Citizen Kane Minute #1 – Rosebud

CITIZEN KANE MINUTE #1 - Rosebud

The greatest film of all time, five minutes at a time.

  • Minutes 00:00-5:00.
  • Special Guest: Author/Editor April Snellings.

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Thanks for listening!

39 responses to “Citizen Kane Minute #1 – Rosebud

  1. Listened to the whole episode this morning while I was getting ready for work. Good stuff here, Rob! I very much enjoyed your conversation with April. Specifically, I’m so glad you guys brought up the matte painting at the beginning of the film. It is indeed a lost artform irrevocably replaced (and not for the better) by CGI. As far as I’m concerned, matte painting is the closest thing filmmaking can get to creating a specific and visually detailed setting the way a work of literature can. I’ve not seen anything in CGI that even comes close.

    Looking forward to future episodes!

    1. Thanks for listening Steve! And yes, matte paintings, when done well like here in CK< are truly a marvel to behold. CK isn't thought of as a special effects picture like Star Wars or such, but it's FULL of visual effects that are so good you don't realize they are visual effects.

  2. Great start on a voyage of wonder! Looking forward to who you have slated next. Dare I hope a Maurice LaMarche shows up?

    You’ve got something good here, Robert!

  3. Fantastic job, Rob (and April); love the concept, and I loved the first episode. How fortunate you are that CK’s initial five-minute chunk is among its most iconic scenes.

    What strikes me most about this opening—and thank you for mentioning—is the radical tonal shift from Kane’s death scene to the “News on the March” reel, which I think really encapsulates the central conflict of CK’s story: The bombastic public vs. the pitiful private.

    Personally, my favorite line in this five minutes is “Cost: No man can say.” My best friend and I used to repeat that in various appropriate and not-so-appropriate circumstances.

    Thanks for doing this, looking forward to the next five minutes…

    1. Thanks Noah! Yes, one of the things that caught me so off guard when I first saw CK was the striking tonal shifts; Welles (and editor Robert Wise, of course) was really daring the audience to keep up. Hope you enjoy the rest of the series!

  4. I am in the middle of listening but I thought that I should point out that you have at least one listener who has never seen the movie. I’m listening to find out why I should watch it. Every time I’ve asked, I’ve just been told “It’s the greatest movie of all time!” and nothing specifically why I would like it.

    And don’t worry about spoilers. I’ve seen enough parodies (including Tiny Toons) to know the big reveal.

      1. Rob, I’m with Gene in that I haven’t see it. I’m one of the people for whom it always sounded like homework, but this episode already has me a little intrigued.

        I’m here because I’m a rob! fan. You’re fun to listen to when you’re excited. The fact that Ms. Snellings was also entertaining was a bonus.

          1. To a big extent, ‘Rosebud was his Maguffin’ but it does have meaning and represent something to Kane.

            Either way, I hate Lucy Van Pelt with a vengeance.

      1. I don’t have HBO Max, actually. And that kind of thing is why I haven’t watched it.

        “You have to watch it!”

        “Why?”

        “Because it’s the best movie ever and that’s reason enough!”

        “Then no thanks.”

        1. Watch it because people with whom you share certain enthusiasms enjoy it? At some point the ‘I won’t try it because everyone says it’s so good’ becomes just a cross-armed position.

          Why not try just, well, five minutes, Gene? Rob, April and future guests can talk about it with authority and insight, but it’s not the same as actually watching the thing and letting the story reveal itself. Rob isn’t kidding when he says forget the reputation, it’s a really entertaining watch.

          1. I’m not opposed to watching it, but I haven’t heard a good reason for me to go out of my way (or pay money) to watch it, either. If it comes up on at streaming service that I already have I might just put it on, if for no other reason than to keep up with this podcast.

  5. Super excited for this!

    As a Welles fan I can’t wait to look closely at these sections with you Rob.

    You can imagine in this day and age, anyone in Kane would be on the convention circuit. If the Stormtrooper who says ‘Droids’ on Tatooine is on the circuit, this nurse certainly would be.

    I am also interested in hearing your co-hosts histories with the film, especially the ‘homework’ feel to it.

    Great discussion this time with April!

    1. Thanks Anj! Yes, AFAIK there are no surviving CK cast members. If there were and they were ever appearing anywhere I would be there.

      Thanks for listening!

      1. FYI Ruth Warrick discussed appearing in the film in her online interview for the Television Academy Archive. You may want to check it out.

