10 Films to Watch if You Like Citizen Kane

Considering it has long been regarded as the best film ever made, it's surprising that the 80th anniversary of Citizen Kane has been marked with so little fuss. Here at Cinema Paradiso, however, we can spot a masterpiece when we see it. In this article, we'll be guiding you to 10 films to watch if you liked Citizen Kane. We'll also zip over the history of Orson Welles, as well as recounting the myths and controversies surrounding the film, bringing you the only article you'll ever need to understand Citizen Kane!.

When it was released in 1941, Citizen Kane was regarded as more of a cause célèbre than a cinematic classic. Ignored by large parts of the American press, it was primarily seen in large cities and made relatively little impact at the box office, despite landing nine Oscar nominations. Eighty years on, however, Orson Welles's directorial debut is ranked among the finest films ever made.

Screeds have been written about it, with much of the focus falling on the relative contributions made to the Oscar-winning screenplay by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz. Debates have also raged about the extent of the impact that Welles's supposedly pioneering technique has had on Hollywood film-making. So, why not let Cinema Paradiso guide you through the maze.

Orson Welles' Arrives In Hollywood

When a 16 year-old from Kenosha, Wisconsin strode into the famous Gate Theatre in Dublin and landed a job after introducing himself as a renowned Broadway star, he realised that anything was possible. Two years later, a chance meeting at a 1933 party in Chicago resulted in Orson Welles making his American stage bow and he had moved into radio and film by the end of the following year.

Welles was 19 when he starred alongside wife-to-be Virginia Nicolson in a self-made short entitled, The Hearts of Age (1934). But he would have to wait a few months before becoming the toast of New York after directing an all-African American cast in a voodoo version of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. He followed this by reviving Eugène Marin Labiche and Marc-Michel's 1851 play, The Italian Straw Hat, which had been wonderfully filmed by René Clair in 1928. But the Boy Wonder was only getting started.

In 1937, he produced Marc Blitzstein's political operetta, The Cradle Will Rock, under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project that had been set up during the Great Depression. Angus MacFadyen captures something of Welles's fearlessness and energy in Tim Robbins's Cradle Will Rock (1999), while the extent to which Welles took the performing arts by storm is discussed in two fine documentaries, Chuck Workman's Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles (2014) and Mark Cousins's The Eyes of Orson Welles (2019).

These also mention an audacious reading of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that relocated the action to Fascist Benito Mussolini's Italy. Workman and Cousins also recall the CBS radio broadcast on Halloween 1938 that jolted a nation. But the full story of how the Mercury Theatre company convinced millions that the United States was under alien attack is retold in John Ross's The Day That Panicked America: The H.G. Wells War of the Worlds Scandal (2005), which is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.

Welles had already been offered the odd script and had even been screen tested at Warner Bros in 1937. But he was in no hurry to venture into the movies, as he deemed them an inferior form of entertainment, even though he had made his own second short, which had been hastily filmed in 1938 to add novelty to a revival of William Gillette's 1894 comedy, Too Much Johnson. Consequently, Welles also turned down both independent producer David O. Selznick's offer to head up his story department and a supporting role in William Wyler's adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1939), which received an Academy Award for the black-and-white photography of Gregg Toland, more of whom anon.

RKO chief George J. Schaefer was so determined to land Welles after The War of the Worlds saga that he offered him the chance to make two films without any studio interference. When the plays Five Kings and The Green Goddess unexpectedly bombed on Broadway, Welles signed on the dotted line. Arriving in Hollywood on 20 July 1939, he declared the first studio he saw 'the greatest electric train set a boy ever had'. However wide-eyed he might have been, the 24 year-old still negotiated a financially favourable contract in return to writing, directing, producing and starring in two pictures whose budgets were not to exceed $500,000.

Despite having guaranteed privacy on the set and in the cutting room, Welles soon discovered just how much freedom he would actually be given when he spent five fruitless months making camera tests in a bid to persuade RKO to spend an extra $50,000 so that he could adapt Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with himself playing both Kurtz and an unseen Marlow.

