Citizen Kane (1941) 

 The classic masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941), is probably the world's most famous and highly-rated film, with its many remarkable scenes, cinematic and narrative techniques and innovations. Its director, star, and producer were all the same individual - Orson Welles (in his film debut at age 25!), who collaborated with Herman J. Mankiewicz on the script and with Gregg Toland as cinematographer. The film engendered controversy because it appeared to fictionalize the life of William Randolph Hearst, a powerful newspaper magnate and publisher, and the film drew remarkable parallels with his palace at San Simeon and his relationship with actress Marion Davies.  

More importantly, the film is well-known for its unconventional lighting, inventive use of shadows, deep-focus shots from foreground to background, low-angle shots revealing ceilings, and the frequent use of dissolves and long, uninterrupted shots. 

 The opening is filled with hypnotic dissolves from one sinister, mysterious image to the next. The film's first sight is a "No Trespassing" sign hanging on a giant iron gate in the night's foggy mist, illuminated by the moonlight. The camera pans up the mesh gate which changes into images of great iron flowers on the heavy gate. On the crest of the gate is a single, silhouetted, wrought-iron "K" initial. The gate surrounds a distant, forbidding-looking castle with towers. The fairy-tale castle is situated on a man-made mountain, obviously the estate of a wealthy man.  

In a succession of views, the camera moves closer and closer to the castle. The grounds are seen with exotic animals (spider monkeys) in private zoo pens, and empty gondolas are tied to a pier on a private lake, and the castle is reflected in the water. A statue of the Egyptian cat god stands before a bridge with a raised portcullis. A deserted green from the large golf course is marked with a sign (No. 16, 365 yards, Par 4). In the distance, a single window of the castle is seen lit. Palm trees surround a crumbling gate on the abandoned, cluttered grounds. The castle appears in a closer, medium shot. During an even closer shot of the window, the light in the window suddenly goes out. From an angle inside the room facing out of the window, a figure can be seen lying stiffly on a bed. The scene shifts to swirling snowflakes that fill the entire screen. They surround a house, and in a quick pull-back, we realize it is actually a scene inside a crystal glass globe or ball in the grasping hand of an old man. Its famous first murmured, echoed word is heard uttered by huge rubbery lips which fill the screen: "R-o-s-e-b-u-d!" 

 An old man has pronounced his last dying word as the snowstorm globe is released from his grip and rolls from his hand, bounces down steps and breaks into tiny pieces on the floor. A nurse appears on screen, refracted through a curve of a sliver of shattered glass fragment from the broken globe. In a dark silhouette, she folds his arms over his body, and then covers him with a sheet. The next view is again the lit window viewed from inside. A dissolve fades to darkness. 

 A row of flags is a backdrop for the News on the March (a simulation of the actual "March of Time"), a newsreel documentary which briefly covers the highlights of the public life of the deceased man. The test screening of the first episode of the series is titled on the first panel: "Obituary: Xanadu's Landlord." A title card with the words of Coleridge's poem is imposed over views of Xanadu (actually a series of shots of San Simeon): "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree - -" 

  

Legendary was Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome. Today, almost as legendary is Florida's Xanadu, world's largest private pleasure ground. Here, on the deserts of the Gulf Coast, a private mountain was commissioned and successfully built. One hundred thousand trees, twenty thousand tons of marble are the ingredients of Xanadu's mountain. Contents of Xanadu's palace - paintings, pictures, statues, the very stones of many another palace - a collection of everything so big it can never be catalogued or appraised, enough for ten museums, the loot of the world. Xanadu's livestock, the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, the beast of the field and jungle. Two of each, the biggest private zoo since Noah. Like the pharaohs, Xanadu's landlord leaves many stones to mark his grave. Since the pyramids, Xanadu is the costliest monument a man has built to himself.  

Another title: "In Xanadu last week was held 1941's biggest strangest funeral." The narrator continues: "Here in Xanadu last week, Xanadu's landlord was laid to rest, a potent figure of our century, America's Kubla Khan - Charles Foster Kane." The newspaper headline of the New York Daily Inquirer appears: "CHARLES FOSTER KANE DIES AFTER LIFETIME OF SERVICE, Entire Nation Mourns Great Publisher and Outstanding American." Other headlines from around the nation and world are flashed: The Daily Chronicle: "C. F. Kane Dies at Xanadu Estate," The Chicago Globe: "DEATH CALLS PUBLISHER CHARLES KANE," The Minneapolis Record Herald: "KANE, SPONSOR OF DEMOCRACY, DIES," The San Francisco..."DEATH FINALLY COMES...," The Detroit Star: "Kane, Leader of News World, Called By Death at Xanadu," The El Paso Journal: "END COMES FOR CHARLES FOSTER KANE," Le Matin: "Mort du grand Editeur C.F. Kane," El Correspendencia: "El Sr. Kane Se Murio!," and more. 

 The castle's owner is Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles): 

  

To forty-four million U.S. news buyers, more newsworthy than the names in his own headlines, was Kane himself, greatest newspaper tycoon of this or any other generation.  

His "humble beginnings" as publisher of the New York Inquirer began in a 

  

ramshackle building, a dying daily. Kane's empire in its glory held dominion over 37 newspapers, two syndicates, a radio network, an empire upon an empire. The first of grocery stores, paper mills, apartment buildings, factories, forests, ocean liners, an empire through which for fifty years flowed in an unending stream the wealth of the earth's third richest gold mine. Famed in American legend is the origin of the Kane fortune, how to boarding house keeper Mary Kane by a defaulting boarder in 1868 was left the supposedly worthless deed to an abandoned mine shaft - the Colorado Lode. 

Fifty-seven years later, before a Congressional investigation, Walter P. Thatcher, a "grand old man of Wall Street, for years chief target of Kane papers' attacks on trusts" recalls his journey to Mrs. Kane's boarding house in Colorado, when he was asked to raise the young boy. 

  

My firm had been appointed trustee by Mrs. Kane for a large fortune which she had recently acquired. It was her wish that I should take charge of this boy, this Charles Foster Kane. 

Thatcher refuses to answer a Congressman's question about whether the boy personally attacked him after striking him in the stomach with a sled. Thatcher prefers to read a prepared statement of his opinion of Kane:  

Mr. Charles Foster Kane, in every essence of his social beliefs, and by the dangerous manner in which he has persistently attacked the American traditions of private property, initiative, and opportunity for advancement, is in fact, nothing more or less than a Communist! 

That same month in New York's Union Square, a crowd is told by an opinionated politician: "The words of Charles Foster Kane are a menace to every working man in this land. He is today what he has always been - and always will be - a Fascist!" Another opinion is a quote from Kane himself: "I am, have been, and will be only one thing - an American." 

 From 1895 to 1941, "All of these years he covered many of these he was." He urged his country into the Spanish-American War of 1898, but opposed participation in World War I, helped swing the election to at least one President, and spoke for millions of Americans, but was hated by as many more.  

For forty years, appeared in Kane newsprint no public issue on which Kane papers took no stand, no public man who Kane himself did not support or denounce - often support (e.g., Hitler), then denounce. 

