Free Essays,College Free Essays,Free College Essays at Anti Essays

CITIZEN KANE
Since CITIZEN KANE mysteriously showed up at our local multiplex -- even the manager had no idea why they booked it, I decided to attempt to forget everything I knew about it and to try to look at it as the first viewers might have back in May of 1941.

Even the greatest films, and CITIZEN KANE is universally considered to be the best or at least one of the best, were once just the latest picture playing at the local Bijou. The audience may have known something of the story ahead of time, but they likely did not expect its greatness.

As everyone now knows, the movie tells the story of one Charles Foster Kane, a boy who inherited an enormous fortune and went on to become a powerful newspaper magnate. Oscar Wells, then a beaming, fairly trim young man, directed CITIZEN KANE, played the starring role and cowrote the script with Herman J. Mankiewicz. Wells was a genius who would go on to other films, but none would ever come close to his masterpiece, CITIZEN KANE.

The film's opening has the look of a creepy old gothic horror movie. The sounds are kept quiet, as if they might awaken some angry god, while we start to learn about Kane's background.

This eerie tranquility is shattered by the blare of a newsreel. Theaters then featured newsreels along with the double feature and the latest installment of some serial. The newsreel in CITIZEN KANE, although slightly comical, gave a documentary feel to the production, what we would call a docudrama today. Since the movie was a slam at the life and times of William Randolph Hearst, a fact the audiences then were likely to have heard, the newsreel approach gave the film an immediate intimacy and accessibility.



A story within the story has a group making a movie about Kane's life. Since it doesn't have a proper ending, they send one guy off to discover the meaning of Kane's last word ("Rosebud"), figuring that it might...