April 16: Citizen Kane (1941)

Published on March 12, 2010 by Alissa Wilkinson

Citizen Kane (1941)

Friday, April 16th - 7:00pm

Trailer

Rotten Tomatoes: 100%

"Sparkles with originality and invention…a triumph" - John C. Flinn Sr., Variety

"A marvelous movie…that gets better with each renewed acquaintance." - Time Out

"To re-visit Citizen Kane is to experience the infinite possibilities of movies being realized right before your very eyes." - Empire Magazine

"The movie that taught [me] what movies were." - Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

"A picture of tremendous and overpowering scope, not in physical extent so much as in its rapid and graphic rotation of thoughts…comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood" - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

"It would be nice to be able to buck the critical orthodoxy and say how tired and overrated Citizen Kane is; but the dull truth is, it's still, indisputably, one of the great masterpieces of cinema." - Robert Hanks, The Independent

Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions, and cannot be easily known.

Welles plays the enormously wealthy media magnate Charles Foster Kane.  Told from the often contradictory perspectives of his friends, coworkers, and romantic interests, the film charts Kanes's rise to power running a media empire, his pursuit of political office, and his eventual personal collapse. The film, based on a composite of eccentric aviator/recluse Howard Hughes and famed newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, bore a strong enough resemblance that Hearst tried to have the movie suppressed.

The film is the sum of Welles's awesome ambitions as an artist in Hollywood.  He pushes the limits of then-available technology to create a true magic show, a visual and aural feast.  Every aspect of the production marked an advance in film language: the deep focus and deeply shadowed cinematography (from Gregg Toland); the discontinuous narrative, relying heavily on flashbacks and newsreel footage (propelled by a script largely written by Herman Mankiewicz); the innovative use of sound and score (music composed by Bernard Herrmann); and the ensemble acting forged in the fires of Welles's Mercury Theatre (featuring the film debuts of, among others, Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, and Agnes Moorehead).

Nominated for nine Academy Awards, Citizen Kane is quite possibly the greatest film ever made and certainly the most influential.  Every moment of the film, every shot, has been choreographed to perfection.  This is truly a one-of-a-kind work, and in many ways is still the most modern of modern films from the 20th century.

Runtime: 119 minutes