Citizen Kane

Theatrical poster
Directed by Orson Welles
Produced by Orson Welles
Written by Herman J. Mankiewicz
Orson Welles
Starring Orson Welles
Joseph Cotten
Dorothy Comingore
Ruth Warrick
Everett Sloane
George Coulouris
Ray Collins
Agnes Moorehead
Music by Bernard Herrmann
Cinematography Gregg Toland
Editing by Robert Wise
Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures
Release date(s) United States:
May 1, 1941
Running time 119 minutes
Country USA
Language English
Budget $686,034 (est.)
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile
Citizen Kane is a 1941 classic American dramatic film, the first feature film directed by Orson Welles, who also co-authored the screenplay. It was released by RKO Pictures. The story, often considered to be a veiled portrayal of the life of William Randolph Hearst, is fictional.[1] Upon its release, Hearst prohibited mention of the film in any of his newspapers. The film traces the life and career of Charles Foster Kane, a man whose career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social service, but gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power. Narrated principally through flashbacks, the story is revealed through the research of a newspaper reporter seeking to solve the mystery of the newspaper magnate's dying word, "Rosebud".

Citizen Kane is often cited as being one of the most innovative works in the history of film. In 1997, the American Film Institute placed it at number one in its list of the 100 greatest U.S. movies of all time. In a recent poll of film critics and directors conducted by the British Film Institute, Citizen Kane was ranked the number one best film of all time by both groups.[2][3]

Contents [hide]
1 Synopsis
2 Cast
3 Development
3.1 Sources
3.1.1 Hearst
3.1.2 Welles as Kane
3.1.3 Jim Gettys
3.1.4 Rosebud
3.2 Production
3.3 Filmmaking innovations
4 Reception
4.1 Hearst's response
4.2 Awards
4.2.1 Academy Awards
4.3 Debate over authorship
4.4 Criticism
5 Prints
6 See also
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links

[edit] Synopsis
When enormously-wealthy media magnate Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) dies, he utters the word "rosebud". An obituary newsreel documents the events in his public life. The producer of the newsreel asks a reporter, Jerry Thompson (William Alland), to find out about Kane's private life and personality, in particular to discover the meaning behind his last word. The reporter interviews the great man's friends and associates, and Kane's story unfolds as a series of flashbacks.

First, Thompson approaches Kane's second wife, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), who refuses to tell him anything. Thompson then goes to the library of Walter Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris), a banker who served as Kane's guardian during his childhood. It is there that Thompson learns about Kane's childhood. In the first flashback, Kane as a young child is forced to leave his beloved mother (Agnes Moorehead) when he becomes suddenly wealthy, and is sent to live with Mr. Thatcher, despite the misgivings of Kane's abusive father.

Thompson then interviews Kane's personal business manager Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), best friend Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), Susan for a second time, and Kane's butler Raymond (Paul Stewart). Other flashbacks show Kane's entry into the newspaper business and his profit-seeking with low-quality "yellow journalism." He takes control of the newspaper, the New York Inquirer, and hires all the best journalists (which he gets from the Chronicle, the main rival of the Inquirer). His attempted rise to power is documented, including his first marriage to Emily Monroe Norton (Ruth Warrick), a President's niece, and his campaign for the office of governor of New York State. A "love nest" scandal ends both his marriage and his political aspirations. Kane remarries, but his domineering personality destroys his relationships and pushes away his loved ones.

Despite Thompson's interviews, he is unable to solve the mystery and concludes that "Rosebud" will forever remain an enigma. At that point, the camera pans over workers burning some of Kane's many possessions. One throws an old sled, with the word "Rosebud" painted on it, into the fire – the same sled that Kane was riding as a child the day his mother sent him away. There is a shot of a chimney with black smoke coming out. For the viewer this solves the "Rosebud" mystery: The sled is a token of the only time in his life when he was poor; but it also represents a time in which he was truly happy and wanted for nothing. After this twist ending, the film ends as it began, with the "No Trespassing" sign.