"Few private lives were more public." The newsreel narrator speaks of Kane's private life:  

Twice married, twice divorced. First to a president's niece, Emily Norton, who left him in 1916. Died 1918 in a motor accident with their son. Sixteen years after his first marriage, two weeks after his first divorce, Kane married Susan Alexander, singer at the Town Hall in Trenton, New Jersey. A wife to one-time opera singing Susan Alexander, Kane built Chicago's Municipal Opera House, cost $3 million dollars. And seen for Susan Alexander Kane, half finished before she divorced him, the still-unfinished Xanadu. Cost? No man can say. 

"In politics - always a bridesmaid, never a bride." "News on the March" describes his unsuccessful attempts to enter politics: 

  

Kane, holder of mass opinion though he was, in all his life was never granted elective office by the voters of his country. But Kane papers were what's strong indeed, and once the prize seemed almost his. In 1916, as independent candidate for governor, the best elements of the state behind him, the White House seemingly the next easy step in a likely political career, then suddenly, less than one week before election - defeat. [The Daily Chronicle headline: "CANDIDATE KANE CAUGHT IN LOVE NEST WITH 'SINGER'"] Shameful. Ignominious. Defeat that set back for twenty years the cause of reform in the U.S., forever cancelled political chances for Charles Foster Kane. 

Then, in the first year of the Great Depression, 1929, a Kane paper in St. Louis closed. In four short years, eleven Kane papers merged, and more were sold or scrapped. "But America Still Reads Kane Newspapers and Kane Himself Was Always News." In 1935, returning from Europe by ship, Kane is asked by the press on arrival in New York harbor: "How did you find business conditions in Europe?" "...with great difficulty," he replies. Kane smugly believes that after talking with the responsible leaders of the Great Powers of Europe, "there'll be no war," but in the next newsreel clip, Kane is seen at a cornerstone ceremony, clumsily dropping mortar on himself. At the center of the ceremony, without his customary power, he is surrounded by workmen swinging hooks and cables around him, while the newsreel narrator explains that Kane helped to change the world, but as a "yellow journalist" had outlived his power to make history. His final days are spent at the decaying Xanadu. He is seen in old age, pushed along in a wheelchair, seen by a concealed camera through a fence: 

  

Alone in his never-finished, already decaying pleasure palace, aloof, seldom visited, never photographed, an emperor of new strength continued to direct his failing empire, varyingly attempted to sway as he once did the destinies of a nation that had ceased to listen to him, ceased to trust him. Then last week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane.  

The "News on the March" newsreel film abruptly ends, distorting the final moments of sound. In the projection room following the screening of the newsreel, characters are seen in shadows striking up matches in the dark, with streams of light coming from the projection booth. The newsreel producer Rawlston (Philip Van Zandt) is unsatisfied, complaining to the assembled group of reporters about how difficult it is to get seventy years of a man's life into a newsreel. He is disappointed because the newsreel doesn't have an angle: 

  

It isn't enough to tell us what a man did. You've got to tell us who he was. 

Rawlston then calls to mind Kane's last words, searching for more beyond his public life, trying to distinguish how he was different:  

Maybe he told us all about himself on his deathbed...All we saw on that screen was a big American...How would...Ford or Hearst for that matter (or John Doe)...I'll tell ya, it comes from a man's dying words...Rosebud, just that one word...Here's a man that could have been president, who was as loved and hated and as talked about as any man in our time. But when he comes to die, he's got something on his mind called 'Rosebud.' Now what does that mean? 

Cinema newsreel reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) is sent out to discover the meaning of Kane's last word: "Rosebud," possibly the secret to Kane's mysterious life. Thompson is assigned to contact as many of Kane's associates as possible over a week or two week period: 

  

See em all. Get in touch with everybody that ever worked for him, whoever loved him, whoever hated his guts...Rosebud, dead or alive. It will probably turn out to be a very simple thing.  

The structure of the film is not told as a traditional chronological story. Over a two week period, Thompson gathers information from four of Kane's associates and from some memoirs of Kane's ex-guardian. In a series of interlocked flashbacks, each one gives a different account of the Kane they knew, but none of them know the meaning of the word.  

Each of the five sources from which the reporter receives his information serve to introduce separate sections of the film. 

 (1) In a striking movement, the camera first views a billboard picture of Susan Alexander Kane (Dorothy Comingore) in a flash of lightning during a thunderstorm. It then moves up to the building's flashing neon sign: "El Rancho/ Floor Show/ Susan Alexander Kane/ Twice Nightly," then through the sign and in through the broken skylight in the building's roof down to a table inside the El Rancho Nightclub, a seedy Atlantic City cabaret, where Susan sits with her head on the table. She is drinking heavily and uncooperative. Thompson makes an attempt to interview her, but she will not talk to him: 

  

Susan: Who told you you could sit down? 
Thompson: I thought maybe we could have a talk together. 
Susan: Well, think again. Why don't you people leave me alone? I'm minding my own business. You mind yours...Get out of here. Get out! 

The nightclub waiter attempts to soften the rebuke: "She just won't talk to nobody Mr. Thompson...She'll snap out of it. Why 'til he died, she'd just as soon talk about Mr. Kane as about anybody." After calling in to Rawlston on the phone, Thompson asks the waiter whether Mrs. Kane ever mentioned 'Rosebud." The waiter remarks that he had asked her the same question when Kane's death hit the papers. She said she had never heard of the word. 

 (2) Thompson then visits the austere Walter Parks Thatcher Memorial Library in Philadelphia. The late Walter Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris), a J. P. Morgan-like figure, was Kane's Wall Street financier and guardian. The sound of Thompson's footsteps echo through the marble halls of the mausoleum-like building as he is led to a reading room by a stern librarian. Shafts of dusty sunlight pierce the room, as in the earlier projection room. There, sitting at a long table, he is confined to inspecting pp. 83-142, the pertinent parts of the manuscripts/diaries/journals of Thatcher's unpublished memoirs. He is told that he must leave at 4:40 pm sharp. The door closes, and the subjective camera moves to peer over Thompson's shoulder to look at the pages of the book.  

Thatcher's words are viewed in gigantic script on the page from left to right: "I first encountered Mr. Kane in 1871." The white of the page becomes a snowy scene in a flashback to young eight-year-old Charles' (Buddy Swan) boyhood and humble beginnings on a farm in Little Salem, Colorado. Outside, young Charles is sledding alone on a hillside in the snow. He throws a snowball at the sign on the top of the rustic wooden building - the snowball smashes against the letters that read "MRS. KANE'S BOARDING HOUSE." (His mother Mary (Agnes Moorehead), proprietress of the lonely, run-down, wooden boarding house, becomes unexpectedly wealthy when seemingly worthless mining stock certificates given her by a poor prospector/boarder in lieu of payment make her the sole owner of one of the world's great gold mines, the Colorado Lode.)  

Just before being sent away, in a memorable deep-focus shot, the camera moves from outside and pulls back, remaining stationary at the table. Thatcher and his mother sign legal papers and discuss the fate of Charles inside the rural, boarding house, while the boy can be seen playing with his sled through the distant window in the center. His mother appoints the banking firm of Thatcher and Company to manage her financial interests - to administer her estate, and to act as trustees of the fortune and guardian of her son. Mr. and Mrs. Kane will each be given $50,000 a year - the rest of the fortune will be placed in a trust for Charles until he reaches maturity at age 25.  

