Citizen Kane: Not the Greatest Movie Ever

Citizen Kane (1941)

Directed by Orson Welles

By Dan Geddes

Note: This essay contains spoilers.

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane is routinely voted the "greatest movie of all time" by Sight and Sound magazine and now a wide range of movie critics.

But Citizen Kane probably isn’t the greatest movie of all time, because it lacks a compelling story. Kane is a solid technical achievement, but it carries little emotional impact. We don’t care about the characters and little is at stake for them. Citizen Kane is based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, and much of its notoriety comes from Welles’ sheer guts in taking on one of the great media barons of the age.

So often in hearing the arguments for Kane’s greatness, you hear about the novelty of its camera angles, of deep focus, of the “prismatic” non-linear narrative structure, the clever use of models and of sound. These are all interesting aspects of the movie, but I am simply never swept away by the story. If I am so conscious of watching a movie while watching Citizen Kane, how can I believe it is the greatest movie of all time? Great movies make me forget I am a watching movie, and engage me. On subsequent viewings I will analyze how the film makers did it. Of course, others have defined great cinema as cinema that draws attention to its own conventions.

None of these remarks are meant to deny the undeniable greatness of Kane, which may well be the most influential movie of all time. Kane was a powerful influence on the film noir of the forties and fifties, and the myth of Orson Welles as the author of the movie, partly inspired the dubious French auteur theory, whereby the director is conceived as the creative author of the film (rather than the producer, or the screenwriter).

Kane is an enjoyable film to watch, seemingly more enjoyable as you study the film’s secrets and in-jokes.

But is it an enjoyable story? Kane is a bio-pic, but it lacks a defining conflict, so there is little plot development. A critic remarked of Welles’ later Othello that it was evidence that a movie is more than a series of great scenes. That criticism applies in least in part to Kane, which is nothing if not a series of great scenes (and also some not great scenes), and deliberately avoids straight chronology.

The movie begins with Kane’s death: we are given a resume of his work through the “News on the March” sequence (an early mockumentary). And then the reporter Thompson gathers five different perspectives of the great man’s life: from Thatcher's memoirs, from Mr. Bernstein, from Mr. Leland, from Susan Alexander, and from Raymond the Butler. Each of these focuses on a different aspect of his life: you could say Thatcher equals business, Bernstein equals his newspaper career, Leland equals friendship, Susan equals romantic love, and Raymond equals life at Xanadu. Despite this simplification, it shows the “prismatic” structure of Kane that screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz envisioned. Such a structure fits the “organic” story model than a conflict-based model. There are certainly conflicts in Kane: Charlie Kane fights with the characters representing all five points of view, as well as others; and yet there is no central plot, no central conflict for Kane as a character. He remains distant from us, because of his money, because of his distance from the other characters, and even because the Rosebud strand falls flat.

The best scene in Citizen Kane is when Tammany Hall-style corrupt boss Jim Gettys confronts Kane, his wife, and his new mistress, Susan Alexander, in her love nest. Boss Gettys will expose Kane’s affair unless Kane quits his campaign against Gettys on the eve of the election for New York governor. Kane not only rejects his offer, he even chooses to stay with Susan in her love nest, rather than return home with his wife and child. However, this familial tension is not sustained, as Kane’s ex-wife and son were killed in a car accident soon after (we are told during the early “News on the March” sequence).

If Citizen Kane is now routinely chosen as the greatest film of all time, it has at least as much to do with the mythology of the film as the experience of watching it. The mythology of the film includes: Welles’ precocity as director (only age 25 while shooting the film); the innovations of photography, greatly attributable to photographer Greg Toland; the fact that a cash offer was made by Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer to destroy the film’s negative; the intriguing parallels between the movie and the life of William Randolph Heart; the intriguing parallels between the movie and the life of Orson Welles; the movie’s near blackout by Hearst and lack of full national release; the Hollywood establishment’s spurning of the movie and so of Welles at Oscar time; and Welles’ subsequent degeneration and relative banishment from Hollywood despite his genius.

All of this subtext makes it impossible to watch Citizen Kane as a movie like others, like Casablanca, a movie from only two years later, also full to the rim with cinematic mythology, and yet so much more moving as a movie. Citizen Kane is more like the canonical work of literature that you are forced to read because it is important, not because you consistently enjoy it. The “News on the March” sequence is brilliant, but the Rosebud quest is silly. What is the value of the early scene when the reporter Thompson’s find a drunk bitchy Susan Alexander?  She gets to tell her story later. Why is it that we don’t get to see Kane in “real time” with spoken dialog from Welles until about 25 minutes into the picture? Toward the end, instead of climaxing, the movie bores with several scenes of Susan Alexander’s terrible opera singing. How could Welles they devote so much screen time to bad opera? Who wants to watch that?

Citizen Kane itself is a work of exhibitionism by Orson Welles. It is a great, important work, but too weak as a story to be “the greatest movie of all time.”  However, Kane is likely to keep the de facto title as there is no consensus over a possible successor.

Further reading:

Pauline Kael, The Citizen Kane Book, 1971. See Part Four “Raising Kane” for a riveting account of the movie’s origins and especially for Kael’s argument that Mankiewicz wrote the screenplay in seclusion, while Wells later added a few bits and took co-writing credit. Personally, I enjoy reading Kael’s “Raising Kane,” more than I like watching the movie, though admittedly I have seen the movie at least ten times.

Roget Ebert’s "Great Movies" review

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