When Kane started filming in the summer of 1940, its director, co-writer and star, Orson Welles, was only 24. He was already known for co-founding the Mercury Theatre company, and for his infamous 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. The studio, RKO Pictures, had given him total creative control of his first feature-length motion picture. The script, which Welles wrote with Herman J. Mankiewicz, begins with the death of publishing mogul Charles Foster Kane, and his final, mysterious word — “Rosebud” — sparks an investigation into his checkered, turbulent and ultimately empty life.
Citizen Kane was highly anticipated, not least because newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the obvious inspiration for Kane, tried to bury it. And when people saw it, what they got was a movie that didn’t look, move or sound like other mainstream American entertainments of the time. It was praised by contemporary critics and won an Oscar for its screenplay, but it divided audiences and underperformed at the box office. And nearly every movie Welles tried to make afterward was either compromised by studios or abandoned.
Then, in the late ’50s, Kane was re-released and its fortunes turned. For the next 40 years, it ranked #1 on the British film magazine Sight & Sound’s poll of the greatest films of all time, and it has twice topped AFI’s list of the 100 greatest American films.
So, with all that out of the way, let’s start with this question: Why should people still care about Citizen Kane 85 years later?