An offer to team with Lucille Ball on a quickie version of Cecil Day-Lewis's thriller, The Smiler With a Knife, was also spurned, as the tale of a fascist plot in Washington was deemed too contentious with Europe being engulfed in the Phony War. Instead, Welles sought out erstwhile Mercury Theatre scenarist Herman J. Mankiewicz to kick around ideas for a project that was provisionally titled, American.

Who Wrote Citizen Kane?

Two films have been made about the writing of Citizen Kane and neither of them can lay claim to telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Produced by Ridley and Tony Scott and taking its title from Kane's studio's production number, Benjamin Ross's RKO 281 (1999) stars Liev Schreiber as Welles and John Malkovich as Mankiewicz, who is nervous about basing a film on press baron William Randolph Hearst and his actress mistress Marion Davies because he knows that the pioneer of yellow journalism had the contacts to destroy both of their careers.

By contrast, David Fincher's 10-time Oscar-nominated Mank (2020) avers that Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) collaborated with Welles (Tom Burke) to wreak his revenge on Hearst (Charles Dance) and Davies (Amanda Seyfried) for causing the suicide of Shelly Metcalf, a personnage à clef based on Felix E. Feist, who went on to direct titles like The Big Trees (1952) and Donovan's Brain (1953), which are available to rent on high-quality disc from Cinema Paradiso.

As there are few uncontested accounts of the writing process, it's only possible to surmise what happened next. In February 1940, with Mankiewicz in plaster after breaking his leg in a traffic accident, he was deposited in a house in Victorville with producer John Houseman and a nurse. Also present was secretary Rita Alexander, who took dictation as Mankiewicz worked from the 300 pages of notes that Welles had amassed during discussions that had been so fractious that he had reached the conclusion that they would be better off working alone.

Glad to be employed, Mankiewicz had agreed to work without credit, as Welles's RKO contract had stipulated that he 'wrote' the screenplay for his film. As news filtered back that the production was going well, Mank came to regret the deal and was encouraged by fellow scribe Ben Hecht to demand formal recognition. Fearing Hearst's backlash, however, Mankiewicz withdrew his appeal to the Screen Writers Guild and it was only when RKO confirmed the credits in January 1941 that he was cited as co-writer. According to Welles's assistant, Richard Wilson, the director had insisted that Mankiewicz's name appeared first. But he also made a point of asserting that the shooting script combined ideas from both drafts. 'At the end, naturally,' Welles stated, 'I was the one making the picture, after all - who had to make the decisions. I used what I wanted of Mank's and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own.'

Such pronouncements failed to mollify Mankiewicz, who spent the last 12 years of his life grumbling about the man he now called 'Monstro'. Reportedly, on once spotting him at the studio, Mank hissed, 'There but for the grace of God goes God.' He continued to write, however, and Cinema Paradiso users can enjoy his efforts on two contrasting pictures, Robert Siodmak's noir, Christmas Holiday (1944), and Frank Borzage's swashbuckler, The Spanish Main (1945). Intriguingly, the former employed a flashback structure to chronicle the relationship between Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly.

Over the next two decades, Citizen Kane slipped out of the public consciousness (see below). Upon its rediscovery, however, the debate over who wrote what was renewed. In October 1971, critic Pauline Kael published The Citizen Kane Book to mark the picture's 30th anniversary. At its core was 'Raising Kane', a 50,000-word article she had written for the New Yorker the previous February. Nettled by the notion of auteur theory that credited directors as the 'authors' of their films, Kael had argued that Welles was indebted to the brilliance of his cast and crew, as well as Mankiewicz, who had written the bulk of the scenario.

Unfortunately, such was her antipathy for Welles that Kael had not bothered to confront him with her convictions. Consequently, he responded with the aid of critic-turned-film-maker Peter Bogdanovich in a 10,000-word Esquire piece entitled, 'The Kane Mutiny' (after Edward Dmytryk's 1954 adaptation of Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny).

