Citizen Kane (1941)

Is Citizen Kane the greatest film of all time? According to Fifty years of the world's most reputable films list Sight and Sound, it is. Roger Ebert, the most famous film critic of all time, calls it not just the greatest film of all time but also his personal favorite. Kane currently sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and #97 on IMDB's Top 250. The film won the Academy Award for Best Original Sceenplay in 1941, and was nominated for eight other awards including Best Picture and Best Actor. Despite all of this, however, Kane was a flop that failed to earn back its budget and cost Orson Welles his unprecedented creative freedom that is rarely ever afforded to directors. So is Citizen Kane the greatest film of all time, and more importantly, is it worth your time if you are not a film history nerd?

Kane's most timeless quality to modern day audiences is its strong, visionary story. It opens with a news reel about the death of one of the most famous men on the planet and quickly devolves into the gossip and petty tabloid articles that have chronicled his entire life from a distance. The open speaks to the part of our brain that likes to quietly watch and judge those famous personalities and their lives that are so much more grand than our own. It's essentially an Entertainment Weekly segment. But then following this superficial recap of Kane's life, the film proceeds to peel back the curtain on who Kane really was as a person, or at least how he was to the people in his life. The story follows a reporter tasked with interviewing those closest to Kane that are still alive, and piece together a picture of who the man really was. By showing us Kane's entire life and death in the intro, the film compels audiences to discover not just the truth about who Charles Foster Kane was, but also to judge for ourselves the choices that he makes and how it all goes so wrong. This non-linear story structure was radically different from anything else in film at the time and provided a sense of mystery to the on-screen drama, rather than a suspense as to what was going to happen. Paired with Orson Welles' charisma and weight to the character, Kane himself is a formidable force to behond on screen that remains interesting to watch to this day.

The technical achievements of Citizen Kane, while not very impressive by today's film standard, should still be mentioned as they set a precedent for the remainder of the decade. The cinematography is the most striking technical aspect of the film. Cinematographer Greg Toland was a professional at the time who wanted to work with first timer Welles because he thought that in Welles' ignorance and creative freedom, he wouldn't be limited by traditional Hollywood film making methods. This turned out to be very true as Kane was a pioneer in filming techniques used to enhance immersion and weight to the film. Deep Focus cinematography was a pioneering technique that managed to keep the entire set in focus, making you feel as though you are in the room yourself. Shots of the ceiling, while hardly exciting now, where revolutionary as most films never showed ceilings, as that's where they put their lighting equipment. Chiaroscuro lighting and jump cuts were also utilized to further define the film and give it a unique artistic style that would be replicated in many films of the decade, including The Maltese Falcon (1941).

Beyond cinematogrpahy, the makeup used to age twenty-four year old Orson Welles is incredibly realistic. The production design is grand and feels as though the budget was much greater than it was. What I personally am not a fan of, however, is how many of the sets feel like empty theatre stages. This is understandable coming from Welles' strong theatre background, but in many scenes I was taken out of the fact that it just looks like the actors were acting on a stage that had few if any decorative props. In fact much of this film is simply a play. Beyond some of the enormous, empty sets, the acting is quite "theatrical." Using actors that have never been in a motion picture before, Welles very consciously gives the acting a very grandiose, weighty feeling to it.

Unfortunately, no discussion about Kane is complete without at least mentioning the history surrounding it, feel free to skip the next few paragraphs if you are not a history nerd. In 1940, a young Orson Welles was considered a genius of theatre whom all the major Hollywood studios wanted to work with. After turning most every opportunity down, Welles agreed to a contract with RKO Radio Pictures that promised him complete autonomy and creative control over at least two films. This was something completely unheard of at the time, and is still a rare thing to see today. After struggling to establish a first project, Welles was able to begin production on a scrip he commissioned from legendary, washed up screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. Welles would take this script and reshape it, adding and subtracting what he liked until he came out with the script for Citizen Kane. This collaboration between Welles and Mankiewicz, and who exactly contributed what to the final draft, is still a controversial topic of discussion today.

Continuing with history, Mankiewicz had been a part of Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst's inner circle for a number of years and had recently been ousted by him. In his anger, Mankiewicz made Hearst the inspiration for Kane so much so that any person at the time would have recognized Kane as a representation of Hearst. It would be like today if someone made a movie about a man who started an electric vehicle company named Belon Husk. This made producing Kane a dangerous endeavor as Hearst's newspapers relentlessley slammed both Welles and Mankiewicz all across the country. This may have contributed to Kane being a financial flop, and resulting in Welles losing his creative control contract which he never got to wield in Hollywood ever again. His films would also never reach the same critical acclaim that Kane, his first film, did. The parallels between Charles Foster Kane and Welle's real life "downfall" as a Hollywood wunderkind provide an ironic context to the film. As does the parallel between Charles Kane as a trend setting revolutionary, and the fact that Citizen Kane the film was also just that. It went against Hollywood conventions, was made by a band of misfits who had never worked in Hollywood before, and is a complete contradiction to the big studio controlled structure that it is built upon.

Overall, the film is a historic film achievement that can still be enjoyed by modern audiences, if for nothing else than to follow and judge the wildly exciting character of Charles Foster Kane and Welles' brilliant performance. I think modern audiences will not hate, but also not care for Citizen Kane. I personally can appreciate and do wildly enjoy watching this film, but it will never be one of my favorite films. It very much follows that old Hollywood style that largely fell out of popularity by the mid-1940s. This is reinforced by the fact that this film was completely forgotten until 1956 when it was suddenly revitalized in critics eyes and was dubbed the greatest film of all time for an incredible fifty years. I can appreciate that Citizen Kane may have been a quintessential film for an entire era of Hollywood films, but today it is not something that resonates with me beyond its history or story appeal. I don't dislike Kane by any measure, and neither do I think modern day audiences would, should they give it a fair chance. I do, however, feel it is a film that had its greatest days behind it and will over time become less and less the "standard" for films that we know it as today.