Before Citizen Kane, Orson Welles conquered radio. Then, at just twenty-five, Hollywood gave him extraordinary freedom to make his first motion picture—and he created a film that changed cinema.
But beneath the revolutionary camera work, deep-focus photography, fractured memories, newspaper empires and battle with William Randolph Hearst lies a surprisingly simple human tragedy.
Charles Foster Kane spends his life making everything bigger: his fortune, his newspapers, his ambitions, his collection and finally the vast palace of Xanadu. Yet the more he possesses, the less he seems to have.
In this Chesterton Radio Deep Dive, we trace Citizen Kane back to Welles’s roots in radio and the Mercury Theatre, explore his collaboration with Gregg Toland, the complicated role of Herman J. Mankiewicz, Hearst’s extraordinary attempt to suppress the film, and the mystery that begins with one dying word:
Rosebud.
We’ll also consider Citizen Kane through a Chestertonian lens—including the fascinating connection made by Jorge Luis Borges—and ask whether Kane’s real tragedy is that he spends a lifetime accumulating extraordinary things because he has forgotten how to treasure ordinary ones.
A boy loses his home.
A man tries to buy the world.
And at the end, the smallest thing in Xanadu may tell us what all his greatness could never replace.
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