Rather than remaining there, Charles is traumatically uprooted from his mother. Upset and reluctant to leave, he rams Thatcher with his sled and then is struck by his father. He glares knowingly at Thatcher, aware that he is being taken away - sent east to be educated and raised under Thatcher's stern guidance. After he has departed, the camera shot cuts to Charles' abandoned sled on a snowbank - the sled is gradually covered by a snowfall, a symbol of vanished innocence and purity, and a train whistle is heard leaving town, symbolic of his unhappy transfer to Chicago. 

 Through a quick-cut edit, Kane is shown growing up, making life miserable for Thatcher. Thatcher wishes the young Kane "Merry Christmas..." and then continues his sentence years later (in a "lightning mix") "...and a happy New Year" just before his protege's 25th birthday. Having reached legal maturity, and with the proper background and training to manage his acquired wealth, the full estate becomes his and he acquires control. Thatcher dictates a memo to that effect: "...may I again remind you that your twenty-fifth birthday which is now approaching marks your complete independence from the firm of Thatcher and Company as well as the assumption by you of full responsibility for the world's sixth-largest private fortune." 

 In a memorable scene, Kane responds in a manner counter to Thatcher's wishes, interested in taking charge of only one small part of his holdings: 

  

Sorry but I'm not interested in gold mines, oil wells, shipping or real estate...One item on your list intrigues me, the New York Inquirer, a little newspaper I understand we acquired in a foreclosure proceeding. Please don't sell it. I'm coming back to America to take charge. I think it would be fun to run a newspaper. I think it would be fun to run a newspaper. Grrr. 

Soon, Kane uses the paper to attack trusts, Thatcher and others among America's financial elite. Headlines of the Inquirer blare out the expose in a montage of early Inquirer newspaper headlines: "TRACTION TRUST EXPOSED," "TRACTION TRUST BLEEDS PUBLIC WHITE," and "TRACTION TRUST SMASHED BY INQUIRER." Other social causes are heralded by the paper: "LANDLORDS REFUSE TO CLEAR SLUMS!!," and "INQUIRER WINS SLUM FIGHT." The paper also attacks Wall Street itself: "WALL STREET BACKS COPPER SWINDLE!!" and "COPPER ROBBERS INDICTED!"  

Thatcher is enraged and indignantly confronts the young publisher in the Inquirer office. Kane is seated at his desk facing the camera as Thatcher stands over him with his back to the camera asking: "Is that really your idea of how to run a newspaper?" Kane replies in a soft-spoken voice, in his first line of dialogue (other than 'Rosebud') in the film: "I don't know how to run a newspaper Mr. Thatcher. I just try everything I can think of." Thatcher explodes at him, accusing him of following a policy at the paper of concocting stories: "You know perfectly well there's not the slightest proof that this Armada is off the Jersey coast." Kane is informed by his assistant Bernstein (Everett Sloane) that a correspondent named Wheeler in Cuba has sent a communique: "Girls delightful in Cuba stop. Could send you prose poems about scenery but don't feel right spending your money stop. There is no war in Cuba. Signed, Wheeler." Kane tells his assistant to answer the war correspondent: "...you provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war." 

 Soon, Thatcher sits down and Kane explains how he is really "two people" - he is both a major stockholder in the Public Transit, a trust he is attacking, and the dutiful publisher of a newspaper campaigning against the trust. Kane stands up by the end of the scene, towering over Thatcher, explaining:  

It's also my pleasure to see to it that decent, hard-working people in this community aren't robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates, just because they haven't had anybody to look after their interests...If I don't look after the interests of the underprivileged, maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody without any money or property...and that would be too bad! 

Thatcher reminds Kane that his philanthropic paper is losing a million dollars a year. Kane jokes that "at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in 60 years."  

The next scene is in the winter of year 1929, much earlier than the predicted year for the demise of the paper. Thatcher sits to the left, with Kane's general business manager Bernstein on the right. Bernstein reads a statement regarding the newspaper - Kane "relinquishes all control thereof...and agrees to abandon all claims..." Kane interrupts the reading while walking away into the distance in the middle of the shot, acknowledging that the paper is bankrupt by saying, "which means we're bust." Thatcher takes over much of Kane's power and control in the name of the bank. Thatcher criticizes Kane's methods: "You never made a single investment, always used money to..." Kane finishes the sentence while he signs the papers: "...buy things. Buy things. My mother should have chosen a less reliable banker. Well, I always gagged on that silver spoon. You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man...I think I did pretty well under the circumstances." Thatcher asks: "What would you like to have been?" Kane shows his contempt for Thatcher in his answer: "Everything you hate." 

 The scene returns to the Thatcher library, where Thompson is told that his time is up for the day. The attendant asks if he has found what he was looking for in his "very rare privilege" at the library. Thompson, of course, replies that he has not, and then impulsively asks her: "You're not Rosebud, are you?" 

 (3) Next, Thompson leans forward to interview Bernstein in his New York City office in front of a fire. Kane's portrait above the mantle dominates the scene. Bernstein was hired as Kane's devoted assistant for the paper, his general business manager. Bernstein is seated with his arms folded on his shiny desktop, reflecting his image. His eyesight is failing, evidenced by a large magnifying glass in front of him. Thompson immediately asks his essential question: "We thought maybe if we could find out what he meant by his last words, as he was dying." Bernstein speculates that Rosebud may have been some girl and then reminisces about an unforgettable moment he had experienced years earlier: 

  

A fellow can remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry. And as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in. And on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all. But I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I hadn't thought of that girl. 

In other memories, Bernstein believes that Thatcher "was the biggest darn fool I ever met...well, it's no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want is to make a lot of money. You take Mr. Kane, it wasn't money he wanted. Thatcher never did figure him out. Sometimes, even I couldn't." As he makes this observation about Thatcher, he goes to the ticker-tape machine near the rain-spattered window to look at the Wall Street prices. 

 Bernstein then remembers the first day that Kane took over the Inquirer with his college friend Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), his dramatic critic. The camera moves down the side of the Inquirer building and then dissolves to a view of the inside of a carriage, where Kane and Leland are riding. After climbing out of the carriage, it moves out of view, and they are seen entering the offices of the failing newspaper for the first time. And then Bernstein's wagon pulls up in the same view, bearing chairs and a iron bedstead (possibly from the Kane Boarding House). They are welcomed by a Dickensian character, a Mr. Herbert Carter (Erskine Sanford), the silly editor-in-chief, who turns in a self-important half-circle, rings a little bell, and descends from his platform to approach them. Kane greets him very politely, after Carter shakes hands with Leland - mistaking him for Kane. Carter continues to be disoriented by mistaking Kane for Leland. The rest of the paper's staff stand around at attention. In the confusion and changing of the guard, Bernstein noisily tumbles over items to be moved into the office. 

 Kane strides over to Carter's office, which the aging editor blocks with his body, reluctant to relinquish control and power over to the new publisher. Carter has been keeping the entire operation open for only twelve hours a day. Kane describes his plan to evict Carter from his office while his bed and furnishings are moved in for a new round-the-clock operation: "Mr. Carter. I'm going to live right here in your office as long as I have to...the news goes on for twenty-four hours a day." Shortly thereafter, Carter stands over the seated Kane as the new occupant of his office cheerfully remakes the rules.  