Among the people Bogdanovich interviewed was renowned screenwriter Charles Lederer, who not only happened to be a good friend of Mankiewicz, but who was also Marion Davies's nephew. He claimed, 'Manky was a great paragrapher - he wasn't really a picture writer. I read his script of the film - the long one called American - before Orson really got to changing it and making his version of it - and I thought it was pretty dull.'

Inspirations for Citizen Kane, Citizen Kane for Inspiration

Shortly before he died in July 1948, pioneering director D.W. Griffith told an interviewer, 'I loved Citizen Kane and particularly loved the ideas he took from me.' This was a bit rich coming from the maker of such landmark early features as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), as, like Orson Welles, he was less of a technical innovator than a skilled applicator of other people's ideas.

Welles liked to claim that he had prepared for his directing bow with 40 viewings of John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). In fact, he spent considerable time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York watching pictures by Frank Capra, René Clair, Fritz Lang, King Vidor and Jean Renoir. He also studied Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920). Once on the set, however, Ford was his tutor and he got into the habit of running Stagecoach after dinner each night with a different member of the crew and bombarding them with questions. As he later recalled, 'It was like going to school.'

Welles was also indebted to production advisor Miriam Geiger, who compiled a handmade textbook of basic techniques that he kept close to hand. Another key collaborator was art director Perry Ferguson, who attended meetings with Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland to design sets that not only captured the atmosphere of a scene, but which could also accommodate the moving camera that Welles intended to use to film scenes in deep focus.

Indeed, Ferguson created models for the pair to plan the lighting and blocking of their sequence shots. He also incorporated trenches into the studio floor so that Toland could grab low-angle shots, while he used muslin to create the famous ceilings that were still a novelty in Hollywood movies. His pièce de résistance, however, was the Great Hall at Xanadu, the Kane mansion that was modelled on the Hearst Castle at San Simeon and belied the fact that it had been fashioned on the tightest of budgets.

On Ferguson's suggestion, shooting on 'RKO 281' began on 29 June 1940 while the front office thought Welles was doing 'camera tests', so that he could get the hang of calling the shots before the suits paid a call. The first scene completed took place in the RKO projection room, as the assembled discussed the News on the March newsreel announcing Kane's death and pondering the mystery of his final word, 'Rosebud'.

Always rehearsing scenes in advance, Welles next made use of sets built for other pictures to shoot the El Rancho nightclub scene in which second wife Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) recalls her relationship with Kane. Similarly, the interviews with best friend Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten) and Inquirer employee Bernstein (Everett Sloane) were filmed on existing sets. The odd scene required location shooting, but the production's main base was Stage 19 at Paramount Pictures, which allowed Welles and sound recordist Bailey Fesler to experiment with overlapping speech and sound perspectives.

Among the most famous scenes was the breakfast montage involving Kane and first wife Emily Norton (Ruth Warwick), which marked the 'official' start of filming. Once the camera started rolling, Welles came to rely so heavily on Toland that he dubbed him 'the greatest gift any director - young or old - could ever, ever have'. Yet Toland had been so keen to work with the Boy Genius with a reputation for experimentation that he had persuaded producer Samuel Goldwyn to loan him to RKO.

Unusually, little inter-studio bartering had to be done to recruit the cast, as 10 members of the ensemble were Mercury Theatre regulars. Like Welles, Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, William Alland (reporter Jerry Thompson), Ray Collins (Boss Jim W. Gettys), Agnes Moorehead (mother Mary Kane), Erskine Sanford (inquirer editor Herbert Carter) and Paul Stewart (Raymond the butler) were all making their first feature. Dorothy Comingore (who had previously used the name 'Linda Winters) was recommened to Welles by Charlie Chaplin, while he cast stage actress Ruth Warwick because she reminded him of his mother, Beatrice.

Morehead claimed that Welles 'trained us for films at the same time that he was training himself', He often discussed the day's shooting during the four-hour stints required to apply Maurice Seiderman's make-up. Often working 18-hour days, Welles was forced to slow down after damaging an ankle in a fall down some steps and had to direct from a wheelchair for a fortnight and use a steel brace to enable him to stand during his own scenes.

