Film Forum

U.S., 1941
Directed by Orson Welles
With Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane, Agnes Moorehead
Screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles
Music by Bernard Hermann
WINNER Academy Awards® – Best Original Screenplay, 1942
Approx. 119 min. DCP.

“Rosebud.” From its Gothic opening at looming Xanadu, through the utterly convincing faked newsreel, through an investigative reporter’s quest through the conflicting accounts of the surviving participants — friends, enemies, wives, bystanders — in the public rise and private fall of a newspaper magnate (played throughout by 25-year-old Welles); with the overlapping dialogue; the low angle shots; the startling, radio-influenced use of sound; the deep focus; the long takes; the whole course of a marriage limned in a succession of breakfasts; to its legendary finale, this is the most electrifying debut in screen history — acting and directing — routinely voted by international critics as the greatest film ever, and acknowledged influence and inspiration to the most disparate cineastes. As brilliant and startling today as in 1941, it remained both Welles’ masterpiece and his nemesis.

Presented with support from the Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film and the Robert Jolin Osborne Endowed Fund for American Classic Cinema of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s

Reviews

“MAY BE MORE FUN THAN ANY OTHER GREAT MOVIE!”
– Pauline Kael

“It made history in the literal sense… The cinema, after the shock waves from CITIZEN KANE made the entire industry shudder, was freer.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Still-devastating portrayal of power, media manipulation, and loneliness.”
– Kristen M. Jones, The Wall Street Journal

“Welles was trying to make the Last Word in movies, looting Hollywood for its finest techniques and technicians to build himself an immortal monument. It is the scope of his youthful presumption that keeps Kane perpetually fresh and exciting.”
– Joseph McBride

“...more than a great movie; it is a gathering of all the lessons of the emerging era of sound.”
– Roger Ebert

Related Events