[edit] Cast
Actor Role
Orson Welles Charles Foster Kane
William Alland Jerry Thompson
Georgia Backus Bertha Anderson
Fortunio Bonanova Signor Matiste
Sonny Bupp Charles Foster Kane III
Ray Collins Jim W. Gettys
Dorothy Comingore Susan Alexander Kane
Joseph Cotten Jedediah Leland
George Coulouris Walter Parks Thatcher
Agnes Moorehead Mary Kane
Erskine Sanford Herbert Carter
Gus Schilling The Headwaiter
Harry Shannon Kane's Father
Everett Sloane Mr. Bernstein
Paul Stewart Raymond
Buddy Swan Young Charles Foster Kane
Ruth Warrick Emily Monroe Norton Kane
Philip Van Zandt Mr. Rawlston

[edit] Development
For some time, screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz had wanted to write a screenplay about a public figure – perhaps a gangster – whose story would be told by the people that knew him.[4] He had already written an unperformed play entitled, The Tree Will Grow about John Dillinger. Orson Welles liked the idea of multiple viewpoints but was not interested in playing Dillinger. Mankiewicz and Welles talked about picking someone else to use a model. They hit on the idea of using William Randolph Hearst as their central character.[4] Mankiewicz had frequented Hearst's parties until his alcoholism got him barred. Mankiewicz resented this and became obsessed with Hearst and Marion Davies.[4]

Once they settled on this project, Welles abandoned two other projects, The Smiler with a Knife and an adaptation of Heart of Darkness.[4] Mankiewicz was put under contract by Mercury Productions and was to receive no credit for his work as he was hired as a script doctor. According to his contract with RKO, Welles would be given sole screenplay credit. He had written a rough script consisting of 300 pages of dialogue with occasional stage directions under the title of John Citizen, USA.[4]

[edit] Sources
The principal source for the story of Citizen Kane was the life of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and the film is seen by critics as a fictionalized, unrelentingly hostile parody of Hearst. Hearst often entertained Hollywood celebrities at Hearst Castle (just north of San Luis Obispo, California) – but only as long as they revealed secrets that would be published the following week in the Hearst newspapers. This quid pro quo resulted in Hearst drawing wide resentment from many actors and directors in Hollywood, and Citizen Kane was seen by many as payback for Hearst's exploits. Welles was also inspired by other figures of the day, and the film also contains autobiographical elements.

[edit] Hearst
The most overt reference to Hearst comes early in the film, as Kane provides a quote that paraphrases an apocryphal quote attributed to Hearst on the Spanish American War: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Kane states, "You provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war". In real life, Hearst denied saying it, and the only source for the quote is a James Creelman memoir published several years after the statement was reportedly made.

Welles himself insisted that there were also differences between the men. In 1968, he told Peter Bogdanovich, "You know, the real story of Hearst is quite different from Kane's. And Hearst himself—-as a man, I mean—-was very different." In his documentary F for Fake, Welles claims Kane was originally intended to be based on Howard Hughes (who was to be played by Joseph Cotten) but he later changed it to Hearst. Hearst's biographer, David Nasaw, finds the film's depiction of Hearst unfair:

Welles' Kane is a cartoon-like caricature of a man who is hollowed out on the inside, forlorn, defeated, solitary because he cannot command the total obedience, loyalty, devotion, and love of those around him. Hearst, to the contrary, never regarded himself as a failure, never recognized defeat, never stopped loving Marion [Davies] or his wife. He did not, at the end of his life, run away from the world to entomb himself in a vast, gloomy art-choked hermitage.[5]

Several other candidates for the basis of the Kane personality have been suggested, the most likely being that of Jules Brulatour, millionaire head of distribution for Eastman Kodak and co-founder of Universal Pictures. Brulatour's second and third wives, Dorothy Gibson and Hope Hampton, both fleeting stars of the silent screen who later had marginal careers in opera, are also believed to have provided inspiration for the Susan Alexander character.

Orson Welles also claimed that Harold Fowler McCormick's lavish promotion of his second wife Ganna Walska's opera career–despite her renown as a terrible singer–was a direct influence on the screenplay. Roger Ebert, in his DVD commentary on Citizen Kane, suggests that the Alexander character had very little to do with Davies, but, rather, that it was based on Walska, mistress and later wife of Chicago heir Harold Fowler McCormick.[6] McCormick spent thousands of dollars on voice lessons for her and even arranged for Walska to take the lead in a production of Zaza at the Chicago Opera in 1920. But unlike Alexander, Walska got into an argument with director Pietro Cimini during dress rehearsal and stormed out of the production before she appeared.

Like the Susan Alexander character, she had a terrible voice, pleasing only to McCormick. Other sources say the Alexander role - and the disastrous opera singing - is a composite of Hampton, Davies, Walska, and the story of Samuel Insull, who built the Chicago Civic Opera House in 1929 for his daughter, who hoped to become famous and sing at the Metropolitan Opera but never did.

