The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Orson Welles · a film · 1941 · 119 minutes
Mode
Investigative biography in flashback; newspaper picture, political drama and marriage story contained in a detective story whose object is a word
Mythos
Kubla Khan in his pleasure dome; the boy taken from his mother for his fortune, who spends his life buying what cannot be given back; the king in the hall of mirrors; the lost thing named at death
Phase
A death, a newsreel and five accounts — the guardian’s papers, the manager, the friend, the wife, the butler — each overlapping the last, framed by a fence that reads No Trespassing at the start and at the close
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, 119 minutes; Gregg Toland’s deep-focus photography, Bernard Herrmann’s score, Robert Wise’s editing; produced, directed, co-written and played in the lead by Orson Welles at twenty-five
Register
Cool, fast and exact; newsreel parody, overlapping talk and newsroom comedy against a cavernous house, a woman’s overdose and a man alone among mirrors
Scale
One man’s life from a Colorado boarding house to a Florida palace; a newspaper, a campaign, an opera house; a country’s half-century seen through a single fortune
Governing Proposition
A newspaper publisher dies alone in a palace he built, saying one word, and a newsreel reporter is sent to find what the word meant. He asks five people who knew the man, and each gives him part of a life that does not fit the others’ parts. The reporter does not find the answer; the audience is shown it, and shown that it explains nothing. The wager of the film is that a man’s unknowability can be made the subject of a biography rather than its failure, and that a form built from partial, contradicting witnesses can know more about American power than any single account of it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins at a fence. A sign reads No Trespassing, and the camera climbs over it, up through wire and iron to a hilltop palace, past monkeys in a cage, gondolas on a lagoon and a golf course gone to ruin, in dissolves that keep one lit window in the same place in the frame. The window goes dark. Inside, a man’s lips fill the screen and say a word, Rosebud, and a glass globe with a snow scene inside falls from his hand and breaks; a nurse comes in, seen bent through the curve of the broken glass, and covers the face. Bernard Herrmann’s music is low and slow. The man is Charles Foster Kane, and the film has shown his death before his face.
Then the lights come up on a newsreel. News on the March, with a booming narrator and stock footage, gives Kane’s life in a few minutes: Xanadu, the largest private estate in the world; the fortune from a Colorado mine; the newspaper empire; the marriages, to a president’s niece and to a singer; the campaign for governor and its collapse in scandal; the opera house built for the second wife; the Depression, which took most of the papers; the old man alone in his palace. It is a parody of the March of Time, exact in its voice, its typography and its jerky film, and it is also the whole plot of the film, given in advance. Orson Welles, who produced and directed the film at twenty-five, plays Kane. The screenplay is by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles.
In a projection room, lit only by the beam, the newsreel’s editor Rawlston tells his staff that the film is good and has no angle. The man’s last word is the angle. He sends a reporter, Thompson, played by William Alland and seen through the film only from behind or in shadow, to ask everyone who knew Kane what the word meant. The structure is set: a detective story whose object is a word, and whose witnesses will each give a piece of a man none of them knew.
Movement II
Thompson tries first Susan Alexander Kane, the second wife, at the El Rancho nightclub in Atlantic City, and the camera goes down through the skylight in the rain to find her drunk at a table. She will not talk. He goes next to the Thatcher Memorial Library, a marble vault where a guard and a shaft of light watch him read the manuscript of Kane’s guardian, the banker Walter Parks Thatcher, played by George Coulouris. The manuscript gives the boy.
Colorado, in snow. A boy plays with a sled outside a boarding house while, inside, his mother, played by Agnes Moorehead, signs the papers that give him and his new fortune to Thatcher’s bank. Gregg Toland’s deep focus holds the boy in the window, the father protesting in the middle distance and the mother at the table in the foreground. When Thatcher comes to collect him, the boy hits the banker with the sled. Thatcher’s account carries Kane through his minority in a line of Christmas greetings cut across decades, to the day the young man, offered his holdings, picks the one worthless one, a newspaper, because he thinks it would be fun to run. The banker watches his ward turn the paper against the trusts and against him, and in the Depression sign it over again. Thatcher’s Kane is an ingrate who wasted a fortune; the film shows an old man who never understood the boy he took.
