I think the closer it draws to theatre, in a way, the more it opens on to a new form of the cinematic. Charles Foster Kane has been untimely ripped from his childhood. He doesn't kind of complete childhood. And so his motivation, I think, is to become someone that he was never allowed to find out whether or not he could ever be. So there's this hankering for that, which is one of the motivations. But there's never a sense of what he would have done. There's a sense, you know, there's the idealism there.
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