In early 1941, before Citizen Kane had been seen by the public, the head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, fronted an extraordinary offer to RKO on behalf of Hollywood's studio bosses: around $800,000 — more than the film had cost — to hand over the negative and every print so they could be destroyed. The studios were not acting out of artistic judgement. They were terrified of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper tycoon whose chain of papers could make or break their business, and who had concluded, correctly, that the film's dying press baron Charles Foster Kane was a thinly veiled portrait of himself.
The man who had provoked all this was 25 years old. Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1939 already famous — for his Mercury Theatre stage productions and for the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast — and RKO gave him a contract that veterans found obscene: near-total creative control and final cut on his first feature. He wrote the screenplay with Herman J. Mankiewicz, a former newspaperman who had been a guest at Hearst's castle at San Simeon and knew the household intimately. The film they built told the life of a publisher through the memories of those who knew him, framed by a reporter's hunt for the meaning of his dying word: "Rosebud". Kane's vast, unfinished palace, Xanadu, was San Simeon with the lights off; his talentless opera-singer mistress was widely read as a cruel version of Hearst's companion, the actress Marion Davies — unfair to Davies, a gifted screen comedienne, and the element Welles himself later said he regretted.
The suppression campaign
Hearst's columnist Louella Parsons saw the film and reported back; the empire mobilised. Hearst newspapers refused all advertising and mention of the film — and, for a period, turned their fire on RKO releases generally. Major theatre chains, frightened of the papers, declined to book it, so RKO was forced to show it in its own cinemas and rented halls. When Kane premiered in May 1941, reviews outside the Hearst press were often ecstatic, but the film could not find enough screens to earn its money back, and it recorded a loss on first release. At the Academy Awards the following February it received nine nominations and won exactly one — for the screenplay, shared by Mankiewicz and Welles — with reports of booing when its name was read out. RKO eventually quietly withdrew it to the vaults. Welles never again had final cut on a Hollywood studio film.
And Rosebud? On screen it is the sled from Kane's childhood, burned unnoticed in a furnace in the final shot — the emblem of everything he lost. A more scurrilous explanation, popularised much later by Gore Vidal, claims "Rosebud" was Hearst's private nickname for an intimate part of Marion Davies, which — if true — would explain the old man's fury better than any editorial. It is gossip, unverifiable and disputed, but it has become quiz-book legend. One of the balsa-wood sled props survived, and in 1982 Steven Spielberg bought it at auction for tens of thousands of dollars, calling it a symbolic bargain.
The long climb to 'greatest ever'
The resurrection came slowly, and from two directions. In the 1950s the film returned via television broadcasts and revival cinemas, and French critics — the future New Wave directors among them — canonised it. What they celebrated was its grammar: Gregg Toland's deep-focus photography, which kept foreground and background simultaneously sharp; ceilings visible in shot; overlapping dialogue; a story told in fractured, contradictory flashbacks. In 1962 the British magazine Sight & Sound's once-a-decade critics' poll named Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made, and it held that number-one spot for five consecutive polls — half a century — until Hitchcock's Vertigo displaced it in 2012. The American Film Institute has twice ranked it first on its list of the greatest American films.
There is a final irony that the film itself might have scripted. Hearst's campaign kept Citizen Kane out of cinemas for a season; it also chained his name to it forever. Today far more people meet William Randolph Hearst through Welles's fiction than through anything his hundreds of newspapers ever printed. The mogul who understood better than anyone that the press writes the first draft of history was undone by the second draft — shot in deep focus, and ending on a burning sled.
Quiz nuggets
- Citizen Kane (1941) was directed by Orson Welles, then 25, who also co-wrote it with Herman J. Mankiewicz and starred as Kane.
- MGM's Louis B. Mayer fronted an offer of around $800,000 to RKO to destroy the negative on behalf of studios fearful of William Randolph Hearst.
- From nine Oscar nominations, Kane won only Best Original Screenplay, shared by Mankiewicz and Welles.
- "Rosebud" is revealed as Kane's childhood sled, burned in the film's final scene; Steven Spielberg bought a surviving prop sled at auction in 1982.
- Kane topped the Sight & Sound critics' poll from 1962 until 2012, when it was displaced by Hitchcock's Vertigo.