Kane's first editorial idea to build circulation is to sensationalize the obscure story of the disappearance of a woman named Silverstone. He intends to turn the paper into a tabloid with a bold, front-page headline, turning the Silverstone disappearance into a murder case, explaining: "If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough." Carter sputters at him, dismayed by the tactic: "It's not our function to report the gossip of housewives. If we were interested in that kind of thing, Mr. Kane, we could fill the paper twice over daily." Kane makes no secret that this is his intention: "Mr. Carter, that's the kind of thing we are going to be interested in, from now on." 

 Kane instructs Carter to send his best reporter (masquerading as a detective from the central office) to see Mr. Silverstone in Brooklyn, with instructions that unless he produces Mrs. Silverstone at once, the Inquirer will have him arrested. "If Mr. Silverstone gets suspicious and asks to see your man's badge, your man is to get indignant and call Mr. Silverstone an anarchist, loudly, so the neighbors can hear!" Although Carter voices his objections, he is conspiratorially surrounded on both sides by Kane and Leland and must give in. As a forcefully-evicted Mr. Carter leaves the New York Inquirer's building, a newspaper boy hawks the competing paper's headlines on the street corner. 

 In the next scene, Kane leans against the office window, writing on a piece of paper. After remaking the front page four times, and finishing their first paper almost four hours behind schedule, Kane suddenly announces: "I've got to make the New York Inquirer as important to New York as the gas in that light." Kane reads outloud the first editorial that he has written, a "Declaration of Principles" crusading for the downtrodden and becoming an idealistic champion of the people: 

  

I'll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly...People are gonna know who's responsible. Now they're gonna get the truth in the Inquirer, quickly and simply and entertainingly and no special interests are gonna be allowed to interfere with that truth. I will also provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings...Charles Foster Kane. 

Leland states his wish to save Kane's original hand-written document of principles, believing: "I have a hunch it may turn out to be something pretty important, a document...like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and my first report card at school."  

The camera pulls back from the front page of a stack of papers (in a large room filled with stacks of papers) where the 'declaration of principles' are displayed in a large box. Through a window, Leland, Bernstein, and Kane are seen behind the Inquirer's front window where the circulation figures are painted: 26,000. The collaborative ambience of his newspaper office contributes to the success of the paper. The next shot is a similar one - it is at the front window of their competitor, the Chronicle, displaying a circulation of 495,000. Reflected in the window, Kane discusses the possibility of taking it over with Leland and Bernstein, a formidable task given that a photograph of the Chronicle's staff is captioned: "THE GREATEST NEWSPAPER STAFF IN THE WORLD."  

Kane attracts the top newsmen of the city by offering high ideals and salaries, and he buys the Chronicle's renowned staff. In a clever transition shot, the Chronicle's staff picture hanging on the wall in the competing paper's office suddenly comes to life - they are having another picture taken. Kane is holding a party in their honor to celebrate their switch to the Inquirer. He mentions that: 

  

Six years ago, I looked at a picture of the world's greatest newspapermen. I felt like a kid in front of a candy store. Well tonight, six years later, I got my candy, all of it. 

Their circulation has become "the greatest in New York, 684,000," as Kane has successfully built the paper into the best-selling newspaper in the city. 

 At the party, a long narrow table is covered with champagne bottles and surrounded by staff members. At Kane's end of the table, an initial "K" ice-sculpture stands. At the other end of the table, there are two carved-ice busts which represent Leland and Bernstein, and they frame the screen as Kane talks to everyone.With his fingers in his mouth, Kane whistles, signalling a line of marching band members to enter, dressed in the costumes of Catherine the Great's Russia. They are followed by dancing chorus girls carrying rifles. He jests to Leland when they appear, suggesting jingoistic attitudes to encourage the US to enter the Spanish-American War: "Are we to declare war on Spain or are we not?" Leland responds: "The Inquirer already has." In a rousing song and dance number, led by a baton-wielding comic in a white-striped blazer and a straw hat, the crowd listens as Kane is given a tribute: 

  

There is a man - a certain man 
And for the poor you may be sure that he'll do all he can! 
Who is this one? - this fav'rite son? 
Just by his action has the traction magnates on the run? 
Who loves to smoke? - enjoys a joke? 
And wouldn't get a bit upset if he were really broke? 
With wealth and fame - he's still the same - 
I'll bet you five you're not alive if you don't know his name? 
CHORUS: What is his name? 
CROWD: It's Mister Kane. 
He doesn't like that Mister he likes good old Charlie Kane. 

 Now please tell me - who can it be 
Who always has a pretty lady parked on either knee? 
Who says a miss - was made to kiss 
And when he meets one always tries to do exactly this? 
Who buys the food - who buys the drinks? 
Who thinks that dough was made to spend and acts the way he thinks? 
Now is it Joe? 
CROWD: No, no, no, no! 
I'll bet you ten that you aren't men if you don't really know! 
CHORUS: What is his name? (repeat from above) 

Kane has succeeded in becoming a much-respected public figure. During the celebratory singing and dancing, while Kane dances with a girl in a long shot, Leland and Bernstein speak about the Chronicle staff. Bored, unimpressed, and resistent, Leland reminds Bernstein:  

Leland: These men were with the Chronicle. Weren't they just as devoted to the Chronicle politics as they are now to our politics? 
Bernstein: Sure, they're just like anybody else. They've got work to do, they do it! Only they happen to be the best men in the business!  
Leland: Do we stand for the same things the Chronicle stands for, Bernstein? 
Bernstein: Certainly not. Listen, Mr. Kane, he'll have them changed to his kind of newspapermen in a week! 
Leland: There's always a chance, of course, that they'll change Mr. Kane, without his knowing it. 

In the offices already crowded with statues that Kane has acquired, Bernstein receives a cable from Kane who is on a treasure-hunting trip to Europe. Bernstein shares the news with Leland: "Look, he wants to buy the world's biggest diamond." Bernstein clarifies the object of his pursuit: "He's collecting somebody that's collecting diamonds. Anyway, he ain't only collecting statues." The staff surround a close-up of a large cup as Bernstein reads the welcome message engraved on it: "Welcome Home Mr. Kane From 467 Employees of the New York Inquirer." Kane returns from his travels and bursts through the office doors, dressed in a white outfit. The camera reverses itself and follows his stride through the assembled group of editors. Kane nervously and hurriedly presents a "little social announcement" to the society editor.  

One staffer alerts everyone to the view he sees from the upstairs window which looks down on Kane's open carriage. Everyone dashes over to see Kane's pretty new fiancee riding in the carriage, framed in the window. The society editor gushes after reading the announcement: "Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Monroe Norton announce the engagement of their daughter Emily Monroe Norton to Mr. Charles Foster Kane." Emily Norton (Ruth Warrick) is the daughter of a senator and the niece of the President of the United States. During Kane's rise to power, idealism as a prime motivator is replaced by power. Bernstein speculates: "Before he's through, she'll be a President's wife." The staff waves farewell as the carriage pulls away - their faces are seen in the windows behind the large letters R E and R on the outside of the Inquirer's building. 

