: paragraph composition. What you put in the foreground, what you defer to the background, what you let the reader notice for themselves. The principle is the same. Compose the page. The reader will read the composition.
The Hearst Problem
Charles Foster Kane is modeled on William Randolph Hearst closely enough that Hearst tried to suppress the film.
His newspapers refused to review it, theater chains under pressure from him declined to show it, and RKO faced legal threats. The campaign damaged the first release and shaped Welles’s later career in Hollywood, and he never had this much creative control again. That last part is hard to swallow. One rich man’s wounded pride cost us whatever Welles would have made next with a free hand.
The Hearst framing also gives the film its historical weight.
Kane is a commentary on the kind of fortune and media power that 1941 America had let accumulate. The film argues that great wealth corrupts the people who hold it and that the public mythology around such men is constructed by paid employees with reason to construct it. The argument applies to 1941 Hearst and to later media barons. The film stays relevant because the type does.
For Writers
Specific fictional portraits of living power figures carry specific risks. Welles’s Kane was identifiable enough that Hearst tried to bury the film. The career consequences were real. The lesson is that satire of the powerful is expensive. Plan for the response before publication. Decide in advance whether you’ll fight, whether you’ll compromise, or whether you’ll accept the costs. The work can outlast the campaign against it, but the campaign happens first.
Craft Note
The breakfast montage tracking Kane’s first marriage is the film’s most economical character work. The sequence shows the marriage through successive breakfast scenes that compress nine years into about two minutes. Welles and Toland stage each breakfast at the same table, with shifts in clothing, posture, and seating distance carrying the entire emotional arc. Montage can tell a story that would take a full subplot to tell in chronological scenes. The breakfast montage is what compression looks like when the director trusts the audience to fill the gaps.
Does Citizen Kane still hold up?
9/10. It’s the most-studied American film of its century, and it deserves every bit of the attention. Welles directed his first feature at twenty-five with resources he never had again, and the Rosebud structure, the deep focus, the political satire and the breakfast montage all became part of the medium’s permanent vocabulary. I dock it a point because the third act goes flat in places and I can feel the energy drain away, and that’s the only thing between it and a 10.
