Citizen Kane: best movie ever?

Citizen Kane is not, as is claimed, the best movie ever produced. But, of course, it's a must-have presence in the best collections of all time. In addition, Gregg Toland's cinematography may qualify the film as one of the best black-and-white works ever made.

The unforgettable opening is a mixture of horror and film noir and shows a castle on a hill: it is Xanadu, the refuge of the millionaire Charles Foster Kane, inspired by the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The opening speech is the last word uttered by the newspaper-tycoon before he died: Rosebud!

The meaning of this puzzling word opens a question for its main newspaper, the New York Inquirer, that will leave to the reporter Jerry Thompson the mission of revealing the secret, that will be known of the public only in the final scene. The revelation of the real meaning of that name is considered one of the most fantastic paradoxes in the history of cinema.

In search of what could be "Rosebud," the reporter reveals various aspects of Kane's life through flashbacks, not always ordered and sometimes disconnected. They interviewed the secretary of the millionaire, Bernstein; his best friend Leland; the second wife Susan Alexander, the pivot of the scandal that removed Kane from politics; as well as the unpublished personal diary of Thatcher, Charles's estate administrator and tutor until his 25th birthday.

Separated from the Colorado family when he was a boy to have a training in New York that would enable him to manage the fortune acquired almost by chance by his mother, Kane reaches the age of 25 and, to the despair of Thatcher, is not interested in no kind of investment except the little Inquirer who becomes the starting point for his journalistic empire.

Unfortunately, Thompson's research is unsuccessful, except for his brilliant conclusion that while Rosebud is one of the few things Charles has never owned or lost, "no word can explain a man's life."

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