 Bernstein's reminiscences fade back to his office, where it is now nighttime, and the rain has stopped. He concludes his thoughts: "Miss Emily Norton was no Rosebud...It ended. And there was Susan. That ended too..." Bernstein speculates about Kane's final word:  

Maybe that was something he lost. Mr. Kane was a man who lost almost everything he had. 

Bernstein then suggests that Thompson go and visit Mr. Leland, who disagreed with Kane's jingoistic attitudes and yellow-journalistic tactics surrounding the Spanish-American War: "That was Mr. Kane's war. We didn't really have anything to fight about. But do you think if it hadn't been for that war of Mr. Kanes', we'd have the Panama Canal?" Bernstein's final words conclude: "Old age, it's the only disease Mr. Thompson that you don't look forward to being cured of." 

 (4) Next, Thompson visits with and interviews Jedediah Leland, the college friend (and later drama critic) Kane had hired to work for him. Leland is a convalescent resident of the Huntington Memorial Hospital, a drab Manhattan retirement center on 180th Street. Thompson is viewed looking up at a large bridge which imposes itself above the hospital building. Leland, frail, a bit senile, wearing dark glasses, a cap/eyeshade and a dressing gown, and sitting in a wheelchair, opens their discussion with: "I can remember absolutely everything young man. That's my curse - that's one of the greatest curses ever inflicted on the human race, memory." The camera imperceptibly moves closer and closer to his face as he talks. Other patients are seen in their wheelchairs in the grey background. Leland remembers that Kane "behaved like a swine" but was never "brutal - he just did brutal things. Maybe I wasn't his friend, but if I wasn't, he never had one. Maybe I was what you nowadays call a stooge." The old man begs for cigars during their talk, trying to sneak them past hospital doctors and nurses.  

Leland discusses the early days in Kane's newspaper empire: 

  

I suppose he had some private sort of greatness, but he kept it to himself. He never gave himself away. He never gave anything away, he just left you a tip, um? Ha. He had a generous mind. I don't suppose anybody ever had so many opinions. But he never believed in anything except Charlie Kane. He never had a conviction except Charlie Kane in his life. I suppose he died without one. It must have been pretty unpleasant. Of course, a lot of us check out without having any special convictions about death, but we do know what we believe in, we do believe in something. 

Thompson asks Leland about his understanding of "Rosebud," Charlie's dying words. Leland recalls having read about it in The Inquirer and offers his opinion: "I never believed in anything I saw in The Inquirer." Then, Leland recalls Emily Kane, Kane's first wife, as a "very nice girl" who he knew in dancing school. Leland comments on their disintegrating marriage after a few months: "She and Charlie didn't see much of each other except at breakfast. It was a marriage just like any other marriage."  

Leland's thoughts are pictured in one of the most talked-about, virtuoso sequences in the film - the breakfast table montage. Succinctly portrayed in less than three minutes of film, Kane's rapidly deteriorating and failing marriage to Emily is captured - from their adoring, talkative, newlywed days to their stony silence as an irreconciliable couple nine years later. The passage of time is conveyed by the technique of quick, swish pans or jump cuts marking the passage of time through each progressive interval.  

Emily complains to Charles about his obsessive work schedule and his egotism: "People will think..." He cuts in "what I tell them to think!" He accentuates his last word by clinking down his coffee cup. In the last panoramic view, they unhappily read rival newspapers (Emily reads The Chronicle, Kane reads The Inquirer) over breakfast, having become more and more distant (both physically and emotionally) at opposite ends of a long table.  

Once he achieves power through his newspaper empire, Kane also sought love from the voters. Leland thinks: "All he really wanted out of life was love. That's Charlie's story, how he lost it. You see, he just didn't have any to give. Well, he loved Charlie Kane of course, very dearly, and his mother, I guess he always loved her."  

Leland then moves on to discuss Kane's second marriage to singer Susan Alexander, whom Charlie called "a cross section of the American public," suggesting that he believes this proved he could be loved by the people. "Guess he couldn't help it. She must have had something for him. That first night, according to Charlie, all she had was a toothache."  

In a chance encounter on a wet, New York City street corner, Kane meets twenty-two year old Susan. Emerging from a drug store, she giggles at him after a carriage splashes mud on him: "You're funny mister. You've got dirt on your face." He accepts her offer to get hot water in her nearby rooming house to clean him up. As they enter, Kane closes the door to Susan's room. She sits at a mirror, decorated with a portrait of herself as a child, and where the snowstorm glass paperweight is first seen. To take her mind off the pain of her tooth and make her laugh, he wiggles both his ears at the same time, and she laughs in the reflection. He explains it was a boyhood trick taught him at one of the world's best boys school by the present President of Venezuela.  

Kane also makes hand-shadows of a rooster on the wall to entertain her. She is impressed by his ability to make shadows on the wall come alive: "Gee, you know an awful lot of tricks. You're not a professional magician, are you?" He is delighted that she likes him even though she does not know who he is. Kane expresses a sentimental empathy towards Susan: "I guess we're both lonely." He tells Susan he was on his way ("a sentimental journey") to a Western Manhattan warehouse "in search of my youth," to look at his mother's belongings after her death. He also explains his profession: 

  

I run a couple of newspapers. What do you do?  

Kane learns she works in a sheet music store, but has ambitions to be an opera singer. He requests that she sing for him while playing the piano in the parlor. He sits, pipe-smoking and contented to her right, listening to her struggling notes. In another "lightning mix," his quiet applause for her dissolves into applause during Jedediah Leland's campaign speech for Kane. Kane seeks election as governor of New York in the 1916 elections. Leland introduces Kane on a workingman's ticket to a small outdoor audience: "the fighting liberal, the friend of the working man, the next governor of this state, who entered upon this campaign..."  

The scene jump cuts to Kane's memorable political speech in Madison Square Garden in front of a large poster of himself. The echoing Kane voice finishes Leland's words (in another lightning mix) in a campaign goal centering on ending corruption: 

  

...with one purpose only, to point out and make public the dishonesty, the downright villainy of Boss Jim W. Gettys' political machine, now in complete control of the government of this state. I made no campaign promises, because until a few weeks ago, I had no hope of being elected. Now however, I am something more than a hope. Jim Gettys, Jim Gettys has something less than a chance. Every straw vote, every independent poll shows that I'll be elected. Now I can afford to make some promises. The working man, the working man and the slum child know they can expect my best efforts in their interests. The nation's ordinary citizens know that I'll do everything in my power to protect the underprivileged, the underpaid, and the underfed.  

Kane's speech centers on his rivalry with political boss and opponent Jim Gettys, whom he angrily threatens to imprison by his first official act as governor. Kane promises to "appoint a special district attorney to arrange for the indictment, prosecution, and conviction of Boss Jim W. Gettys." (After these words, Gettys is sighted high above Madison Square Garden watching Kane below.) Kane is heavily favored and expected to win the governor's race. As he leaves triumphantly, Emily sends their son Junior home in the car - the family is symbolically broken up. His wife Emily, sitting in a taxi wrapped in a white fur, melodramatically confronts him with a note she has received and suspicion she has of an affair he is conducting at 185 W. 74th Street (the house Kane has provided for Susan). Kane follows Emily to Susan's apartment. 

