Citizen Kane (1941)

Some called him a hero...others called him a heel.

Newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane is taken from his mother as a boy and made the ward of a rich industrialist. As a result, every well-meaning, tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply wounding event.

Directed by: Orson Welles

Written by: Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz

Music by: Bernard Herrmann

Starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Agnes Moorehead, Paul Stewart, Ruth Warrick, Erskine Sanford, William Alland

Genre: Mystery, Drama

Released: 1941-04-17

Runtime: 119 minutes

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Citizen Kane (1941): trivia & fun facts

Fun facts

• At first he simply wanted to spend three months in Hollywood and earn enough money to pay his debts and fund his next theatrical season.
• Schaefer told Welles that the $500,000 budget could not be exceeded; as war loomed, revenue was declining sharply in Europe by the fall of 1939.
• Toland had to leave due to a commitment to shoot Howard Hughes' The Outlaw, but Toland's camera crew continued working on the film and Toland was replaced by RKO cinematographer Harry J. Wild.
• Film scholar Robert L. Carringer wrote, "The simple fact seems to be that Schaefer believed Welles was going to pull off something really big almost as much as Welles did himself."
• Kane was the first film scored by Bernard Herrmann, who had composed for Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air.
• Welles said that at the Chicago premiere that he attended the theater was almost empty.
• Henry Luce was in attendance and reportedly wanted to buy the film from RKO for $1 million to distribute it himself.
• Ruth Warrick as Emily Monroe Norton Kane, Kane's first wife.
• Hearing about Citizen Kane enraged Hearst so much that he banned any advertising, reviewing, or mentioning of it in his papers, and had his journalists libel Welles.
• In 2006, the Writers Guild of America ranked its screenplay 4th in WGA's list of 101 Greatest Screenplays.
• Principal photography took place in 1940, the same year that its innovative trailer was shown, and the film was released in 1941.
• Additionally, Charles Bennett appears as the entertainer at the head of the chorus line in the Inquirer party sequence, and cinematographer Gregg Toland makes a cameo appearance as an interviewer depicted in part of the News on the March newsreel.
• Other scenes effectively employed miniatures to make the film look much more expensive than it truly was, such as various shots of Xanadu.
• A special effects camera crew from Walker's department was required for the extreme close-up shots such as Kane's lips when he says "Rosebud" and the shot of the typewriter typing Susan's bad review.
• In the breakfast montage, Welles chronicles the breakdown of Kane's first marriage in five vignettes that condense 16 years of story time into two minutes of screen time.

Source: Wikipedia

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