Amazon.com Essentials:
Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles's 1941
masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and
carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to
reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their
contradictions, and can't be known easily. Welles plays newspaper
magnate Charles Foster Kane, taken from his mother as a boy and made
the ward of a rich industrialist. The result is that every
well-meaning or tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the
rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply
wounding event. Written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, and
photographed by Gregg Toland, the film is the sum of Welles's awesome
ambitions as an artist in Hollywood. He pushes the limits of
then-available technology to create a true magic show, a visual and
aural feast that almost seems to be rising up from a viewer's
subconsciousness. As Kane, Welles even ushers in the influence of
Bertolt Brecht on film acting. This is truly a one-of-a-kind work, and
in many ways is still the most modern of modern films from the 20th century. --Tom Keogh
