Why does everyone love citizen kane

And miles and miles of words have been written, of course, about whether it deserves that acclaim — not to mention who, exactly, is responsible for its greatness. But how did Citizen Kane become so firmly established at the top of the canon in the first place?

Who put it there? Unlike a lot of other classics whose greatness was recognized belatedly, Citizen Kane actually came roaring out of the gate. By the time Kane began screening for the press, its theatrical fate was in jeopardy. RKO had already moved its release date several times, and efforts were underway by the other studios — many of whose chiefs had close ties to Hearst — to buy and destroy the print before it could be seen.

Oddly, all these efforts may have helped build additional hype around Kane. For journalists and critics writing about the movie at least, for non-Hearst publications , there was some urgency in making sure that readers knew that the film was, you know, good.

Back then, the Hollywood majors actually owned most of the screens in the country, a fact which had helped power the rise of the studio system. Seven years later, after a landmark anti-trust case brought about by the U.

This helped precipitate the gradual decline of the studio system and the eventual rise of the Film Brat Generation … led by directors who worshipped Citizen Kane and Orson Welles and who would ultimately transform the industry. They even tried to get him arrested: Welles recounted that during a lecture tour in Buffalo, New York, he was warned at dinner one night not to go back to his hotel, as there was a year-old girl and a couple of Hearst photographers waiting in his room for him.

But what America dismissed, Europe embraced. Many critics, filmmakers, and fans consider it to be their favorite movie, or one of their favorites. The movie is like a whodunit detective story. I had to write a paper about Citizen Kane in college. If you study the film, you discover that it really has no superfluous scenes or dialogue. Then I Had an Existential Crisis. Flipboard Email. Sign up for the The Ringer Newsletter Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email required.

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Orson Citizen. Joseph Cotten had a part that was possibly short on savor because when he was with the great man he had to be something of a chump and when he was talking of him afterwards he had to be something of a Mr. Chips, with twinkle and lip-smacking. Ray Collins did a good piece of work with a stock part, and so did all the other stock parts; but to me the man to remember was Everett Sloane, who seemed to understand and seemed to represent it, the little man with the big mind, the projection without the face motion and flapping of arms.

You may be surprised when you take the film apart, and find that his relations to any analysis of Kane were as much as anything else the things that made him real. Now I believe we can look at the picture, and of course have been told to wait for that.

The picture. The new art. The camera unbound. The picture is very exciting to anyone who gets excited about how things can be done in the movies; and the many places where it takes off like the Wright brothers should be credited to Welles first and his cameraman second Herman J. Mankiewicz as writing collaborator should come in too.

The Kubla Khan setting, the electioneering stage, the end of the rough-cut in the Marsh of Thyme projection room, the kid outside the window in the legacy scene, the opera stage, the dramatics of the review copy on opening night—the whole idea of a man in these attitudes must be credited to Welles himself. And in these things there is no doubt the picture is dramatic. But what goes on between the dramatic high points, the story?

What goes on is talk and more talk. It is a thing that takes years and practice to learn. Tricks and symbols never really come to much. The real art of movies concentrates on getting the right story and the right actors, the right kind of production and then smoothing everything out.

And after that, in figuring how each idea can be made true, how each action can be made to happen, how you cut and reverse-camera and remake each minute of action, and run it into a line afterwards, like the motion in the ocean. Does this picture do this? Right now I have to hurry to catch a boat back to New York. To make any sense about technical innovations in any one movie, one should, in an ideal state at least, have some idea of the general technique of making every movie.