#3 Citizen Kane (Welles) at the Golden State Theatre
When the first Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll was published in 1952, Bicycle Thieves earned the top position. Ten years later, it was relegated to sixth place (tied with Battleship Potemkin) and Citizen Kane (1941) took the number-one spot. The film stayed there for fifty years, an immovable monolith of “greatness,” until Vertigo nudged it aside in 2012.
My dad and I went to a free screening as part of the 90th anniversary celebration of the Golden State Theatre in downtown Monterey. The historic Moorish revival movie palace—with its opulent decor, velvet seats, and frescoed ceiling—was the perfect setting to watch a film that opens in the protagonist’s own palatial estate, Xanadu. It felt a little like stepping through the screen.
More happens in the first ten minutes of Citizen Kane than in most full-length features: a death, a mystery, a newsreel obituary, and a montage that sketches the entire arc of a man’s life. The story pieces together the rise and unraveling of Charles Foster Kane, a narcissistic, ambition-crazed newspaper mogul loosely inspired by William Randolph Hearst. Through a series of nonlinear flashbacks, the film builds a portrait of a man who could buy anything except what he actually wanted.
Welles was 25 when he acted in, directed, co-wrote, and produced this film. The inventiveness still shows: deep-focus shots, swooping camera movements, reflections in glass everywhere you look. Even the famous “Declaration of Principles” scene still stings—Kane laying out his high-minded ideals for journalism, only to abandon them the moment power becomes more valuable than integrity. His attempt to pay off Jedediah Leland later feels like the whole tragedy in miniature: corruption dressed as friendship.
For all its technical brilliance and historical weight, the film also lands on a surprisingly simple moral: don’t let the bank raise your child. The sadness at the core of Kane’s life. His loneliness, his neediness, his compulsive collecting of people and things comes from a boyhood ripped away from him and replaced with money.
And of course it ends with the most famous single word in movie history: “Rosebud.” A mystery, a symbol, and a punchline.