Principal photography wrapped on 24 October with a bonfire that got out of hand and Paul Stewart noted that 'Orson was delighted with the commotion.' However, he was back shooting retakes on 15 November, although Harry J. Wild had to take over partway through because Toland was contracted to start what turned out to be the interminable shoot for Howard Hughes's Western, The Outlaw (1943).

Fittingly, the final scene taken on 30 November was Kane's death and Welles boasted to the press that he had only overrun by 21 days (when he had actually been shooting in secret for a month). The delays cost RKO $115,927, as the budget reached $839,727. But the work was far from over. In addition to the numerous special effects shots created by Vernon L. Walker and Linwood G. Dunn, Welles also insisted on making extensive use of an optical printer during post-production.

Having edited 'in camera' by using the mise-en-scène technique of shooting long takes in depth to restrict the amount of coverage of each scene, Welles provided editor Robert Wise and assistant Mark Robson (who would both go on to become acclaimed directors) with copious notes to 'guide' them in the application of Sergei Eisenstein's theory of associative montage.

Initially, Wise struggled to impose rhythms on the fluid images and overlapping dialogue, but he achieved several masterly set-pieces, including the News on the March newsreel and the breakfast montage that compresses 16 years of marital ennui into two minutes. This sequence makes innovative use of the 'lightning mix' technique that Welles and sound engineer James G. Stewart devised to provide audio bridges within visual montages.

Adding to the efficacy of these passages was Bernard Herrman's score. However, the sharp-eared will detect strains of Anthony Collins's 'Belgian March' from Herbert Wilcox's Nurse Edith Cavell (1939), which is available to rent from Cinema Paradisoon high-calibre DVD.

They Think It's All Over

In order to prevent the Hearst empire from discovering the truth about Citizen Kane's genesis, Welles restricted press access to the set and limited the number of RKO executives who could see the daily rushes. In a rare interview, he explained that the plot was based on the Faust legend, while he made a point of buttering up Louella Parsons, who was the Hearst gossip columnist in Hollywood.

She was excluded when certain sections of the press demanded a screening of the rough cut on 3 January 1941. However, arch rival Hedda Hopper insisted on being admitted, even though she had not been invited, and she rubbished the film's old-fashioned melodramatics and visual trickery before denouncing Welles for perpetrating a 'vicious and irresponsible attack on a great man'.

Furious at being scooped and outraged at being duped by Welles, Parsons set out to humiliate him, while making it seem as though she was defending her blameless employer. Shortly after storming out of a private screening on 10 January, she threatened a lawsuit if RKO released the film. Moreover, she urged Radio City Music Hall in New York to boycott the film. Meanwhile, the Hearst chain refused all RKO advertising and this ruffled front office feathers, as it was running a campaign to land Ginger Rogers the Academy Award for Best Actress for Sam Wood's Kitty Foyle (1940).

But George Schaefer remained loyal to Welles, as he sensed he had produced something unprecedentedly remarkable. Despite Hearst threatening to expose Welles's affair with married actress Dolores Del Rio, Welles was advised by his lawyers to sit tight, as Hearst would never sue him for libel or invasion of privacy, as he knew that details of his liaison with Davies would have to be revealed in court.

Such was Hearst's lack of scruple, however, that he tipped off the Hollywood Reporter that his newspapers were about to run a series of rabble-rousing articles denouncing the studios for overlooking American workers and hiring the numerous Jewish artists who had fled war-torn Europe. Fearing a backlash, MGM chiefs Nicholas Schenck and Louis B. Mayer spoke on behalf of the other major studios in offering RKO $805,000 compensation if it destroyed all prints of the film and the master negative.

Rather than buckle, however, Schaefer invited his peers to a screening in New York, at which Welles agreed to cut three minutes of potentially defamatory material in return for a guarantee that the Production Code Administration would pass the picture for release. Hearst instructed his journalists to avoid any mention of Kane in smearing Welles as a Communist degenerate. By pure coincidence, at the height of the furore, Welles and Hearst found themselves sharing a lift at the Fairmont Hotel on the night of the San Francisco premiere. Welles invited Hearst to attend and, when he refused to reply, he teased, 'Charles Foster Kane would have accepted.'