 There, in a brilliant confrontation scene, Susan admits that Gettys forced her to write a letter to Emily, exposing Kane's relationship and affair with her. Emily is introduced to Gettys (Ray Collins), who appears in the doorway of Susan's place as a menacing, black silhouetted shadow. Kane is incensed by Gettys' tactics, and threatens to break his neck right there. In a remarkably-directed scene in the apartment, in a two-minute unbroken shot with dramatic use of lighting for emphasis, Kane, Emily, Susan, and Gettys discuss the affair and how it will affect the race for governor. Gettys refuses to be called a gentleman, but then steps forward into the light to tell Emily that he has a more honorable character than Kane himself:  

Mrs. Kane, if I owned a newspaper and I didn't like the way somebody was doing things, some politician say, I'd fight him with everything I had. Only I wouldn't show him in a convict's suit with stripes so his children could see the picture in the paper, or his mother. 

Gettys is fighting for both his political life and his own existence. He counter-threatens to make the affair public by exposing his relationship with Susan in every newspaper in the state not owned by Kane, using the information to get Kane to withdraw from the race. Gettys proposes that Kane explain that his withdrawal is due to illness. Gettys threatens to make the headlines look bad: "The story about him and Miss Alexander...We got evidence that'll look bad in the headlines. Do you want me to give you the evidence Mr. Kane?" 

 Ultimately, Kane refuses to give up the race, in effect renouncing his own family. As he steps forward into the light, Kane decides to stay with Susan. He promises: "I can fight this all alone...There's only one person in the world who decides what I'm going to do, and that's me." As Emily and Gettys leave and descend the apartment building staircase, Kane calls down to them: "Don't worry about me. I'm Charles Foster Kane! I'm no cheap, crooked politician, trying to save himself from the consequences of his crimes. Gettys! I'm going to send you to Sing Sing. Sing Sing Gettys." Kane's threats are powerless - his words are silenced by the closing of the front door and the sound of an auto horn. 

 Outside the door of Susan's house, Gettys and Mrs. Kane walk off in opposite directions. The live image freezes on the doorway, the camera withdraws, and then the doorway is seen as part of the newspaper photograph of the "love nest" underThe Chronicle's headlines broadcasting: "CANDIDATE KANE CAUGHT IN LOVE NEST WITH 'SINGER'." The picture is captioned: "THE HIGHLY MORAL MR. KANE AND HIS TAME 'SONGBIRD.'" A subheading reads: "Candidate Kane Caught in Love Nest With Singer, Entrapped by Wife as Love Pirate Kane Refuses to Quit Race." 

 The next day, the story is told to the media. Kane's political dreams and aspirations are shattered by newspaper accounts of the affair, and he loses the race and a possible stepping-stone to the Presidency. In the offices of The Inquirer, Bernstein must decide between two alternative headlines for the front page, "KANE ELECTED" or "CHARLES FOSTER KANE DEFEATED, FRAUD AT POLLS!" and he chooses the latter. As the dejected staff leave the office, the melancholy tune A PocoNo is heard. In the background, Kane's campaign poster has the shadows of the venetian blinds forming bars across it. A drunken Leland confronts Kane in the confetti-strewn makeshift campaign headquarters of the newspaper offices following the defeat. Kane reflects on his loss:  

Kane: I set back the sacred cause of reform...That's the way they want it. The people made that choice. It's obvious the people prefer Jim Gettys to me. 
Leland: You talk about the people as though you owned them, as though they belong to you. Goodness. As long as I can remember, you've talked about giving the people their rights, as if you can make them a present of Liberty, as a reward for services rendered. Remember the working man?  
Kane: I'll get drunk too Jedediah, if it'll do any good. 
Leland: Aw, it won't do any good. Besides, you never get drunk. You used to write an awful lot about the workingman. He's turning into something called organized labor. You're not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your workingman expects something is his right, not as your gift! Charlie, when your precious underprivileged really get together, oh boy! That's going to add up to something bigger than your privileges! Then I don't know what you'll do! Sail away to a desert island probably and lord it over the monkeys! [imagery of Xanadu and its private zoo] 
Kane: I wouldn't worry about it too much, Jed. There'll probably be a few of them there to let me know when I do something wrong. 
Leland: Mmm, you may not always be so lucky...You don't care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love 'em so much that they ought to love you back. Only you want love on your own terms. Something to be played your way, according to your rules. 

Leland asks to be sent to the Chicago paper as a drama critic. Kane doesn't want him to leave New York so soon: "I warn you Jedediah, you're not going to like it in Chicago. The wind comes howling in off the lake and gosh only knows if they ever heard of Lobster Newburg." Kane proposes a toast, the most definitive line in the film: 

  

A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own. 

Shortly afterward, Susan becomes his second wife: "KANE MARRIES SINGER." After the wedding, Susan and Kane emerge. She is giggling helplessly, carrying a large bedraggled bouquet of roses tied with a big ribbon. In the backseat of an open car, Kane responds to a question about his future in politics: "Am I through with politics? I should say vice versa. We're gonna be a great opera star." With his political career going nowhere after losing the election for governor, he attempts to use his wealth and influence to promote Susan as a successful opera singer. "KANE BUILDS OPERA HOUSE." He even builds a $3 million opera house for her in Chicago.  

The front page headline dissolves into a closeup of Susan's preparation for her debut in "Salammbo" as an opera singer on the Chicago stage. She is introduced with her Italian voice teacher screaming at her: "No, no, no, no, no." It is an absurd scene, with properties being set, costumes readied, other players moved back and forth. When the opera begins after an overhead cue light has snapped on, the camera rises slowly upwards to high above the stage in the flies, where one of two stagehands holds his nose. Susan's career has become a test of Kane's own power and judgment. His attempts fail miserably when, presenting her at his own theater in a lavish production, the debut performance is a disaster. Kane enters the door of the offices of the Chicago Daily Inquirer following the performance, where he overhears the staff editors gloating to Bernstein over the favorable, "swell" and "enthusiastic" reviews that have been written about Susan's performance. Kane expectantly wants to read Leland's review. 

 He finds a drunken Jedediah Leland, now the dramatic critic, slumped over his typewriter while writing his review. Bernstein reads what Leland wrote about Susan's operatic performance, before he passed out in a drunken stupor:  

'Miss Susan Alexander, a pretty but hopelessly incompetent amateur, last night opened the new Chicago opera house in a performance of' - I still can't pronounce that name, Mr. Kane. 'Her singing, happily, is no concern of this department. Of her acting, it is absolutely impossible to...'  

Kane takes the review out of the typewriter and dictates what would be the natural, scathing conclusion to what Leland has already written: "...say anything except in the opinion of this reviewer, it represents a new low..." Kane finishes Leland's notice, usurping his identity and ordering a typewriter. A closeup of large letters appears on the screen: "W-E-A-K" and the sound of a typewriter is heard in the background as Leland revives in the inner office and raises his head off his typewriter. He walks into the outer offices and finds Kane pounding away on a typewriter, writing the conclusion to his review. Kane is on the left of the screen facing the camera. Jed approaches from a distance, and Kane shows his awareness of his presence with a roll of his eyes. Leland responds to Kane's greeting with: "I didn't know we were speaking." Kane moves the typewriter carriage to the right margin, so that after he answers: "Sure we're speaking, Jedediah - you're fired!" he can accentuate his words with a noisy carriage return. This marks the end of Leland's friendship with Kane. 