Bernstein, Kane’s business manager, played by Everett Sloane, is found in his office under a portrait of his employer. He tells of the day Kane took over the Inquirer with his friend Leland, dismissed the old editor, moved into the office, and in the small hours wrote a Declaration of Principles promising his readers the truth; Leland asked to keep the sheet. Bernstein also tells of a girl in white he saw on a ferry in his youth, for a moment, and has thought of every month since. It is the film’s hint of what the word might be: not a thing but a glimpse, and nothing to do with Kane. His account ends with Kane sailing for Europe and returning engaged to Emily Norton, the President’s niece.
Movement III
Jedediah Leland, played by Joseph Cotten, is old, on the sun roof of a hospital, asking for cigars the doctors have forbidden. He gives the marriage and the fall. The marriage is one sequence at the breakfast table, a few lines each across years, the couple drawing apart with every cut until they sit in silence at opposite ends of a long table, she reading the rival paper. Then a chance meeting in the street: Kane, splashed by a carriage, meets Susan Alexander, played by Dorothy Comingore, who has a toothache and does not know who he is, and laughs at him. She sings for him in her room. Her mother had wanted her to be a singer.
The campaign for governor. Kane speaks beneath a poster of his own face many times life size, and promises to jail the boss, Jim Gettys, played by Ray Collins. Gettys answers by bringing Kane’s wife to Susan’s apartment, where the four of them stand in one room and Gettys offers a choice: withdraw or be exposed. Kane refuses, shouting down the stairs after Gettys, and the rival paper carries the love nest. He loses. The Inquirer’s two prepared headlines, victory and fraud at the polls, are both shown. Leland, drunk, tells him what he thinks: that he talks about the people as if he owned them, and wants love only on his own terms. He asks to be sent to Chicago.
Kane marries Susan and builds an opera house for her. On the night of her Chicago debut Leland, drunk again, falls asleep over his typewriter with the notice half written, and Kane, finding him, finishes it in Leland’s judgment, that she is no singer, prints it, and fires him. Years later Leland sends back the severance cheque with the Declaration of Principles, torn to pieces. The film has given the man’s one friendship and the one document in which he wrote down what he meant to be, and shown both destroyed by him.
Movement IV
Susan, sober enough now, gives the opera and the palace. The singing lessons with Matiste, who despairs; the premiere, seen from behind her as the curtain goes up on a house in darkness; the camera climbing from the stage up through the flies to two stagehands, one of whom holds his nose. Herrmann composed the opera, Salammbô, so that it would sit too high for her voice. Kane applauds alone when the house has stopped. He makes her go on singing, town after town, the reviews in a montage over the glare of the footlights, until she takes an overdose. The scene is a glass and a spoon in the foreground, her breathing in the dark, and Kane breaking down the door. He lets her stop.
Xanadu. Susan at a jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a hall the size of a railway station, a fire burning in a hearth a man could stand in, their voices echoing across the room when they speak. Puzzle after puzzle, in dissolves, through the seasons. A picnic in the Everglades, a line of cars and a tent, where Kane slaps her when she tells him he has never given her anything that was his. She packs. He asks her to stay, and then says that she cannot do this to him. She goes. Comingore gives the film its one open pain; everyone else is seen from outside, and she is the only one the audience is let inside.
Hers is the only account from a woman, the only one from someone Kane bought rather than hired or fought, and the only one in which the man is seen doing harm to a person at close range, in a room, over years. The film places it fourth, so that what it shows is already known from the newsreel and the reviews, and still arrives as new.
Movement V
Raymond the butler, played by Paul Stewart, gives the end for a price. After Susan leaves, Kane walks into her room and destroys it, slowly and thoroughly, an old man pulling down shelves, until his hand finds the glass globe with the snow scene in it. He stops. He says the word. He walks out through the hall with the globe in his hand, past the servants, and passes between two facing mirrors, so that a line of old men walks with him into the glass. Raymond says the word meant nothing; he heard him say it the day he died too.
The last scene is the inventory. Reporters and photographers move among the crates and statues of Kane’s possessions, a warehouse of a lifetime of buying, under the roof of the great hall. Thompson, asked what he found, says that he did not find it, that a single word could not explain a man’s life, and that Rosebud was perhaps something he could not get or something he lost, a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, a missing piece. The reporters go. The camera rises and moves across the heaped possessions, more than the eye can take in, and comes down to a furnace into which the junk is being thrown, and a sled goes in, and on the sled as the paint blisters is the name. Smoke rises from the chimney of Xanadu, and the camera comes back down the fence to the sign.
