Welles’s first feature is probably the most respected, analyzed, and parodied of all films. Although its archival and historical value is unchallenged, Citizen Kane nevertheless seems fresh on each new viewing. The film touches on so many aspects of American life—politics and sex, friendship and betrayal, youth and old age—that it has become a film for all moods and generations. In an expansive way, it creates a kaleidoscopic panorama of a man’s life. Loosely based on newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane is the saga of the rise to power of a “poor little rich boy” starved for affection, as Welles himself was after his parents’ early deaths. It is also a meditation on emotional greed, the ease of amassing wealth, and the difficulty of sustaining love.

Welles completed the film at the age of twenty-five. It is a young director’s movie, full of boyish bravado, impatient with the genteel traditions of seamless cinematic storytelling, and eager to plunder other media (incorporating the staccato rhythm of newsreel clips, the briskness of radio narrative, and the moodiness of stage lighting). Through its cunning flashback format, the film shows that the future is both inevitable and unknowable. Citizen Kane is a classic tour de force which Welles not only wrote, directed, and edited, but also starred in—he played the title role.