How was Citizen Kane Originally Recieved?

A decade after it premiered at Broadway's RKO Palace on 1 May 1941, Hearst died thinking he had won the battle over Citizen Kane. The lack of stars counted against the picture outside the major cities, as did its narrative complexity and bold stylisation. Some even complained the message that wealth couldn't buy happiness was unAmerican. Thus, with European being lost to war, Kane lost $160,000 and slowly slipped into anonymity.

Frustrated by the ticket sales and the missed opportunity to get Welles to direct The Men From Mars in a bid to cash in on his War of the Worlds notoriety, RKO insisted on re-negotiating his deal. Moreover, the studio butched his adaptation of Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) while Welles was in South America making the Good Neighbour documentary, It's All True, for the US government. In his absence, Hearst pulled strings with J. Edgar Hoover to have Welles investigated by the FBI, while Parsons campaigned to have him drafted so that he would be sent to the Pacific. But Welles remained in Hollywood and, with Norman Foster's Journey into Fear (1943), he began the lifelong globe-trotting rigmarole of acting in the films of others in order to bankroll his own projects.

Five years after its US release, Citizen Kane premiered in France at the Marbeuf Theatre in Paris on 10 July 1946. Intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Georges Sadoul wondered what the fuss had been about, with the latter claiming 'the whole film is based on a misconception of what cinema is all about'. Echoing the contention that the film rehashed old techniques, novelist Jorge Luis Borges declared it a 'labyrinth with no centre...whose historical value is undeniable but which no one cares to see again'.

For many years, no one could see Kane at all. But André Bazin was determined to salvage the film's dwindling reputation and his 1947 essay, 'The Technique of Citizen Kane', did much to prompt a re-evaluation. Following the positive notices of future auteurs François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, New York critic Andrew Sarris proclaimed the film a masterpiece in 'Citizen Kane: The American Baroque', which was published in Film Culture in 1956, the year in which Kane started screening on American television after RKO sold its library prior to closing down.

The rehabilitation continued in 1958, when Citizen Kane came 9th in a Top 12 list compiled by over 100 critics and historians at Expo 58 in Brussels. Indeed, Kane, Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) were the only talkies to make the cut.

The latter also topped the first decennial poll sponsored by Sight and Sound in 1952, with Kane limping into 11th place. However, it topped the chart in 1962 and remained there until being unseated by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) five decades later. It will be interesting to see where it comes in the 2022 vote.

It's hard to find a current film-maker who doesn't acknowledge the influence of Welles and Kane. An early disciple was John Huston, who encouraged cinematographer Arthur Edeson to copy Toland's shooting style in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Frank Tuttle's This Gun For Hire (1942), George Cukor's Gaslight (1944) and Max Ophüls's Caught (1949) also borrowed noirish touches from Welles, who almost certainly influenced Robert Stevenson's stylistic decisions while playing Rochester opposite Joan Fontaine in Jane Eyre (1943).

Although Akira Kurosawa hadn't seen Kane when he made Rashomon (1950), Welles himself revisited the flashbacking structure for Confidential Report (aka Mr Arkadin, 1955) and it has further resurfaced in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Grim Reaper (1962), Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble (1977) and Warren Beatty's Reds (1981), Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1988) and Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine (1998).

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012) have been claimed as latterday variations on Kane, while the efforts of the North Korean regime to coerce Sony into suppressing Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen's The Interview (2014) recalls the Hearst campaign.

It was often believed that one of the reasons that the mogul got so riled about Kane was that 'Rosebud' was his pet name for Marion Davies's genitalia. Biographer Richard Meryman, however, insisted the name came from a childhood bicycle that had been stolen while Mankiewicz was in a public library. But Patrick McGilligan has cleared up the mystery by revealing that, while seeking a suitable symbol of lost youth, Mank had remembered a horse named Old Rosebud that had won him a bet by romping home by eight lengths in a record time at the 1914 Kentucky Derby. Now there's a topic for a movie!