The audience has been told what no witness knew, and told that it explains nothing. The film was released by RKO in 1941, opposed before its release by William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers would not advertise it and whose life it was taken to attack, and it did modestly in its first run. Its standing came later and through critics: first in the Sight and Sound critics’ poll from 1962 to 2002, then second and third. What the filmmakers who followed took was not the word but the form: a life assembled from witnesses who disagree, a frame in which everything is sharp and the man is not there.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The newsreel is required: it gives the whole life in a few minutes so that the five accounts can be read against a public version. Each witness is required for a stretch no other covers: Thatcher for the boy and the money, Bernstein for the paper, Leland for the marriage and the campaign, Susan for the opera and Xanadu, Raymond for the end. Rosebud is required as the question that keeps the reporter moving and the answer the film gives only to the audience. The breakfast table and the Chicago review are compressions a longer film would have spread. The give is in display: the crane through the El Rancho skylight, the opera-house crane to the stagehands, flourishes that demonstrate the apparatus beyond what the argument needs.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a public life cannot be explained from outside, and the men who make a nation’s public life are vacant where a self should be. Kane buys a newspaper, a wife, an election, an opera career and a palace, each bought in place of what he could not keep. Leland tells him that he wants love on his own terms; Susan tells him that he never gave her anything that was his. The film shows American power as acquisition without a centre, and the press making the public man it then investigates. Held below the top because the vacancy is seen and not entered: the account is of surfaces, and the one piece of inner truth, the sled, is an object the film itself says explains nothing.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation recurs, and it is cold throughout. The approach to Xanadu through the fence and the lit window that goes out; the snow globe falling from the hand and the nurse seen through its glass; the boy in the snow framed in the window while his mother signs him away; the great poster of Kane’s face above the rally; the camera rising through the Chicago opera house to two stagehands, one holding his nose; Susan’s face by the lamp as the spoon lies in the glass; Kane between mirrors, repeated into the distance; the sled burning. Herrmann’s score keeps the film in a grave key. Held at the figure because the elevation is a brilliance that admires itself, and the comedy of the newsroom and the newsreel runs fast and low.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built as absence. The newsreel names Kubla Khan, and Xanadu is the pleasure dome of a king who collects the world. Under it the film builds a plainer pattern: the boy taken from his mother for his fortune, who spends his life buying back what was taken and names it as he dies. The sled is not a symbol laid on; it is the structure’s missing piece, the one object the five witnesses never saw. Kane is also the king in his hall of mirrors. Held nearer the gate than the others because the pattern is small in kind: one man’s loss, disowned by the film’s own voice. The archetype is built into the frame, not into the middle of the life, where the accounts stay particular and the king is a newspaperman.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the studio biography and the newspaper picture. The departures were many and made at once: a life told backward through five witnesses whose accounts overlap and disagree; a newsreel pastiche as exposition; Toland’s deep focus, long takes and faces lit from below; sound mixed as overlap and as transition; a protagonist the film does not like. The stake was the largest a first film has carried: RKO gave a twenty-five-year-old from radio final cut, and the film attacked the most powerful publisher in the country, who answered through his papers. The attack cost Welles the independence he had been given. Held from the top because the techniques had precedents, in Toland’s work for Ford on The Long Voyage Home (1940) among others, which the film gathered rather than invented.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The form is the knowledge. Told forward, Kane’s life is a rise-and-fall biography. Told as five partial accounts that overlap and contradict, it becomes a demonstration that the man cannot be known, and the audience’s failure to assemble him is the film’s statement. The witnesses are placed where their bias shows: Thatcher’s account is a manuscript in a vault, Leland’s an old man’s performance, Susan’s told drunk. The deep focus is the same knowledge in the image: everything in the frame is sharp, and the man is still not there. Held a step from the top because the film does not wholly trust its form: it gives the audience the sled, an answer no witness had, and tells the reporter a word cannot explain a life while showing the audience the word.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence over promise, and there are eighty-five years of it. The film founded a literature: Bazin’s essays on depth of field, Pauline Kael’s “Raising Kane” (1971) and the long dispute over authorship it provoked, Carringer’s The Making of Citizen Kane (1985). It still yields on form: the lightning mixes, the match of the newsreel to the accounts, the question of who was present at Kane’s death to hear the word. The semantic return is smaller. The film’s meaning was open at once and has not deepened as much as its construction has been studied; much of the rereading is of how it was made and by whom. Held at the figure because the well is formal more than semantic, and the dispute over credit has filled part of the space that return would fill.