 Reporter Thompson asks Leland why he was fired while Kane finished his notice. In a dissolve back to the hospital, a small image of Kane typing the review is seen in the upper right of the screen for a moment, and then Leland replies to the question: "You just don't know Charlie. He thought that by finishing that notice, he could show me he was an honest man. He was always trying to prove something. That whole thing about Susan being an opera singer. That was trying to prove something." 

 Leland relates how he never responded to a letter he received from Kane five years earlier from "Shangri-La, El Dorado, Sloppy Joes...Xanadu...I guess he was pretty lonely down there in that Coliseum all those years. He hadn't finished it when she left him. He never finished it. He never finished anything, except my notice. Of course, he built the joint for her...He was disappointed in the world so he built one of his own, an absolute monarchy. Something bigger than an opera house, anyway." Shortly, Leland is led away from the interview by two nurses (whose heads are unseen), after begging for more cigars. 

 (5) On a return visit to Atlantic City, Thompson returns to a drunken Susan at the cheap El Rancho nightclub (in the same movement through the sign - now NOT flashing - and broken skylight) and is able to persuade her to tell her part of the story. At a table amidst imitation-tropical decor, with the jazzy sound of In a Mizz being played on a piano, Thompson, with his back to the camera, questions Susan. She remembers that Kane "was really interested in my voice. What do you suppose he built that opera house for? I didn't want it. I didn't want to sing. It was his idea. Everything was his idea, except my leaving him." Her flashback tells of her singing lessons, her operatic career, and their final days together at Xanadu. 

 Her ravaged face in the nightclub dissolves slowly to a scene of vocal lessons, where a younger Susan is viewed. She is forced to practice her singing with Matisti (Fortunio Bonanova), her voice teacher and opera coach. Off-pitch, her music teacher believes she is devoid of talent: "Some people can sing. Some can't. Impossible! Impossible!" Kane approaches from the far background behind Matisti, and speaks abruptly. He forcefully exerts his will over her lessons and tells the teacher: "It's not your job to give Mrs. Kane your opinion of her talents. You're supposed to train her voice Signor Matisti, nothing more." Matisti fears being "the laughingstock of the musical world," believing Susan's shrill and off-key voice is untrainable. 

 Her disastrous, opening debut performance is seen again, from her point of view. The overhead cue light once again snaps on. As the curtain rises, the subjective camera view looks out at the footlights but cannot see into the darkness of the audience. Kane sits inexorably in his box watching the stage down below where Susan is a tiny figure in his sight. Leland (who tears up the program into little strips during the performance) views the opera with disinterest from his vantage point. Kane is startled when he overhears someone's criticism: "Perfectly dreadful." The finale, in which Susan falls back on cushions, is greeted with scant applause, and Kane stands and applauds long after everyone else has ceased.  

Back in the hotel room, Susan, with a shrill and vulgar voice, reads Jed Leland's "Stage Review," (which Kane had completed), reacting with furious rage at Kane for the paper's bad review: 

  

Stop telling me he's your friend. Friend don't write that kind of review. All these other papers panning me, I could expect that. But for The Inquirer to run a thing like that spoilin' my whole debut...Friend! Not the kind of friends I know. But of course, I'm not high class like you and I never went to any swell school." 

Susan is also angry that Kane gave Leland a check for $25,000 as part of his severance. A delivery boy delivers an envelope from Leland, returning The Inquirer's declaration of principles - that no special interests are going to interfere with truth. Kane calls it an "antique." As he rips up the manifesto, Susan demands an end to her singing career: "I'm through. I never wanted to do it in the first place." Imperiously, he orders her to continue her singing, looming over her: "You will continue with your singing, Susan. I don't propose to have myself made ridiculous." Susan is exasperated with him and screams back: "What about me? I'm the one who's got to do the singin'. I'm the one who gets the raspberries. Why don't you let me alone?" Unable to accept her pleas to stop, he walks over to her, casting a dark shadow over her, and again orders: "...I will not tell it to you again. You will continue with your singing."  

Susan is unrealistically forced and pressured to continue her operatic career, and in a "montage," the show tours throughout the country, to cities where Inquirer papers are located - Washington, San Francisco, St. Louis, Detroit, New York. The papers give her glowing reviews. But her career fizzles out, symbolized by the flickering and blackening of a filament bulb in the cue light, and the slow decline of her voice on the soundtrack, during the display of the New York headline: "NEW YORK IN FUROR FOR SUSAN ALEXANDER." In her locked room, Susan's head lies in shadow on the pillow. She has attempted suicide by taking poison (a bottle of poison, glass, and spoon are seen in close-up). In the background, Kane pounds on the door to her room, and then bursts in to find her on the bed. A doctor is summoned, and Kane refuses to accept her deliberate act of suicide, explaining away the facts of the deed as the result of the strain and excitement of preparing for a new opera. 

 Their relationship has begun to collapse, showing signs of strain under his tyrannical pressure. Susan tells Charlie, who keeps a vigil at her bedside, how her feelings meant nothing to him: "I couldn't make you see how I felt Charlie. But I couldn't go through with the singing again. You don't know what it means to know that people are...the whole audience just doesn't want you." Although Kane responds with words typical of his own struggle to be a political candidate in the face of defeat: "That's when you've got to fight them," he is forced to realize that he can push her no further, and he accepts her request by consoling her (and himself): "All right, you won't have to fight them any more. It's their loss." 

 He builds her a private castle-mansion in Florida named Xanadu (where lights are aglow), into which they both retreat. Kane's gloomy old age is portrayed with hollow tones as he wanders the echoing halls of the cavernous, eerie grandiosity of Xanadu. In the grand hall, there are two large Egyptian figures and a descending staircase. Susan does not like being forced to live there - imprisoned. In front of a vast imported Scottish Stuart fireplace, Susan endlessly assembles a giant jigsaw puzzle of a landscape out of boredom and loneliness. She grows increasingly miserable, frustrated, desperate and bored, missing the excitement of New York. She asks about the time, unable to distinguish night from day: 

  

Susan: Charlie. What time is it? 
Kane: 11:30. 
Susan: New York? 
Kane: Mm? 
Susan: I said what time is it in New York? 
Kane: 11:30. 
Susan: Night? 
Kane: Mm, mm. 
Susan: Gee! 11:30. The show's are just gettin' out. People are goin' to nightclubs and restaurants. Course we're different, because we live in a palace. 
Kane: You always said you wanted to live in a palace. 
Susan: Aw, a person could go crazy in this dump! Nobody to talk to. Nobody to have any fun with...49,000 acres of nothin' but scenery and statues. I'm lonesome. 
Kane: Just yesterday, we've had no less than 50 of your friends at any one time. I think if you look carefully in the west wing, Susan, you'll find about a dozen vacationists still in residence.  
Susan: You make a joke out of everything. Charlie, I want to go to New York. I'm tired of being a hostess. I want to have fun. Please, Charlie. Charlie, please.  
Kane: Our home is here, Susan. I don't care to visit New York.  