[edit] Welles as Kane

Orson Welles as Charles Foster KaneThere are autobiographical elements to the film. Orson Welles lost his mother when he was only nine years old and his father when he was 15. After this, he became the ward of Chicago's Dr. Maurice Bernstein--and Bernstein is the last name of the only major character in Citizen Kane who receives a completely positive portrayal.

The documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane points out the great irony that Welles's own life story resembled that of Kane far more than Hearst's: an overreaching wunderkind who ended up mournful and lonely in his old age. Citizen Kane's editor Robert Wise summarized: "Well, I thought often afterwards, only in recent years when I saw the film again two or three years ago when they had the fiftieth anniversary, and I suddenly thought to myself, well, Orson was doing an autobiographical film and didn't realize it, because it's rather much the same, you know. You start here, and you have a big rise and tremendous prominence and fame and success and whatnot, and then tail off and tail off and tail off. And at least the arc of the two lives were very much the same..."[1]

[edit] Jim Gettys
The character of political boss Jim Gettys is based on Charles F. Murphy, a political leader in New York City's infamous Tammany Hall political machine, who was an enemy of Hearst. In one scene Gettys admonishes Kane for printing a cartoon showing him in prison stripes. This is based on the fact that Murphy, who was a horse-cart driver and owned several bars, was depicted in a 1903 Hearst cartoon wearing striped prison clothes. A caption, referring to the restaurant Murphy frequented, said: "Look out, Murphy. It’s a short lock-step from Delmonico’s to Sing Sing."

[edit] Rosebud
Orson Welles himself described Rosebud as: "It's a gimmick, really, and rather dollar-book Freud".[7] The symbolic sled 'Rosebud' used in the film was bought for $60,500 by film director Steven Spielberg in 1982. Spielberg commented, "Rosebud will go over my typewriter to remind me that quality in movies comes first".[8][9]

According to Louis Pizzitola, author of Hearst Over Hollywood, "Rosebud" was a nickname that Orrin Peck, a friend of William Randolph Hearst, gave to his mother, Phoebe Hearst.[10] It was said that Phoebe was as close, or even closer, to Orrin than she was to her own son, lending a bitter-sweet element to the word's use in a film about a boy being separated from his mother's love.

In 1989, essayist Gore Vidal cited contemporary rumors that "Rosebud" was a nickname Hearst used for his mistress Marion Davies; a reference to her clitoris,[11][12] a claim repeated as fact in the 1996 documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane. A resultant joke noted, with heavy innuendo, that Hearst and/or Kane died "with 'Rosebud' on his lips."[1]

[edit] Production
During production, Citizen Kane was referred to as RKO 281. Filming took place between June 29 and October 23, 1940. Welles prevented studio executives of RKO from visiting the set. He understood their desire to control projects and he knew they were expecting him to do an exciting film that would correspond to his The War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Welles' RKO contract had given him complete control over the production of the film when he signed on with the studio, something that he never again was allowed to exercise when making motion pictures.

[edit] Filmmaking innovations

A deep focus shot: everything, including the hat in the foreground and the boy in the distance, is in sharp focus.Film scholars and historians view Citizen Kane as Welles' attempt to create a new style of filmmaking by studying various forms of movie making, and combining them all into one. The most innovative technical aspect of Citizen Kane is the extended use of deep focus.[13] In nearly every scene in the film, the foreground, background and everything in between are all in sharp focus. This was done by renowned cinematographer Gregg Toland through his experimentation with lenses and lighting. Specifically, Toland often used telephoto lenses to shoot close-up scenes. Anytime deep focus was impossible — for example in the scene when Kane finishes a bad review of Alexander's opera while at the same time firing the person who started the review — Toland used an optical printer to make the whole screen appear in focus (visually layering one piece of film onto another). However, some apparently deep-focus shots were the result of in-camera effects, as in the famous example of the scene where Kane breaks into Susan Alexander's room after her suicide attempt. In the background, Kane and another man break into the room, while simultaneously the medicine bottle and a glass with a spoon in it are in closeup in the foreground. The shot was an in-camera matte shot. The foreground was shot first, with the background dark. Then the background was lit, the foreground darkened, the film rewound, and the scene re-shot with the background action.

