I think he's absolutely brilliant, but there's just this incredible charisma. He was completely unembarrassed about making himself look unattractive in the period of the film. This is his first acting role in film. Would you make him a Mejon actor? I would stand by the characterization of this as like being not necessarily the kind of nuanced, psychologically realist performance that one might have expected from a certain type of Hollywood actor in the late 1930s and early 1940s. So I think you feel this larger-than-life theatrical presence. Of course, Kane, I think, is casting everyone around him as supporting characters and a production that he mounts across his life.
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