Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film by Orson Welles, its producer, co-screenwriter, director and star. The picture was Welles’s first feature film. Nominated for Academy Awards in nine categories, it won an Academy Award for Best Writing by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles. The film was released on Blu-ray on September 13, 2011, for a special 70th-anniversary edition.
About Citizen Kane in brief
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film by Orson Welles, its producer, co-screenwriter, director and star. The picture was Welles’s first feature film. Considered by many critics, filmmakers, and fans to be the greatest film ever made. Nominated for Academy Awards in nine categories, it won an Academy Award for Best Writing by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles. The quasi-biographical film examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, a composite character based in part upon American media barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. The film was released on Blu-ray on September 13, 2011, for a special 70th-anniversary edition. It was selected by the Library of Congress as an inductee of the 1989 inaugural group of 25 films for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” The film faded from view after its release, but was subsequently returned to the public’s attention when it was praised by such French critics as André Bazin and given an American revival in 1956. In a mansion called Xanadu, part of a vast palatial estate in Florida, the elderly Kane is on his deathbed. Holding a snow globe, he utters a word, \”Rosebud\”, and dies; the globe slips from his hand and smashes on the floor. Kane’s death becomes sensational news around the world, and the newsreel’s producer tasks reporter Jerry Thompson with discovering the meaning of \”RoseBud\”.
Thompson sets out to interview Kane’s friends and associates. He tries to approach his wife, Susan Alexander Kane, now an alcoholic who runs her own nightclub, but she refuses to talk to him. Thompson goes to the private archive of the late banker Walter Parks Thatcher. Through Thatcher’s written memoirs, Thompson learns about the rise and decline of Kane’s personal fortune. In 1871, gold was discovered through a mining deed belonging to Kane’s mother, Mary Kane. She hired Thatcher to establish a trust that would provide for Kane’s education and to assume guardianship of him. When Kane’s parents turned him over to Thatcher, the boy struck Thatcher with his sled and attempted to run away. By the time Kane gained control of his trust at the age of 25, the mine’s productivity and Thatcher’s prudent investing had made him one of the richest men in the world. He took control of the New York Inquirer newspaper and embarked on a career of scandalous articles that attacked Thatcher’s career. Kane sold his newspaper empire to the stock market after the 1929 stock market crash left him short of cash. He began an affair with Emily Norton, the niece of the President of the U.S., and more over the years he began to build a more and more expensive home. He died in a car accident in 1941. He was played by Welles in the film, which was a critical success, but failed to recoup its costs at the box office.
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This page is based on the article Citizen Kane published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