Another unorthodox method used in the film was the way low-angle shots were used to display a point of view facing upwards, thus allowing ceilings to be shown in the background of several scenes.[14] Since movies were primarily filmed on sound stages and not on location during the era of the Hollywood studio system, it was impossible to film at an angle that showed ceilings because the stages had none. In some instances, Welles' crew used muslin draped above the set to produce the illusion of a regular room with a ceiling, while the boom mikes were hidden above the cloth.

One of the story-telling techniques introduced in this film was using an episodic sequence on the same set while the characters changed costume and make-up between cuts so that the scene following each cut would look as if it took place in the same location, but at a time long after the previous cut. In this way, Welles chronicled the breakdown of Kane's first marriage, which took years of story time, in a matter of minutes.

Welles also pioneered several visual effects in order to cheaply shoot things like crowd scenes and large interior spaces. For example, the scene where the camera in the opera house rises dramatically to the rafters to show the workmen showing a lack of appreciation for the second Mrs. Kane's performance was shot by panning a camera upwards over the performance scene, then a curtain wipe to a miniature of the upper regions of the house, and then another curtain wipe matching it again with the scene of the workmen. Other scenes effectively employed miniatures to make the film look much more expensive than it truly was, such as various shots of Xanadu. A loud, full screen closeup of the typewriter typing a single word magnifies the review for the Chicago Inquirer—"weak".[15]

The film broke new ground with its use of special effects makeup, created by makeup artist Maurice Seiderman, believably aging the cast many decades over the course of the story. The details extended down to hazy contact lenses to make Cotten's eyes look rheumy as an old man.[citation needed] Welles later claimed that his own dashing appearance as a young man also involved a lot of makeup (including some strategically applied surgical gauze and tape) skillfully applied by Maurice Seiderman to give him a mini-facelift.[citation needed]

Welles brought his experience with sound from radio along to filmmaking, producing a layered and complex soundtrack. In one scene, the elderly Kane strikes Susan in a tent on the beach, and the two characters silently glower at each other while a woman at the nearby party can be heard hysterically laughing in the background, her giddiness in grotesque counterpoint to the misery of Susan and Kane. Elsewhere, Welles skillfully employed reverberation to create a mood, such as the chilly echo of the monumental library, where the reporter is confronted by an intimidating, officious librarian.

In addition to expanding on the potential of sound as a creator of moods and emotions, Welles pioneered a new aural technique, known as the "lightning-mix". Welles used this technique to link complex montage sequences via a series of related sounds or phrases. In offering a continuous sound track, Welles was able to join what would otherwise be extremely rough cuts together into a smooth narrative. For example, the audience witnesses Kane grow from a child into a young man in just two shots. As Kane's guardian hands him his sled, Kane begrudingly wishes him a "Merry Christmas". Suddenly we are taken to a shot of his guardian fifteen years later, only to have the phrase completed for us: "and a Happy New Year". In this case, the continuity of the soundtrack, not the image, is what makes for a seamless narrative structure.[16]

Welles also carried over techniques from radio not yet popular in the movies (though they would become staples). Using a number of voices, each saying a sentence or sometimes merely a fragment of a sentence, and splicing the dialogue together in quick succession, the result gave the impression of a whole town talking - and, equally important, what the town was talking about. Welles also favored the overlapping of dialogue, considering it more realistic than the stage and movie tradition of characters not stepping on each other's sentences. He also pioneered the technique of putting the audio ahead of the visual in scene transitions (an L-cut); as a scene would come to a close, the audio would transition to the next scene before the visual did.

[edit] Reception
In a 1941 review, Jorge Luis Borges called Citizen Kane a "metaphysical detective story," in that "... [its] subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man's inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined..." Borges noted that "Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and reconstruct him." As well, "Forms of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum." Borges points out, "At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by a secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances."[17]

Despite numerous positive reviews from critics at the time,[18] the film was not a box office success, just making back enough to cover the budget, but not enough to make a profit. This resulted in Welles's career suffering a crippling blow. He spent the rest of his life struggling to make films on his own terms. He did live long enough to see his debut film acknowledged as a classic, and late in life he famously remarked that he'd started at the top and spent the rest of his life working his way down.

