Citizen Kane (1941)

Academy Awards, USA 1942

Winner Oscar	Best Writing, Original Screenplay Herman J. Mankiewicz Orson Welles On Friday, July 19th, 2003, Orson Welles' Oscar statuette went on sale at an auction at Christie's,... More
Nominee Oscar	Best Picture
	Best Actor in a Leading Role Orson Welles
	Best Director Orson Welles
	Best Cinematography, Black-and-White Gregg Toland
	Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White Perry Ferguson Van Nest Polglase A. Roland Fields Darrell Silvera
	Best Sound, Recording John Aalberg (RKO Radio SSD)
	Best Film Editing Robert Wise
	Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture Bernard Herrmann

RKO Radio Pictures
Directed by Orson Welles
My rating: 4 stars out of 4
IMDb Wikipedia
(Blu-ray, Warner Bros.)

The last utterance of a dying newspaper mogul, "rosebud", becomes the object of a reporter's search. He interviews former acquaintances, friends, enemies, wives and mistresses, all in search of the meaning of the word. Along the way, he pieces together the life story of the larger-than-life figure of Charles Foster Kane. As a youth in snowy Colorado, his parents find gold, only to send  him away to live with their banker! He inherits wealth in his early twenties and proceeds to buy a struggling New York newspaper. He turns it into a great success and uses it to destroy enemies and pursue his own political ambitions. It all comes crashing down when rivals discover he is having an affair with a lowly cabaret singer. He spends the next few decades using his enormous wealth to buy her a career in opera, which she fails at miserably. He spends his last years alone in his mammoth mansion. We finally learn the meaning of "rosebud" in the final scene, a symbol of innocence lost. Quintessential American film broke all the rules of the time, from the fast cuts, the untrustworthy and multiple narrators, montages, and more, although many of these techniques were lifted straight from old German expressionistic films. Nonetheless, it is rightly regarded as one of the best, if not influential, films of all time, bolting its star and director to heights he would struggle to maintain.