Orson Welles was 25 when he signed with RKO Pictures in 1939, and the contract gave an untried director something Hollywood almost never handed out: final cut. Citizen Kane is what he did with it. The film runs 119 minutes, opens with a dying word and spends the rest of its length failing to explain it. That failure is the point.
Trailer, via Warner On Demand.
Rosebud, and the reporter who never finds it
Charles Foster Kane dies in his mansion, Xanadu, on a vast palatial estate in Florida. His last word is “Rosebud.” A newsreel producer assigns reporter Jerry Thompson to learn what it means. Thompson interviews Kane’s friends and associates and gets nowhere. Kane’s second wife, Susan Alexander Kane, now an alcoholic nightclub owner, refuses to speak to him.
The refusal is the film’s method. Citizen Kane is a mystery, and it never solves itself. Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote a screenplay that hands the audience the answer in the final shot and hands Thompson nothing.
A sled, a trust, and a Colorado boarding house
Thompson reads the private archive of the late banker Walter Parks Thatcher. Kane’s mother, Mary Kane, ran a Colorado boarding house. Gold was discovered in 1871 through a mining deed belonging to her. She hired Thatcher to establish a trust for Kane’s education and to take guardianship, protecting the boy from his brutal father.
Young Kane is playing in the snow with his sled when his parents introduce him to Thatcher and tell him he will live with him. He strikes Thatcher with the sled and tries to run away. At 25, Kane controls the trust, and through the mine’s productivity and Thatcher’s investing he becomes one of the richest men in the world. Then he buys the New York Inquirer and attacks the business interests that made him rich.
The Mercury players, most of them new to film
The end credits state that “Most of the principal actors in Citizen Kane are new to motion pictures. The Mercury Theatre is proud to introduce them.” Ten were billed as Mercury Actors, drawn from the repertory company Welles founded with John Houseman in 1937.
The film marks the feature debuts of William Alland, Ray Collins, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane, Paul Stewart and Welles. Cotten had just become a Broadway star in The Philadelphia Story. Welles plays Kane. Alland plays Thompson and narrates the News on the March newsreel. Dorothy Comingore plays Susan. Moorehead plays Mary Kane. Ray Collins plays Jim W. Gettys, Kane’s political rival for Governor of New York.
What the film costs the man at its center
Kane is a composite, built from William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick, with pieces of his writers’ own lives folded in. Hearst banned any mention of the film from his newspapers. It was a critical success and failed to recoup its costs at the box office. It faded, then returned when French critics including André Bazin praised it, and it was re-released in 1956.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1871 | Gold discovered through Mary Kane’s mining deed |
| 1939 | Welles signs with RKO Pictures |
| 1940 | Principal photography |
| 1941 | Release |
| 1956 | Re-release |
- Runtime: 119 minutes
- Release year: 1941
- Directed by: Orson Welles
- Written by: Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz
- Genres: Mystery, Drama
The tagline asks whether Kane was a hero or a heel. The film refuses the question, and that refusal is why it holds. Every tyrannical and self-destructive move Kane makes reads as a reaction to being taken from his mother, and Welles never once says so out loud. The sled is a fact, not a thesis. Eighty-five years on, the mystery structure still works because the answer never arrives through Thompson. It arrives through the camera, and the audience gets it alone.
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