Due to the Second World War, Citizen Kane was little seen and virtually forgotten until its release in Europe in 1946, where it gained considerable acclaim, particularly from French film critics such as André Bazin. In the United States, it was neglected and forgotten until its revival in the late 1950s, and its critical fortunes have skyrocketed since. Critics worldwide began listing it among the best films ever made. The Sight & Sound Top Ten list, revised every ten years, began in 1952 and first listed Citizen Kane in 1962.[19]

[edit] Hearst's response
Hearing about the film enraged Hearst so much that he offered RKO Pictures $800,000 to destroy all prints of the film and burn the negative. Although it is often said that Hearst was upset because the film was about him, one alternative theory is that Hearst was more upset about the portrayal of his mistress, Marion Davies (as singer Susan Alexander) than himself in the film. Davies was a light comedic actress who was talked by Hearst into starring in pompous costume dramas many thought were out of her depth.[citation needed]

When RKO rejected Hearst's offer to suppress the film, Hearst flew into so extreme a rage that he banned every newspaper and station in his media conglomerate from reviewing — or even mentioning — the movie. The documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane lays the blame for Citizen Kane's relative failure squarely at the feet of Hearst. Even though it did decent business at the box-office and went on to be the sixth highest grossing film in its year of release, this fell short of its creators's expectations but was still acceptable to its backers. In The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, David Nasaw points out that Hearst's actions were not the only reason Kane failed, however: the innovations Welles made with narrative, as well as the dark message at the heart of the film (that the pursuit of success is ultimately futile) meant that a popular audience could not appreciate its merits (Nasaw, 572-573).

In a series of documentaries about Welles's career made and broadcast by the BBC in 1982, Welles claimed that during opening week, a policeman approached him one night and told him: "Do not go to your hotel room tonight; Hearst has set up an undressed woman to leap into your arms when you enter and a photographer to take pictures of you. Hearst is planning to publish it in all of his papers." Welles thanked the man and stayed out all night. However, it is not confirmed whether this was true or not. Welles also described his only meeting with William Randolph Hearst: in an elevator in a building in San Francisco, where the film was being premiered. Welles offered Hearst some free tickets but the tycoon declined to answer; Welles later stated that Charles Foster Kane would probably have accepted the offer.

Although Hearst's efforts to suppress it damaged the film's success, they backfired in the long run, since almost every reference of Hearst's life and career made today typically includes a reference to the film's parallel to it. The irony of Hearst's efforts is that the film is now inexorably connected to him. This connection was reinforced by the publication in 1961 of W. A. Swanberg's extensive biography titled Citizen Hearst.

[edit] Awards

[edit] Academy Awards

Theatrical release posterWin:

Best Original Screenplay - Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz
Nominations:

Best Picture - Mercury
Best Director - Orson Welles
Best Actor - Orson Welles
Best Film Editing - Robert Wise
Best Art Direction - Perry Ferguson, A. Roland Fields, Van Nest Polglase, Darrell Silvera
Best Cinematography (black and white) - Gregg Toland
Best Sound Mixing - John Aalberg
Best Music Score - Bernard Herrmann
Boos were heard almost every time Citizen Kane was referred to during the Oscars ceremony that year.[20] Most of Hollywood did not want the film to see the light of day considering the threats that William Randolph Hearst had made if it did.

The American Film Institute put the film at the top of its "100 Greatest Movies" lists, having the top on the 1997 and 2007 lists. In 1989, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. This film is consistently in the top 25 on the Internet Movie Database. Beginning in 1962, and every ten years since, it has been voted the best film ever made by the Sight and Sound critics' poll. The quote, "Rosebud," was listed as no. 17 on the American Film Institute's AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes. The film has also ranked number one in the following film "best of" lists: Editorial Jaguar, FIAF Centenary List, France Critics Top 10, Kinovedcheskie Russia Top 10, Romanian Critics Top 10, Time Out Magazine Greatest Films, and Village Voice 100 Greatest Films.

Other Awards

NYFCC Best Picture for 1941

[edit] Debate over authorship
One of the long standing academic debates of Citizen Kane has been the nature of the authorship of the original screenplay, which the opening credits attributes to both Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Most famously, film critic Pauline Kael, in an essay titled "Raising Kane" (originally published in The New Yorker in 1971 and later reprinted in The Citizen Kane Book and in her omnibus collection For Keeps) claims that Welles downplayed veteran screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz's contribution. Kael argues that Mankiewicz was the true author of the screenplay and therefore responsible for much of what made the movie great. This angered many critics of the day, most notably critic-turned-filmmaker (and close friend of Welles) Peter Bogdanovich, who rebutted many of Kael's claims.

