59 Facts About Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film produced by, directed by, and starring Orson Welles.

Citizen Kane is frequently cited as the greatest film ever made.

Citizen Kane is praised for Gregg Toland's cinematography, Robert Wise's editing, Bernard Herrmann's music, and its narrative structure, all of which have been considered innovative and precedent-setting.

Quasi-biographical film examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Citizen Kane, played by Welles, a composite character based on American media barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick, as well as aspects of the screenwriters' own lives.

Citizen Kane 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".

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Citizen Kane's death becomes sensational news around the world, and the newsreel's producer tasks reporter Jerry Thompson with discovering the meaning of "Rosebud".

Citizen Kane tries to approach his second wife, Susan Alexander Kane, now an alcoholic who runs her own nightclub, but she refuses to talk to him.

Citizen Kane's hired Thatcher to establish a trust that would provide for Kane's education and to assume guardianship of him.

When Citizen Kane's parents introduced him to Thatcher, the boy struck Thatcher with his sled and attempted to run away.

Citizen Kane took control of the New York Inquirer newspaper and embarked on a career of yellow journalism, publishing scandalous articles that attacked Thatcher's business interests.

Citizen Kane sold his newspaper empire to Thatcher after the 1929 stock market crash left him short of cash.

Bernstein recalls that Citizen Kane hired the best journalists available to build the Inquirers circulation.

Citizen Kane rose to power by successfully manipulating public opinion regarding the Spanish–American War and marrying Emily Norton, the niece of the President of the United States.

Thompson interviews Citizen Kane's estranged best friend, Jedediah Leland, in a retirement home.

Citizen Kane married Susan and forced her into a humiliating operatic career for which she had neither the talent nor the ambition, even building a large opera house for her.

Citizen Kane's attempted suicide and so Kane finally allowed her to abandon singing.

Back at Xanadu, Citizen Kane's belongings are cataloged or discarded by the staff.

Citizen Kane turned down three scripts sent to him by Warner Bros.

Houseman wrote that Citizen Kane is a synthesis of different personalities, with Hearst's life used as the main source.

Citizen Kane specifically acknowledged that aspects of Kane were drawn from the lives of two business tycoons familiar from his youth in Chicago—Samuel Insull and Harold Fowler McCormick.

Many assumed that the character of Susan Alexander Citizen Kane was based on Marion Davies, Hearst's mistress whose career he managed and whom Hearst promoted as a motion picture actress.

Citizen Kane regarded it as the prototype of Charles Foster Kane's sled.

Citizen Kane was a rare film in that its principal roles were played by actors new to motion pictures.

Citizen Kane's characterized her own personal relationship with Welles as motherly.

Citizen Kane then taught himself filmmaking by matching its visual vocabulary to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which he ordered from the Museum of Modern Art, and films by Frank Capra, Rene Clair, Fritz Lang, King Vidor and Jean Renoir.

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Citizen Kane eventually wore a steel brace to resume performing on camera; it is visible in the low-angle scene between Kane and Leland after Kane loses the election.

Citizen Kane was edited by Robert Wise and assistant editor Mark Robson.

Citizen Kane had sufficient time to do his own orchestrations and conducting, and worked on the film reel by reel as it was shot and cut.

Citizen Kane wrote complete musical pieces for some of the montages, and Welles edited many of the scenes to match their length.

At the time, it was almost unprecedented for a film trailer to not actually feature anything of the film itself; and while Citizen Kane is frequently cited as a groundbreaking, influential film, Simon Callow argues its trailer was no less original in its approach.

Citizen Kane rejects the traditional linear, chronological narrative and tells Kane's story entirely in flashbacks using different points of view, many of them from Kane's aged and forgetful associates, the cinematic equivalent of the unreliable narrator in literature.

Citizen Kane became fascinated with the look of low angles, which made even dull interiors look interesting.

The scene in which characters sing "Oh, Mr Citizen Kane" was especially complicated and required mixing several soundtracks together.

Citizen Kane used different "sound perspectives" to create the illusion of distances, such as in scenes at Xanadu where characters speak to each other at far distances.

For example, Citizen Kane grows from a child into a young man in just two shots.

Citizen Kane was the first, in fact the only, great film that uses radio techniques.

Make-up for Citizen Kane was created and applied by Maurice Seiderman, a junior member of the RKO make-up department.

Citizen Kane had not been accepted into the union, which recognized him as only an apprentice, but RKO nevertheless used him to make up principal actors.

Citizen Kane made a plaster mold of Welles's body down to the hips.

Citizen Kane's mustache was inserted into the makeup surface a few hairs at a time, to realistically vary the color and texture.

Citizen Kane made scleral lenses for Welles, Dorothy Comingore, George Coulouris, and Everett Sloane to dull the brightness of their young eyes.

The scene in which the camera in the opera house rises dramatically to the rafters, to show the workmen showing a lack of appreciation for Susan Alexander Citizen Kane's performance, was shot by a camera craning upwards over the performance scene, then a curtain wipe to a miniature of the upper regions of the house, and then another curtain wipe matching it again with the scene of the workmen.

Bordwell claims that the scene where Thatcher agrees to be Citizen Kane's guardian used rear screen projection to depict young Citizen Kane in the background, despite this scene being cited as a prime example of Toland's deep focus cinematography.

One of the editing techniques used in Citizen Kane was the use of montage to collapse time and space, using an episodic sequence on the same set while the characters changed costume and make-up between cuts so that the scene following each cut would look as if it took place in the same location, but at a time long after the previous cut.

Citizen Kane's wrote that the film reflects "the battle between intervention and isolationism" then being waged in the United States; the film was released six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, while President Franklin D Roosevelt was laboring to win public opinion for entering World War II.

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Citizen Kane is reported to be one of Trump's favorite films, and his biographer Tim O'Brien has said that Trump is fascinated by and identifies with Kane.

Citizen Kane's contacted the management of Radio City Music Hall and demanded that they should not screen it.

For to most of the several hundred people who have seen the film at private screenings, Citizen Kane is the most sensational product of the U S movie industry.

Citizen Kane had many movie theaters ban it, and many did not show it through fear of being socially exposed by his massive newspaper empire.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane lays the blame for the film's relative failure squarely at the feet of Hearst.

Citizen Kane was the only film made under Welles's original contract with RKO Pictures, which gave him complete creative control.

Citizen Kane has enriched his filmic repertory with new or forgotten effects that, in today's artistic context, take on a significance we didn't know they could have.

Citizen Kane was a runner up to the top 10 in its 1952 poll but was voted as the greatest film ever made in its 1962 poll, retaining the top spot in every subsequent poll until 2012, when Vertigo displaced it.

Citizen Kane was ranked number one in the American Film Institute's polls of film industry artists and leaders in 1998 and 2007.

In 2015, Citizen Kane ranked 1st on BBC's "100 Greatest American Films" list, voted on by film critics from around the world.

Citizen Kane has been called the most influential film of all time.

Rosenbaum sees similarities in the film's plot to Mr Arkadin, as well as the theme of nostalgia for loss of innocence throughout Welles's career, beginning with Citizen Kane and including The Magnificent Ambersons, Mr Arkadin and Chimes at Midnight.

The film depicts the life of Jack Reed through the eyes of Louise Bryant, much as Citizen Kane's life is seen through the eyes of Thompson and the people who he interviews.

Citizen Kane's claimed that Welles's deal to terminate his contracts with RKO meant that Turner's copyright of the film was null and void.