This review was updated on September 21, 2024
The film that changed everything. First-time director Orson Welles, 28, may not have invented all of the groundbreaking techniques he employed in Citizen Kane – from deep-focus photography to the incorporation of newsreel footage via densely overlapping dialogue and the film’s labyrinthine flashback-within-flashback structure – but he was the first to bring all these ideas together in a single work. The result is still dizzying, still enthralling, and still devastating in its emotional impact.
Renowned for his work in the New York theatre and on radio, where he scandalised America with his all-Black stage production of ‘Macbeth’ and his terrifyingly realistic broadcast based on ‘The War of the Worlds’, Welles was wooed to Hollywood with a controversial contract promising him total creative control – unheard of in the days of the studio system – and the chance not only to direct, but to write and star in his own movies.
As witty, tragic, unlikely, unique and fascinating as ever
Penned by Welles in partnership with screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz – a complex relationship explored in David Fincher’s 2020 biopic Mank – Citizen Kane is at heart a satire on wealth and power in America, inspired at least in part by the life of billionaire media mogul William Randolph Hearst, whom Mankiewicz knew and loathed. Played by Welles himself in various degrees of ageing makeup, Charles Foster Kane starts out as a crusading newsman delivering the unvarnished truth to the masses, only to end his life in his vast, garish palace of Xanadu, with only the servants to hear his final word.
Regularly voted the greatest film of all time – an epithet it probably deserves – Citizen Kane would turn out to be a financial disappointment, and the last time Welles was given carte blanche by a movie studio. Viewed today, it remains as witty, tragic, unlikely, unique and fascinating as ever.
Find out where it lands on our list of the 100 greatest movies ever made.
What to watch next:
Sunset Boulevard (1950); Chimes at Midnight (1966); The Social Network (2010)