Citizen Kane (1941)

9.00pm, Thursday, BBC Four “Mr Carter, if the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough”

Where does one start? Over eight decades on, a debut lm from a 25-year-old is still on the all-timegreat movie list of almost every

lm critic in the world. Orson Welles never doubted that his chronicle of the rise and fall of a newspaper tycoon (with more than a nod to William Randolph Hearst) was an important work, but even he couldn’t have anticipated that it would be so in uential. Though Welles had made a huge reputation on stage and on radio, he had little experience of lmmaking. In fact, before shooting a single frame of lm, he watched John Ford’s Stagecoach thirty times. Despite his inexperience, Welles, in conjunction with his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, decided to incorporate an array of techniques - deep focus, invisible wipes, matte shots, overlapping dialogue, low angle shots, faux newsreel footage – which dazzled audiences and critics alike. Other

lms had featured variety of those elements (Jean Renoir had been using deep focus for years, for example) but none had combined them to such telling e ect.

On the acting front, Welles is terri c in the lead role and he ages wonderfully well on screen. There is also strong support from his regular Mercury Theatre Players, Joseph Cotton, Agnes Moorehead and Everett Sloane. The great Bernard Herrmann, who had worked with Welles on various radio productions, provided the haunting score, his rst for lm. Despite being nominated for nine Oscars, it achieved just the one, Best Adapted Screenplay, for Welles and co-writer, Herman J. Mankiewicz.