How One of History’s Most Famous and Beloved Movies Was Almost Forgotten

When Citizen Kane premiered on May 1, 1941, it wasn’t at some historic Hollywood theater, or even at one of New York’s fancy movie houses. Instead, the film destined to become the most admired of all time opened more modestly, at a former vaudeville hall on Broadway. All glitzier plans had been scuttled by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who believed, correctly, that the film was a thinly veiled indictment of him. Hearst banned his many newspapers from even mentioning Orson Welles’ filmmaking debut, and in many accounts, the magnate had offered a handsome bounty, worth more than the film’s budget, to purchase the negatives, simply for the pleasure of destroying it. Welles later said a Hearst minion had tried, unsuccessfully, to frame Welles by sending a 14-year-old girl to his hotel room. It was a full-on campaign to derail the career of the 25-year-old filmmaker before it had begun.

Thanks to Hearst’s boycott, Citizen Kane was a box office flop, losing the studio, RKO, at least $150,000, a bit more than $3 million today, even though many early reviewers were gobsmacked. The critic Bosley Crowther, writing in the New York Times, praised the outsize ambitions of writer-director-producer-star Welles, celebrating the young auteur for his brash style, which showed “more verve and inspired ingenuity than any of the elder craftsmen have exhibited in years.” 

Equal parts bootstrap fable (think Horatio Alger) and tragedy (think Doctor Faustus), the movie tells the life story of Charles Foster Kane, who rises from a modest Colorado boarding house to the highest echelons of American power as a cocksure media magnate whose meaty fingers could tip the scale of world power—and whose cryptic last word before dying, “rosebud,” provides the mystery that drives the film. Yet Welles’ startlingly new approach to visual storytelling elevated the rags-to-riches template into high tragedy—and uncomfortable satire. Bucking convention at every turn, Welles skipped around chronology freely, using inventive dissolves and edits to move the viewer back and forth in time. The small touches were groundbreaking. One famous shot in the first minutes of the film, showing reflections in a smashed snow globe, anticipates the film’s grand themes of ambition and legacy and the cracked mirror of memory. Welles attributed these innovations to his own ignorance as a first-time filmmaker entering Hollywood from a career in theater and radio. “It’s only when you know something about a profession,” he told an interviewer, “that you’re timid or careful.” 

After its unhappy opening in the United States, the film receded, until a detailed 1947 essay by the French critic André Bazin, who went on to co-found the iconic French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, hailed Citizen Kane as “a revolution in film language.” French critics and filmmakers championed the film, and Americans gave it another chance. It was released for a second time in the States in 1956, to a broader—and more appreciative—audience. By 1962, a survey of around 70 esteemed movie critics hailed it as the greatest movie ever made. It is also one of the most influential. In particular, Welles’ endless capacity for experimentation, combined with his bullheaded persona, was a central inspiration for the New Hollywood directors of the 1970s. “The one key element we learned from Welles was the power of ambition,” the director Martin Scorsese once said. “He is responsible for inspiring more people to be film directors than anyone else in the history of the cinema.” 

In a tragic turn, Hearst’s hatred managed to do lasting damage to Welles professionally: The brilliant filmmaker and star found himself having to battle with studios for artistic control, often struggling to fund projects for the rest of his life, and never once made a movie that turned a profit in his lifetime. Welles once joked of his career: “Began at the top, and have been working my way down ever since.” The long shadow of Hearst’s curse has only deepened the sense of mystique around Welles’ most famous, and in some ways most enigmatic, movie. 

One could argue that Welles has triumphed against Hearst in the battle of legacies; so the Hearst Estate seemed to admit in 2015, when it finally screened Citizen Kane at the magnate’s famously garish castle in San Simeon, California. Regardless, the film’s scandalous backstory remains an essential component of its all-American greatness. In her 1971 book-length New Yorker essay about the film’s production, critic Pauline Kael contended that Hearst ultimately became “the victim of his own style of journalism.” That is to say, Welles had matched Hearst in his capacity for sensationalism, crafting a brilliant feature film that doubled as its own sort of yellow journalism. In this way, Citizen Kane was not only a high-​water mark for the American cinema circa 1941; it also anticipated reality television, the celebrity-flogging of TMZ, plus other, arguably more execrable, trends in American entertainment and public life. It is a towering artistic achievement, shot through with the inky grease of tabloid sleaze.  

Citizen Kane (1941): Original Trailer - Orson Welles, Dorothy Comingore - Classic Dramas

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John Semley | READ MORE

John Semley is a writer and culture critic who writes frequently about film and technology.