Citizen Kane

RKO gave Orson Welles, who had never directed a feature, full artistic control and final cut on two pictures, and no executive saw a frame of this 1941 film until he showed it. The structure is as unusual: a fake newsreel, “News on the March,” gives Kane’s whole life in the opening minutes, so the rest is not what happened but how it changes shape in five different mouths. Cinematographer Gregg Toland published his method in American Cinematographer in 1941: nearly every interior shot at an aperture no wider than f:8, some at f:11, one at f:16. With 24mm lenses and coated glass, a face at arm’s length and a door forty feet back stay equally sharp. Sets got real ceilings, microphones behind muslin, and holes cut in the concrete floor for low angles. Hearst’s papers were ordered to boycott RKO; his own letter denied giving such an order. It lost money first time out. Of nine nominations it won one, Writing (Original Screenplay), credited to Herman J. Mankiewicz ahead of Welles; who wrote how much has been argued since 1971 without settling. A good fit if you will invest in a film that gives its plot away first and asks its real question later. Not for you if five witnesses contradicting one another reads as sloppiness, not the point.