Bernard Herrmann was equally vocal in his criticism of Kael's claim not only on her position that it was Mankiewicz, not Welles, who made the main thrust of the film but also in her assumptions about the use of music in the film without consulting him:

Pauline Kael has written in The Citizen Kane Book (1971), that the production wanted to use Massenet’s "Thais" but could not afford the fee. But Miss Kael never wrote or approached me to ask about the music. We could easily have afforded the fee. The point is that its lovely little strings would not have served the emotional purpose of the film.[21]

Robert L. Carringer, in a 1978 essay titled "The Scripts Of Citizen Kane," and in his 1985 book The Making Of Citizen Kane, refutes Kael's claim that Mankiewicz was the sole author of the screenplay. After analysis of the seven script revisions of the film, Carringer found the film's dual credit for both Welles and Mankiewicz to be accurate. The script revisions indicate the different contributions and the author of each of those contributions and prove, according to Carringer, that Mankiewicz did not write the script entirely on his own and that Welles contributed to it significantly.

[edit] Criticism
Despite its status, Citizen Kane is not entirely without its critics. Boston University film scholar Ray Carney, although noting its technical achievements, criticized what he saw as the film's lack of emotional depth, shallow characterization and empty metaphors. Listing it among the most overrated works within the film community, he accused the film of being "an all-American triumph of style over substance... indistinguishable from the opera production within it: attempting to conceal the banality of its performances by wrapping them in a thousand layers of acoustic and visual processing." Of its director, he went on to state, "Welles is Kane — in a sense he couldn't have intended — substituting razzle-dazzle for truth and hoping no one notices the sleight of hand." He also criticized critics and scholars of allowing themselves to be pandered to, stating "critics obviously enjoy being told what to think or they'd never sit still for the hammy acting, cartoon characterizations, tendentious photography, editorializing blockings, and absurdly grandiose (and annoyingly insistent) metaphors....When will film studies grow up? Even Jedediah Leland, the opera reviewer in the film, knew better than to be taken in by Salammbo's empty reverberations."[22]

Similarly, James Agate wrote, "I thought the photography quite good, but nothing to write to Moscow about, the acting middling, and the whole thing a little dull...Mr. Welles's high-brow direction is of that super-clever order which prevents you from seeing what that which is being directed is all about."[23]

[edit] Prints
Welles' original master film negative of Citizen Kane was destroyed in a fire in the 1970s at his villa in Madrid, Spain, along with the only known print of Welles' 1938 short film Too Much Johnson. Until 1991, all existing theatrical prints of the film were made from copies of the original. When the rights to the film were purchased by Ted Turner's Turner Entertainment (which bought the rights to the MGM and RKO film libraries), film restoration techniques were used to produce a pristine print for a 50th Anniversary theatrical revival reissue in 1991 (released by Paramount Pictures). The 2003 British DVD edition is taken from an interpositive held by the British Film Institute. The current US DVD version (released by Warner Home Video) is taken from another digital restoration, supervised by Turner. The transfer to Region 1 DVD has been criticised by some film experts for being too bright. Also, in the scene in Bernstein's office (chapter 10) rain falling outside the window has been digitally erased, probably because it was thought to be excessive film grain. These alterations are not present in the UK Region 2, which is also considered to be more accurate in terms of contrast and brightness.

In 2003, Orson Welles' daughter Beatrice sued Turner Entertainment and RKO Pictures, claiming that the Welles estate is the legal copyright holder of the film. Her attorney said that Orson Welles had left RKO with an exit deal terminating his contracts with the studio, meaning that Welles still had an interest in the film and his previous contract giving the studio the copyright of the film was null and void. Beatrice Welles also claimed that, if the courts did not uphold her claim of copyright, RKO nevertheless owes the estate 20% of the profits, from a previous contract which has not been lived up to.

On May 30, 2007, the appeals panel agreed that Beatrice Welles could proceed with the lawsuit against Turner Entertainment, the opinion partially overturns the 2004 decision by a lower court judge who had found in favor of Turner Entertainment on the issue of video rights.[24]

In the 1980s, this film became the catalyst in the controversy over the colorization of black and white films. When Ted Turner told members of the press that he was considering colorizing Citizen Kane, his comments led to an immediate public outcry. The uproar was for naught, as Turner Pictures had never actually announced that this was an upcoming planned project. Turner later claimed that this was a joke designed to needle colorization critics, and that he had never had any intention of colorizing the film. Turner could not have colorized the film had he wanted to. Welles' original contract prevented any alteration to the film without his, and eventually his estate's, express consent.