Citizen Kane
The world's most acclaimed film. With this inventive account of the life of a media tycoon, the young Orson Welles threw down a challenge to Hollywood from which neither fully recovered.
Charles Foster Kane (Welles), a multi-millionaire property and publishing tycoon, political mover and profligate art collector, dies alone in Xanadu, his vast mansion. A journalist (Alland) is dispatched to interview Kane's ex-wife and a number of his surviving friends and colleagues to find out more about him and to discover the meaning of his last utterance: 'Rosebud'. Welles embarked on his doomed love affair with Hollywood when he arrived on the West Coast as a 25-year-old who had already established himself as a prodigiously gifted performer, director and producer on stage and radio. Having abandoned his dream of adapting Conrad's 'Heart Of Darkness' for the big screen, he turned instead to Kane, a project based loosely on the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Welles brought with him many members of his Mercury theatre company and, with Mankiewicz's often undervalued screenplay, created a work of astonishing maturity and depth. He always acknowledged his debt to John Ford in his approach to filmmaking, and for his debut feature employed as cinematographer Ford's sometime collaborator, the gifted Greg Tolland. Verdict With its spirit of visual and narrative innovation, and Welles's precocious, towering central performance, Citizen Kane almost lives up to its own reputation as the best of all time. |