Later, she is seen assembling puzzle after puzzle (a camel, a snowscape, a turreted house, a country scene, a river with boats and weeping willows, a ship at sea) in a series of dissolves, representing the passage of time. She tells him, "It makes a whole lot more sense than collecting statues." Kane agrees: "You may be right. I sometimes wonder. But you get into the habit." Susan defends her hobby: "Not a habit! I do it 'cause I like it." Kane has planned a garden picnic for the next day. Susan mocks his domineering attitude: "Invite everybody. Order everybody...."  

The next day as a funeral-like entourage of cars travels along a Florida beach to the garden picnic spot, she unemotionally tells Kane, dressed in a white blazer and sitting in the back seat of one of the Dusenbergs, "You never give me anything I really cheer about." A close-up of a black man singing a bluesy-jazz song then pulls back to reveal people dancing in an outdoor scene. A pig rotates on a spit. Inside a tent, a bald, overweight Kane and Susan argue, with Susan accusing her husband of an inability to love: 

  

Susan: Oh sure, you give me things. But that don't mean anything to you.  
Kane: You're in a tent, darling. You're not at home. I can hear you very well if you speak in a normal tone of voice. 
Susan: What's the difference between giving me a bracelet or giving somebody else a hundred thousand dollars for a statue you're going to keep crated up and never even look at? It's just money. Doesn't mean anything! You never really give me anything that belongs to you, that you care about!  
Kane: Susan, I want you to stop this. 
Susan: I'm not going to stop it. 
Kane: Right now! 
Susan: You never gave me anything in your whole life. You just tried to buy me into giving you something.  
Kane: Susan! (Kane stands up, looming enormously over her)...Whatever I do, I do because I love you. 
Susan: You don't love me. You want me to love you. Sure. 'I'm Charles Foster Kane. Whatever you want, just name it and it's yours.' But you've gotta love me! (Kane slaps her.) Don't tell me you're sorry. 
Kane: I'm not sorry. 

While they quarrel, the sound of the band music in the background becomes more frantic, and screams and cries are heard as the guests enjoy themselves at the picnic. 

 Kane has become increasingly isolated and lonely as his publishing network begins to weaken. At Xanadu, Kane is surrounded by dutiful servants and a vast collection of thousands of art treasures from around the world, many still in their packing crates unopened and undisplayed. But his newspaper chain has lost its former strength, never recovering from the losses of the Depression. Susan finally builds up her courage to leave him, even in the face of his despotism.  

Kane is told by the butler that Susan has been packing in her bedroom since early morning. Susan's bedroom is decorated like a child's nursery, with painted animals decorating the beams (similar to the animals that decorate the grounds of the castle) and doll-house furnishings. Kane feels threatened by her departure and enters her room, slamming the door toward the camera. He screams at her to not leave: 

  

Kane: Have you gone completely crazy?...I won't let you go. 
Susan: Goodbye Charlie.  
Kane: Susan. Please don't go. No. Please, Susan. From now on, everything will be exactly the way you want it to be, not the way I think you want it, but your way...You can't do this to me! 
Susan: I see, it's you that this is being done to! It's not me at all, not what it means to me. I can't do this to you? Oh yes I can.  

She leaves him alone in the castle, walking away from him through a succession of doorways.  

Back in Atlantic City in the half-darkened nightclub, Thompson tells Susan that he feels sorry for Mr. Kane. Susan replies with a twinge of pity: "Don't you think I do?" It is already morning, and the chairs of the nightclub are stacked up and Susan's story is over. As the camera pulls up and away, she is heard saying (without moving lips): "Come around and tell me the story of your life sometime." 

 (6) At the end of the film, reporter Thompson goes to Kane's castle, Xanadu, marked by a big K on the gate. He talks briefly to Kane's sinister butler Raymond (Paul Stewart) who worked for Kane for eleven years. He wishes to be paid $1,000 for telling what he knows. The butler tells Thompson that Kane "acted kind of funny sometimes," and did "crazy things." Raymond boasts: "I knew how to handle him; like the time his wife left him." His memory of Susan is parodied by a screeching cockatoo flapping off the balcony. Kane tore her room apart in a rage, methodically smashing her lamp, phonograph, table, curtains, chest of drawers, chairs, bookshelves (with one shelf concealing a bottle of alcohol), bedside stand, and her mirrored dresser. Then he picked up in his hand the clear, snow crystal paperweight that she left behind, viewed it in silence, and murmured "Rosebud." With tears in his eyes, he walked stiffly out of her room past the guests and servants and in front of an endlessly-reflecting full-size mirrored corridor. Raymond remembers that Kane also said 'Rosebud' one other time, when he died, but Kane "said all kinds of things that didn't mean anything." 

 In the film's conclusion, Thompson is joined by other newsreel people who have gathered at the estate. As they talk, they walk through the enormous warehouse stacked with crates, furniture, and other possessions. An amazing crane shot tracks their progress through the boxes and statues which are being inventoried. Various objects are identified: a 4th century Venus ("$25,000 bucks. That's a lot of money to pay for a dame without a head"), the welcome back cup, one stove from the estate of Mary Kane ("value two dollars"), jigsaw puzzles ("we've got a lot of those"), a Burmese temple and three Spanish ceilings down the hall, and more worldly goods.  

The other reporters ask Thompson if he has discovered what 'Rosebud' means: "Did you ever find out what it means?" Thompson replies that he hasn't learned the word's meaning. He is also asked: "What did you find out about him, Jerry?" He tells his curious questioners: "Not much really." Jerry admits that he has not solved the secret of Rosebud, that he has been "playing with a jigsaw puzzle," and in a symbolic gesture, puts down an unassembled jigsaw puzzle box. Thompson answers more fully: 

  

Mister Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything. I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle - a missing piece. Well, come on everybody, we'll miss the train.  

Only film viewers are let in on the meaning of Rosebud after Thompson leaves, moving off with other reporters. The camera pulls away to show the incredible accumulation of Kane's acquisitions over a lifetime. Then, the camera slowly glides over years and years of his pitiless pieces of material goods, looking like a broken jigsaw puzzle or a deserted skyscraper city when photographed from high above. In the basement beneath Xanadu, workers clear away the vast array of junk and articles. A workman is sorting and crating his possessions near an incinerator, a blazing furnace where items are thrown that are considered junk. One worker picks up a sled (with the letters Rosebud written across it). Raymond, the butler, tells him to "throw that junk" into the flames of the incinerator to be consumed, along with an accumulation of other possessions. The name "Rosebud" is briefly seen on the sled before the heat warps the paint and it is consumed by the flames.  

The "Rosebud" sled is a momento from Kane's childhood with his mother, a childhood that was interrupted by the opportunities wealth and fortune bestowed upon him. When he glimpsed the snow crystal paperweight, he might have imagined the house in the globe was Mrs. Kane's boarding house, and had a fleeting memory of the sled that he loved. The sled symbolized the innocence, beauty, and love that he lost, the love that eluded him - a dying man's memory of a possession that held special meaning. He died an old man, friendless, loveless, but wealthy. His power and wealth were unable to halt his decline. 

 In the film's final shot, a dissolve shows the exterior of the Kane mansion at dusk, panning up with the black smoke pouring from its chimney and filling the sky. The smoke of Kane's youth - his sled - disappears into the night sky. The fence with the sign, "No Trespassing" is visible again, as it was at the film's start. The film fades out on the "K" of the crest of the Kane estate.