When Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1939, he had never directed a feature film. Two years later, the 25-year-old released a movie that would eventually be hailed as the greatest American film ever made, even though audiences initially stayed away.
Citizen Kane premiered in 1941 with Welles serving as director, producer, co-writer, and star. The ambitious drama earned considerable critical acclaim but delivered disappointing box-office returns during its original release. Decades later, its reputation couldn’t look more different: the American Film Institute ranks Citizen Kane at No. 1 on its list of the 100 greatest American films of all time.
The movie traces the life of wealthy newspaper publisher Charles Foster Kane, beginning with his death at the sprawling Xanadu estate and his mysterious final word: “Rosebud.” A reporter attempts to uncover its meaning by speaking with people who knew Kane, gradually piecing together the rise and unraveling of a powerful but deeply isolated man.
Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote the screenplay, drawing inspiration in part from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. The similarities did not sit well with Hearst, whose newspapers largely refused to advertise or cover the movie.
“Kane isn’t really founded on Hearst… in particular,” Welles later admitted. “It was intended consciously as a sort of social document, as an attack on the acquisitive society, and indeed on acquisition in general.”
Its filmmaking was equally provocative.
“I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do or the imagination could do,” Welles said in a 1960 interview. “And if you come up from the bottom in the film business, you’re taught all the things that the cameraman doesn’t want to attempt for fear he will be criticized for having failed. And in this case I had a cameraman who didn’t care if he was criticized if he failed.”
Working with cinematographer Gregg Toland, Welles employed techniques including dramatic low-angle shots, deep-focus photography, unusual lighting, and a nonlinear narrative structure. Although many of those techniques weren’t entirely new, their combination in Citizen Kane helped make the film enormously influential.
“I didn’t know what you couldn’t do,” Welles said in an interview years later. “I didn’t deliberately set out to invent anything. It just seemed to me, why not? And there is a great gift that ignorance has to bring to anything. That was the gift I brought to Kane, ignorance.”
Awards recognition followed, although not to the extent its later reputation might suggest. Citizen Kane received nine Academy Award nominations, but won only one Oscar: Best Original Screenplay for Welles and Mankiewicz.
Time proved far kinder to the film.
As Citizen Kane was rediscovered and reassessed, it increasingly became a fixture of greatest-films lists. In 1989, it was also among the first movies selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
AFI placed Citizen Kane at No. 1 when it unveiled its original “100 Years…100 Movies” ranking in 1998, and the film retained the top spot in the 10th-anniversary edition in 2007, ahead of The Godfather and Casablanca.
What began as a commercially disappointing 1941 release ultimately achieved a distinction no opening-weekend numbers could have predicted: becoming AFI’s greatest American movie of all time.
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