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Released in 1941, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film reorganised what a narrative film could do with time and point of view, and what a camera could hold in a frame. The reach is demonstrated. Film noir took its low angles, shadows and flashback structure within three years. The French critics of the 1950s made it a founding text of the new wave; Truffaut wrote that it had started more filmmakers than any other film. Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) take the dead or absent man seen through witnesses; Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998) follows its structure openly. Held from the top only by the discount on delay: the reach came through critics a decade after a release that did not reward the studio.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across eighty-five years, much of it at the summit of consensus: first in the Sight and Sound critics’ poll from 1962 to 2002, five polls in a row, second in 2012 and third in 2022. The surface most fixed to its moment, the March of Time pastiche, the 1941 newsroom comedy and the campaign rally, has outlived the forms it parodied and is now read as period rather than topical. The Hearst quarrel, which was the film’s first meaning for its first audience, has fallen away and left the film standing. The form is whole in its one cut and the presence unbroken. The standing is a critics’ standing more than a public one: the film is more taught than loved, its coolness keeps audiences at a distance, and the first-place consensus, once unbroken, has given way. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it: eighty-five years is a shorter and narrower demonstration than the oldest works on the bench can make, and where the Parthenon has outlasted the language, faith and state that built it, a film has so far outlasted only the decades of its own medium. With the critics’ standing charged, the evidence would carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, the making load-bearing throughout. Toland’s deep focus holds the boy in the window while his mother signs at the table; his low angles put muslin ceilings in frame; his long takes let the breakfast table age by cuts. Welles’s sound overlaps talk and bridges years in a phrase. Robert Wise’s editing makes the newsreel and the montages. Herrmann’s score runs to a whole false opera. Linwood Dunn’s optical printing joins what was never in one shot. Perry Ferguson’s design builds a palace from a few sets and darkness. Welles ages fifty years; Dorothy Comingore gives Susan the only open pain; Cotten, Sloane, Moorehead and Coulouris are exact. The costs are few: the ageing make-up at Xanadu is visible, and the reporter kept in silhouette leaves the frame’s centre empty.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the newsreel parody and Susan’s overdose, the spoon in the glass. One law governs both: the image against the self. The newsreel is the public Kane, made by the industry he made; Susan’s suffering is what the public image was built on, a woman made to sing so that a headline would be true. The breakfast table, the campaign poster, the review Kane finishes against himself and the mirrors at the end obey the same law. The strain is in temperature: the film’s wit and its grief run in different keys, governed by one law but seldom felt in one body. The frame’s own voice, telling the reporter a word explains nothing and then showing the word, is the one place the law bends.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure: consciousness, in a man’s vacancy and a woman’s pain; the family, in a mother who gives up her son and two marriages that fail; the press, as the maker of a public man; capital, in a fortune from a mine; the state, in a campaign and a governor’s office not reached; history, in the American half-century from the Gilded Age to the Depression. They are integrated: the campaign is press, marriage and power in one night. What holds the axis lowest is absence and distance. The sacred is nowhere; labour appears as servants and stagehands; the natural order is a palace zoo and a snowfall. And the orders are seen from outside, as a newsreel sees them: much is held, little is entered.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, then The Swerve and The Made at 9.4, and The Living Form at 9.3. A film that redirected narrative and photography for the whole field, a set of departures made at once at the largest stake a first film has carried, a making in depth, sound, cutting and design that bears weight in every frame, and a form in which five partial accounts are the knowledge.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3 — consciousness, the family, the press, capital, the state and the American half-century are held in one structure, but the sacred is absent, labour is servants and stagehands, and every order is seen from outside, as a newsreel sees it. Above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6, a pattern built into the frame rather than the life and disowned by the film’s own voice, and The Sublime at 8.7, a brilliance that admires itself while the newsroom and the newsreel run fast and low.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6, The Swerve at 9.4, Pressure on Tradition at 9.5 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, The Archetypal Deep by one tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met. The work stands near the floor of the tier: the twelve sum to 107.5, a tenth above the 107.4 the tier requires, an average of 8.958 that rounds to 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Citizen Kane as released by RKO Radio Pictures in 1941, 119 minutes, in black and white, from the fence to the fence. No print, script or recording was consulted. The film survives in one cut, and that cut is judged. The screenplay drafts, the dispute over their authorship and the life of William Randolph Hearst are context, not part of the work. Dialogue is described rather than quoted, with the one word the plot turns on as the exception. Figures that could not be verified, among them the budget, the first-run gross, the length of the newsreel and the number of sets built, are not given.