Citizen Kane Review

Gregg Toland's contribution is the reason this is still taught. Deep focus keeps foreground and far background equally sharp, so a boy plays in the snow through a window while his future is being signed away at the desk in front of him, and the composition itself makes the argument. Welles built ceilings onto sets so Toland could shoot from floor level, which makes Kane loom in triumph and shrink inside his own cavernous halls. The newsreel prologue delivers the plot in six minutes and frees the rest of the film to be structural rather than suspenseful; five witnesses, five contradictory Kanes, and no reconciliation offered.

The breakfast montage compresses a marriage into ninety seconds of widening table. Bernard Herrmann's first film score cues each register shift. Welles and Joseph Cotten are superb, and Agnes Moorehead does an entire life in one scene. The limitation is Rosebud, a tidy psychological key Welles himself dismissed as cheap Freud, which explains a man the film had already rendered unknowable.