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Citizen Kane Film Analysis: https://goo.gl/fldcE
Charles Foster Kane,
Jedediah Leland,
Susan Alexander Kane' s Character Sketch: https://goo.gl/VgMTw
Charles Foster Kane,
Jedediah Leland,
Susan Alexander Kane' s Character Sketch: https://goo.gl/VgMTw
Plot Summary
The film opens with the most famous one word in movie history, “Rosebud,” uttered in the dying breath of millionaire media mogul Charles Foster Kane (Welles). Immediately, reporters compile a newsreel to recap the major events in Kane’s life. But something is missing. Rosebud. Who is it? What is it? And why did it mean so much to Kane that he would say it on his death bed?
To crack this mystery would be to unlock the personal core of the man, the most public of all private lives. And so we follow journalist Jerry Thompson (William Alland) on his vital research venture, first to the Thatcher Library, where he reads the memoirs of Kane’s adopted guardian, Walter Thatcher (George Coulouris), and then to interviews with Kane’s journalist colleagues, Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane) and Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), and his second wife, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore). Their accounts weave a picture of an ambitious, arrogant, self-righteous man who longed for a happiness that had been ripped from his grasp long ago.
It seems Kane was happiest when he was the poorest, a young kid playing with his sled on the snowy, rural banks of a carefree childhood. We go to the moment that all changed, in 1871, when mother Mary (Agnes Moorehead) sends him to live with the wealthy Mr. Thatcher so that he will never have to worry about money again. Despite the newfound wealth, young Kane resents the move. And by his early ’20s, he’s operating a newspaper, The Inquirer, railing against the likes of Thatcher with its populist positions.
Kane’s Inquirer launches with a “Declaration of Principles,” the likes of which should be followed by today’s news outlets. Gradually, he loses these principles in favor of a new mantra: ”If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.” He builds a media empire on this type of sensational yellow journalism, rubbing elbows with history’s biggest figures (Teddy Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler) and having so much influence on national opinion that he is able to push his country into the Spanish American War. When a correspondent wires, “There is no war in Cuba,” Kane responds as Hearst did: “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.”
These journalistic untruths soon spill over into his personal life. After marrying Emily Norton (Ruth Warrick) and having a child, Kane sets his sights on political office, running for governor against corrupt political boss Jim Gettys (Ray Collins). He loses after being exposed for an affair with young shopgirl Susan (Comingore), echoing his own advice to Emily: “You never shoulda married a newspaper man. They’re worse than sailors.” Two weeks after divorcing Emily, Kane takes Susan for his second bride.“Takes” is the key word, as Susan quickly becomes just another object of his ambition.
Despite her clear lack of singing talent, she’s pushed to become the star for Kane’s new $3 million Chicago opera house. Like Hearst, Kane uses his media influence to inflate the image of Susan and eventually constructs a massive castle to her, located on a man-made mountain on the west coast, borrowing its name from the estate of Kubla Kahn — Xanadu.
In this vast space, Kane and Susan grow old, until Susan too leaves him out of loneliness of their cavernous existence. In his final days, Kane is not surrounded by family, but by the hoards of relics he’s bought only to store in crates, stuff he cannot take with him when he dies. His death leaves all of his worldly possessions for others to sift through, and in the end, Thompson and his fellow reporters (including a young Alan Ladd) are left scratching their heads as to the meaning of “Rosebud.” They settle on the notion that, “Mr. Kane got everything he wanted then lost it. Perhaps Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost.” In the final shot, the latter is confirmed.