Actors - Citizen Kane

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	Actors - Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane was the first feature film directed by Orson Welles, who had previously directed two short films. Endlessly discussed and dissected by critics and viewers alike, this innovative masterpiece is perhaps the most influential in the history of film.abcdefghijk

Citizen Kane is rumored to be based on the lives of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the reclusive aerospace and movie mogul Howard Hughes, and the Chicago utilities magnate Samuel Insull. Welles maintained that the film's main character, Charles Foster Kane, is a composite of several historical individuals. In F for Fake
, Welles claims Kane was originally intended to be based on Hughes (to be played by Joseph Cotten) but he changed it to Hearst. During production, Citizen Kane was referred to as RKO 281
. The film premiered on May 1, 1941.

The movie has some parallels to the 1933 movie The Power and the Glory.

The only remaining living cast member is Sonny Bupp who played Kane's young son, Charles Foster Kane III. Robert Wise, who died of heart failure on September 14, 2005, was the last living crew member.

Synopsis

Produced in 1941, the film deals with the inability of Charles Foster Kane (played by Orson Welles) to truly love. Instead Kane has only "Love on my own terms." As a result, Kane eventually alienates every loved one around him and dies a lonely recluse in an opulent but crumbling estate.

Kane dies in the opening scene of the film at his estate Xanadu; this is followed by a newsreel pastiche documenting Kane's public life (this segment was produced by RKO's actual newsreel department).

A reporter, Jerry Thompson, and a group of associates watch the newsreel, and convinced that the newsreel was regarded as functional but not especially profound as it didn't tell the whole story, Thompson is determined to find the meaning behind Kane's last word, "rosebud". The reporters interview the key figures who, for better or worse, played a part in Kane's life, which is told in a series of flashbacks.

We first see Kane's tainted childhood, followed by his entrance into the newspaper business and his establishment of "yellow journalism"; his rise to power; his first marriage to a President's niece, his run for governor, and the "love nest" scandal that ended them both; his second marriage to a woman who he molded as an opera singer; and his ever-dominant attitude that led to destruction within his entire inner circle of friends and loved ones, including himself.

In the end, however, Thompson concludes that "rosebud" is a piece in a missing mythological puzzle, and that no one word can describe a man's life. The film's chilling conclusion reveals the meaning behind "rosebud"...it was the name of a sled from Kane's childhood, and represented a lost childhood innocence. The sled is thrown in the fire to be burned (having been dismissed as junk), and the story ends exactly as it began, with a shot of a "no trespassing" sign.

Overview

What is revealed was described by Jorge Luis Borges, in a 1941 review, as a "metaphysical detective story. subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man's inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined... Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and reconstruct him. Forms of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum. At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by a secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances."

The film combines revolutionary cinematography (by Gregg Toland, with whom Welles shared a title card, which was an unprecedented gesture of Welles' appreciation for Toland's overall contribution to the film) with an Oscar-winning screenplay (by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz—though most film history circles consider Mankiewicz's contribution to the screenplay to be far greater than that of Welles), and a lineup of first time film actors, associates of Mr. Welles' from his stint at the Mercury Theater, such as Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Citizen Kane ]

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Actors - Citizen Kane

Synopsis

Overview

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