It's a deconstructed melodrama. Just when you want to hate him most, you actually feel the most pity for him and the most sympathy for him. The whole thing hinges on a kind of impossibility. Yes, and it has to close up with a male. So it actually has to us. And so we want to know, and then, and then we do, funnily enough, we get to know, but by knowing what Rosebud is, we kind of don't know anything. I think our producers long to burst through the door. Fine. I've got an opera to go to. Yeah. Would you go to?
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Orson Welles' film, released in 1941, which is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, films yet made. Welles plays the lead role of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate, and Welles directed, produced and co-wrote this story of loneliness at the heart of a megalomaniac. The plot was partly inspired by the life of William Randolph Hearst, who then used the power of his own newspapers to try to suppress the film’s release. It was to take some years before Citizen Kane reached a fuller audience and, from that point, become so celebrated.
The image above is of Kane addressing a public meeting while running for Governor.
With
Stella Bruzzi
Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London
Ian Christie
Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London
And
John David Rhodes
Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge
Producer: Simon Tillotson