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All Movie Info
Starring:
Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick, George Coulouris, Ray Collins, William Alland, Paul Stewart, Erskine Sanford, Agnes Moorehead, Alan Ladd, Gus Schilling, Philip Van Zandt, Harry Shannon, Arthur O'Connell, Sonny Bupp, Dorothy Comingore, Sonny Bupp
Directed By:
Orson Welles
Written By:
Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz
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Citizen Kane (1941)
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Movie Review by Ezra
February 16th, 2007
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Never before or since has any director made such an impressive feature film debut as Orson Welles did, at the astonishing age of 25, with Citizen Kane (1941). Despite having no prior experience in filmmaking, Welles was given carte blanche on the film, and he delivered the most original, innovative and provocative film of its time. Even today it is considered one of the greatest films ever made, and it is a standard by which all other films are judged. According to the great critic Andrew Sarris, "Citizen Kane is still the work which influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since Birth of a Nation."
Welles, a child prodigy who read at three and was giving performances of King Lear at seven, was, in this regard, the Mozart of the cinema. He first garnered national fame in 1937 when, at the age of 21, he co-founded the Mercury Theatre with John Houseman, a man he later described as "an old enemy of mine." Welles's voice was already known on the radio as that of The Shadow, but it was his Halloween night broadcast adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds in 1939 that really catapulted him to stardom. The broadcast, which was done in the form of news bulletins interrupting regularly scheduled programming, caused mass hysteria and even a few suicides, despite the fact that Welles announced several times during the broadcast that it was merely a dramatization.
From this notoriety, Welles and company were enticed by RKO to come to Hollywood and make a motion picture that, "once ... approved, it was entirely in his hands. He didn't even have to show rushes to the executives." Welles brought into the picture members of the Mercury Theater such as actors Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead and composer Bernard Herrmann, all of whom went on to greater fame with other filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock. He also worked with veteran screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who later sued Welles (unsuccessfully) for not giving Mankiewicz due credit during the film's promotion, as well as renowned cinematographer Gregg Toland, a favorite of John Ford, who was one of Welles's biggest influences. Welles later said of Mankiewicz: "He wrote several important scenes. I was very lucky to work with Mankiewicz: everything concerning Rosebud belongs to him. As for me, sincerely, he doesn't please me very much; ... I have never had complete confidence in him," and of Toland: he "is the best director of photography that ever existed." The story of Citizen Kane is a mixture of autobiographical elements from Welles's own life and scathing satire of William Randolph Hearst, "the most powerful newspaper publisher in the world." Probably the most incendiary bit of this satire is the crux of the story, "Rosebud", which was rumored to be Hearst's nickname for his mistress's vagina. As the subject matter of the film became more widely known in Hollywood, controversy grew; at one point, "Louis B. Mayer offered the president of RKO the cost of the picture plus a profit if he would simply burn the negative. [Luckily,] the offer was refused."
Despite the controversy, Kane was not the smashing box office success RKO had hoped for, which led to the studio ruining Welles's next feature, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), by cutting approximately a third of the film in order to make it fit a second feature time slot. Welles would never again have the complete creative freedom he did on Kane, but he still managed to make a number of excellent films throughout the '40s, '50s and '60s, including The Stranger (1946), The Trial (1963) and Touch of Evil (1958), which bears many similarities to Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), in which Welles appears as an actor, and which also stars Joseph Cotten.
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