Actors, Movies and Moore

Classic Movie of the month

Citizen Kane

It is a mystery story, a freewheeling satire on power and ambition in America, a newspaper drama, and the biography of an ambitious man: his rise and fall.

The man is Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), "American`s Kubla Khan" and its most influential publisher. He dies with the word "Rosebud" on his lips, prompting a curious reporter to investigate his life. Through interviews with those who knew Kane, leading to series of flashbacks, we arrive at a composite portrait of Kane as a brazen, outrangeous young man, who, through bitter disappointment and personal failure, became a bloated, eccentric hermit living and dying alone in the splendor of his castle called Xanadu. Contrasting views of Kane come from his manager Bernstein (Everett Sloane), his vulgar, alcoholic ex-wife Susan (Dorothy Comingore), his former friend Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), and his enigmatic butler Raymond (Paul Stewart), who speaks his epitaph:"Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted - and then lost it." In the final few minutes, the audience comes to learn the significance of "Rosebud"( and what is it, after all, but a Hitchcockian "McGuffin"?).

Welles took many of the basic elements of film and used them in such original ways that film was never quite the same again. With the help ofhis cameraman, Gregg Toland, and his editor, Robert Wise, he lifted the motion pictures into a new era.

To the dismay of many people, the subject of the film was evidently the highly powerful publisher William Randolph Hearst; the events in the movie were strongly suggested by Hearst`s public and private life.

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