Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is often called the greatest film ever made.

Orson Welles' 1941 magnum opus "Citizen Kane".

Working under a contract with RKO Radio Pictures, Welles produced and directed the film, co-wrote the screenplay with Herman J. Mankiewicz and starred as the title character.

10 of the players in major roles were veterans of Welles' stage company, The Mercury Theater.

Several of them later went on to successful motion picture careers including Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, William Alland, Ray Collins, Everett Sloane, and, of course, Orson Welles himself.

Also worthy of note are the actresses who portray Kane's two wives, Ruth Warrick in her film debut, and Dorothy Comingore, a protege of Charlie Chaplin.

The film begins at night on the grounds of an imposing mountain top estate where a single light shines in a high window in the surrounding gloom.

Inside an old man lies on his deathbed, holding a snow globe.

He speaks a single word, rosebud, and drops the globe which shatters on the floor.

A news reel obituary abruptly follows.

The dead man is Charles Foster Kane, whose vast wealth allowed him to create this palatial Florida estate, Xanadu, with building materials stripped from old world banners and castles.

It boasts its own menagerie and lagoon and art objects gathered from throughout Europe, but many of those are still in crates and the great house itself remains unfinished and is starting to decay.

The newsreel then reviews Kane's life and career as a newspaper publisher, his political ambitions and the scandal that brought them to an end.

When the newsreel ends, we discover its audience, a group of news magazines staffers.

Their editor, Mr. Rawlston, exhorts him to find some new angle to tell the story, not about what Kane did, but about who he was.

Rawlston fixes on Kane's last word, rosebud.

He commissions a reporter, Jerry Thompson, to investigate Kane and to get in touch with everybody that ever worked for him, whoever loved him, whoever hated his guts, to find out what rosebud means.

Thompson begins to gather information from Kane's old associates, friends, enemies and lovers, hoping to make sense of the enigma who is Charles Foster Kane.

Orson Welles, the theatrical wunderkind, who had already left his mark on Broadway and radio with his innovative unorthodox productions, was sought out by Hollywood studios as early as 1936.

After his memorable radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" on Halloween night in 1938.

He was lured to the West Coast by the offer of an unprecedented contract with George J. Schaefer, then head of RKO Radio Pictures.

Under the terms of the contract, Welles' was to produce two motion pictures for the studio.

What was unusual was that Welles was granted complete artistic control over the two films providing RKO approved the stories.

Welles would be free to choose his own cast and crew, and Welles alone would decide how the film would be edited, as well as when RKO executives would have an opportunity to see any of the results.

Most important, Welles had the exclusive right to determine the final cut of his movies.

In other words, in every respect, Orson Welles was the final authority about every artistic aspect of the motion pictures he would produce for RKO.

No wonder then, when Welles arrived in Hollywood on July 20th, 1939, and had his first tour of RKO, he called the studio the greatest electric train set a boy ever had.

Welles made good use of his new toy.

He uses miniatures, match shots and other motion picture magic to create the world in which "Citizen Kane" takes place.

Lighting and shadows create a mood or direct the audience's attention to where Welles wants it to go.

The camera sometimes swoops up or down and sometimes even seems to move through solid objects.

The film also makes extensive use of deep focus, a way of shooting a scene that keeps objects in the foreground, center and background all in clear focus simultaneously.

Welles acknowledged the important contribution made to the film of his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, and placed Toland's name on the same title card where Welles' own name appeared at the end of the film.

In an interview in 1967, Welles reviewed his career and said, "I've known only one great cameraman, Gregg Toland."

He said, "He could teach me everything about the camera in four hours, and he did."

The remarkable thing about what Orson Welles did with "Citizen Kane" was his complete lack of previous experience with motion pictures.

He had never even expressed much interest in making movies and later admitted his love for cinema was entirely the product of his preparations for "Citizen Kane."

His production advisor, Miriam Geiger, made up a textbook of filmmaking techniques for Welles and he immersed himself in the work of directors like Frank Capra, Fritz Lang, King Vidor, and especially John Ford.

Welles later said that when he began directing, "I'd learned whatever I knew in the projection room from Ford.

After dinner every night for about a month, I'd run 'Stagecoach' often with a different technician or department head from the studio, and ask questions.

How was this done?

Why was this done?

It was like going to school."

One camera technique Welles learned from what Ford did in 'Stagecoach' had to do with the angle of a shot.

The camera will look up at Kane and his best friend Jedediah Leland, and down at weaker characters like Kane's second wife Susan, to influence how the audience sees them in the context of the film.

Although Welles didn't develop any new filming techniques in the making of "Citizen Kane", he did develop a distinctive style by studying and making novel use of techniques that earlier directors had already developed.

Welles borrowed ideas about camera use, lighting, and framing from early German expressionism as well as popular American directors.

The great silent film director D. W. Griffith said in a 1948 interview, "I loved 'Citizen Kane', and particularly loved the ideas he took from me."

Despite the promises RKO executives had made about granting him total artistic control over the making of "Citizen Kane", Orson Welles began in something close to complete secrecy to making what was then known as "RKO 281".

He began filming on June 29th, 1940, a Saturday, when executives were unlikely to be at the studio.

His story for RKO was that he was only shooting camera tests.

"But we were shooting the picture," he later said, "Because we wanted to get started and be already into it before anybody knew about it."

The first test was the scene following the news on the March news reel, filmed in an actual projection room in near darkness.

"At $809, Orson did run substantially beyond the test budget of $528," wrote Welles' biographer Barton Whaley, "To create one of the most famous scenes in movie history."

Although Charles Foster Kane was commonly thought to be a fictionalized version of publisher William Randolph Hearst, the character is actually a fictional composite of several different prominent men.

One was Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World, who was also a Democratic congressman who fought corruption in big business.

Another was Samuel Insull, a business magnate who married a much younger actress, built the Chicago Civic Opera House and saw his businesses collapse during the Great Depression.

Yet another was Harold McCormick, chairman of the International Harvester Corporation, who became known for promoting the operatic career of his second wife, Ganna Walska, despite her mediocre vocal talents.

All these, as well as Hearst, served as models for Charles Foster Kane.

But William Randolph Hearst, who relentlessly promoted the movie career of his longtime mistress Marion Davies, and had his own political ambitions, saw "Citizen Kane" as a direct personal attack.

Hearst did his best to mitigate the influence of the film.

He interceded with George Schaefer of RKO to suppress it.

Failing that, Hearst forbade any mention of it in his many newspapers, exerted his influence to limit the number of theaters that would show "Citizen Kane", prompting fear of reprisals.

As a result, the number of people who saw "Citizen Kane" on its initial release was limited and was only a modest financial success.

The film's current reputation began to emerge in 1956, when RKO became one of the first Hollywood studios to sell its library to television, and "Citizen Kane" was broadcast into American homes.

That same year, film critic Andrew Sarris wrote "Citizen Kane: The American Baroque" for the journal Film Culture, and called it the great American film, and the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since "The Birth of a Nation".

Its reputation has only grown since.

New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael perhaps explained why with the first sentence of her influential 1971 essay "Raising Kane."

She wrote, "'Citizen Kane' is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.