The movie opens with a fade-in on foggy, forlorn Xanadu, a palatial estate off the Florida coast, where Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful men, dies whispering the word "Rosebud." Fade-out, then a flat cut to a "March of Time"-like documentary which presents a thumbnail sketch of the life of publishing magnate Kane (a brilliant and entertaining means of dispensing a maximum amount of exposition in a minimum amount of time). Managing editor Rawlston (Phil Van Zandt) insists that the Kane obituary film is missing something and "needs an angle." Rawlston orders his top reporter to discover what "Rosebud" means, and Thompson's search leads him to five key players in Kane's private life. In the end, Thompson has nothing to show for all his legwork except a jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece. The viewer, however, has better luck, and the mystery is resolved by the story's end. A thinly veiled biography of powerful publisher William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane has probably inspired more directorial careers than any film short of Pulp Fiction; as with Quentin Tarantino's later film, Kane became influential through the sheer rule-breaking audacity of its young filmmaker (Welles was 25 years old when he made it). Welles uses his March of Time gimmick to fragment conventional notions of space, time, and character, suggesting that no one can be known other than through varying perspectives. The deep-focus cinematography of Gregg Toland, who would also pioneer this 1940s camera style in such William Wyler movies as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and The Little Foxes (1941), adds to the film's chilly atmosphere of alienation and emptiness. Widely cited as the greatest American film, Citizen Kane is neither comforting nor stale, and its energy and invention set the pace for new movies many decades later. -- Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
             That tarnished sign on a forbidding black wire fence is th...