9 / 10
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 elevate. 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.
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. The commercial reception was modest. The film won one Academy Award (Best Original Screenplay). Subsequent 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 does not tell Kane’s story chronologically. It tells the story of how Kane’s story was constructed by the people who survived him.
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 is not 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 does not know about Kane while pretending to be a biography.
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. Embracing the reconstruction openly produces a richer portrait than the omniscient narrator pretending to know everything. Let the witnesses contradict each other. The truth lives 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 do not say. The technique would be imitated by Welles’s successors for the next eighty years.
For Writers
Visual composition can carry meaning that dialogue cannot 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 with sufficient specificity that Hearst attempted to suppress the film. Hearst’s newspapers refused to review it. Theater chains owned by Hearst declined to show it. RKO faced legal threats. The suppression campaign damaged the film’s initial commercial reception and shaped Welles’s subsequent career in Hollywood. The studio learned that biographical satire of living power figures carries costs. Welles never had this much creative control again.
The Hearst framing also gives the film its historical weight. Kane is not just a fictional rich man. He is a specific 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 subsequent 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 will fight, whether you will compromise, or whether you will 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. The sequence demonstrates how 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.
The Verdict
9/10. The most-studied American film of its century. Welles directed his first feature at twenty-five with technical resources he never had again. The Rosebud structure, the deep focus, the political satire, and the breakfast montage are all permanent contributions to the medium. The film loses a point for occasional pacing flatness in the third act. Watch it for the craft. Watch it again for what the craft is doing. Citizen Kane is the standard the rest of American cinema gets measured against.
FAQ
Was Hearst really trying to suppress this?
Yes. The Hearst press refused to review the film. Hearst-affiliated theater chains declined to book it. The suppression campaign was extensive and partially effective.
Who actually wrote it?
Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz share screenplay credit. The relative contributions remain disputed eighty years later. The 1971 Pauline Kael essay “Raising Kane” argued Mankiewicz did most of the writing. Subsequent scholarship has contested that position.
What is Rosebud?
The brand name on Kane’s childhood sled. The film reveals the sled in the closing sequence. The reveal is meant to suggest that Kane’s adult acquisitiveness was a substitute for the boyhood he lost when his mother sent him away.
How does the deep focus work technically?
Toland used high-contrast lighting, coated wide-angle lenses (24mm and 18mm), and sometimes split-focus optical printing to keep foreground and background simultaneously sharp.
What happened to Welles after this?
His subsequent films had progressively less studio support. RKO recut The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) against his wishes. Welles spent the rest of his career fighting for productions he could control.
Is the 1962 Sight and Sound ranking still relevant?
Citizen Kane held the top spot in the Sight and Sound critics poll from 1962 through 2002. The 2012 poll moved Vertigo to first. The 2022 poll moved Jeanne Dielman to first. Critical consensus shifts. Kane remains in the top ten.
Should I watch this?
Yes. Citizen Kane is required viewing for anyone interested in American cinema as a craft tradition.