- It was a considerable relief to me last year when Citizen Kane was finally displaced by Vertigo from the top of Sight and Sound's critic-chosen list of the greatest films of all time. I could probably watch Hitchcock's masterpiece once a week for a year and never tire of it, but I've always found Welles' film to be far more inscrutible and inaccessible. Without a doubt, Citizen Kane is a well-constructed, groundbreaking, important, and influential film. Furthermore, along with fellow 1941 release The Maltese Falcon, it rightly belongs on any list of the most impressive directorial debuts of all time. Parts of it are terrific, as I will happily elaborate upon in this review. As for whether it ever belonged at the top of the pack, well, read on.
- The life of Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) is presented to the audience through one of the great cinematic riddles: Rosebud. An anonymous investigating reporter named Thompson (William Alland) spends the entire film striving to interpret the newspaper magnate's dying utterance, but all he concludes by the end is that it is a missing "piece in a jigsaw puzzle." The trail he follows leads both Thompson and the audience through Kane's life via non-chronological flashbacks concerning the parents (Agnes Moorehead and Harry Shannon) who reluctantly gave him up, his dispassionate guardian (George Coulouris), the first love who became his wife (Ruth Warrick), the second love who became his mistress (Dorothy Comingore), his redoubtable business associate (Everett Sloane), and his best friend, Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten). Of the huge cast of characters that intersected Kane's very public life, the unflappable Southerner Leland is perhaps the only one who ever really understood him. That's probably why they had a falling out.
- In many respects, Citizen Kane is a classic rise-and-fall story of the sort perfected by the gangster films of the 1930's. Sure, Kane is less overtly sinister than Scarface or Little Caesar, but his flaws run deep and bring him low in the end. Somehow he transforms from the creative dynamo who slept in the back room of his own newspaper office to a creepy old monster lurking in a cavernous home. Which brings us to the film's best and most memorable character: Xanadu. Whatever else the film accomplishes, the Kane estate ("cost: no man can say") is one of the most amazing sets ever filmed. It is a truly weird and disquieting palace populated by lifeless statues, strange fauna, and fireplaces that dwarf its human occupants. Even its shadows have shadows. If there was any doubt as to the value of cinematographer Gregg Toland's extensive use of deep focus, the Xanadu scenes should remove it. Of course, that's hardly the only impressive camerawork in Citizen Kane. As the camera swoops in to peek into skylights and peer through gates, the film's prying narrative is perfectly reinforced by its visuals.
- Regarding the film's broader themes, I think it's fair to conclude, as Leland does, that Kane struggled his entire life to look like an honest man. Unfortunately the same drive that propelled his newspaper also led him to alienate his best friend, to push his talentless second wife on stage, and to collect more museum pieces than he would ever have time to appreciate. Somewhere in life, Kane lost his perspective and, as the film's final reveal suggests, his innocence and happiness, too, ultimately ending up like one of the mummies in his collection. Unfortunately, Kane's tragic tale is probably the least interesting aspect of a film overbrimming with such outstanding set design and creative direction. Although Welles is excellent (even in heavy makeup) as Kane, no performance could overshadow the hollow abnormality of his palatial home. Xanadu rightly belongs up there with Norma Desmond's decrepit Sunset Blvd mansion and Rebecca's Manderley, even if Citizen Kane doesn't quite possess the narrative propulsion of the other two films.
- There is no shortage of cinematic references to this film, but the one that I realized this time around was that several shots near the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark mimic the final shots of Xanadu.
- Ray Collins, who played Lt. Tragg on Perry Mason, plays a crooked politician. Nat King Cole plays a pianist. Alan Ladd plays a reporter.
- Film debuts of Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead.
- Edited by Robert Wise and scored by Bernard Herrmann.