  6. BUT SERIOUSLY, on the question of whether it’s the best film ever made, I think it’d be more proper for it to claim to be the best AMERICAN film ever made, as I would probably mint a couple of Japanese directors, maybe a Frenchman or a Russian before Welles. Citizen Kane is inventive and remains relevant even today (if not more so than when it was made), but it has one big flaw that keeps it from being the very best (for me). I’ll hold on that until we get to more pertinent minutes.

    1. Any time I refer to any movie as one of the best ever made, it always has an asterisk that means *American film, because I just am not conversant enough on world cinema to include them on that list.

  7. Please forgive me if this comes off as snarky, because it’s not meant to be. I just found it very amusing that, in the discussion of the first 5 minutes of the film, we have something like the following:

    “Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made. In fact, it’s better than a movie, it is FILM! Now here are two technical problems (snow globe exploding and exteriors of Xanadu not matching) and one writing problem that derails the entire story (no ne hears Rosebud), But that’s OK, because it’s Orson Welles, so who cares?”

    OK, I can give you the technical things. It was the early 40’s, so there’s problems actually doing what you want to do. That’s easy to let slide. A major error in storytelling being handwaved because “Oh, Welles. He’s such a trickster.” Sorry, that’s a bit much for me. Even a “perfect” movie can have flaws*, and that doesn’t invalidate it as being great, but a little more acknowledgement of them as flaws would be nice. 🙂

    * The one line in Jaws that continues to drive me nuts is Hooper, when examining the first victim, says, “This is what happens…” and NEVER FINISHES THE LINE! Bugs me every time I hear it.

    1. One way to look at flaws, in certain works, is the way we look at Shakespeare’s “problem plays” (the most famous being Hamlet – like, what age is he exactly? the Ghost being handled different ways, etc.). The “mistake” whether intentional or not generates discussion, adds layers of meaning, etc.

      So for example – and this is already apparent even in a 5-minute bite – Welles does a lot with empty, church-like spaces. Kane has accumulated objects but not PEOPLE. People are in fact extremely, bizarrely absent from Xanadu. So the absence of someone to overhear “Rosebud”, at least in the shot, is in service to that effect, which is more important to the fabric of the film than its plot mechanics.

      To me a “mistake” in an otherwise good film is a cue to inspect the mistake for meaning, not wave it away as an aberration, my English lit background showing, but usually it pays dividends.

      1. I agree, Siskoid. Discussion is certainly the way to go, which is part of the reason I listen to shows like this. Discussing the ins and outs of something for 9 times the length of the clip allows you to get really into conjecture as to the why’s and how’s things were done. 🙂

      2. I always just assumed that Xanadu was so cavernous and empty that even a whisper might echo loudly through the halls. Thus a butler down the hall might have heard it.

        I bet that staff heard a lot in those halls.

        1. That’s possible. The staff might have known of certain areas of the house that allowed you to overhear things better. Or Kane was so delirious that this wasn’t the first time he said it, so the butler could have heard it that morning. There are all kinds of possibilities.

          1. The best thing about knowing or not knowing what “Rosebud” is/means, is that it really doesn’t matter. It might be a mistake, it might be Welles being cheeky, when you watch the film you get caught up in the story so it doesn’t really make a difference.

            FWIW, near the end, the butler explicitly says he heard it, so unless we assume he’s lying just for the attention of the reporter, then he did hear it in some way.

          2. The only “why” I can give you is like looking into the 12-bar blues if you’re into pop/early rock. It’s in the DNA of every one of those songs since its introduction.

            CK is a lot like that to me. It’s the under drawing for so much that has come since. There’s a reason it has the rep it does.

        2. Yes, that works. Me too. The whole idea is to create the sense of America’s Churches and Cathedrals of Capitalism and Enterprise, and so the scene a kind of confessional.

    2. The Butler was in the room off-camera when Kane dies. The butler is interviewed later in the movie and says this.

  8. Congratulations on a fine first episode, It’s great to hear April again (tell us shout the comic!).

    I am embarrassed. Despite having seen the film a fair few times, and having read stuff and watched documentaries, this is the first time I’ve noticed the name similarity between Kubla KHAN and Charles Foster KANE. We even have the Coleridge poem in there. I suspect it’s all so obvious that no one bothers to mention it. I’m such a dimwit.

    As April and yourself say, Rob, this really is a horror film beginning, the first of many genres the film cycles through.

    The matte work really is stunning, giving us a Disney Wicked Queen castle in Florida (I expect our friend Shag lives in a place like that). I wonder if those poor neglected monkeys are the same ones from the Wizard of Oz… nah, not nearly terrifying enough. As for the big cat that couldn’t be identified, surely that’s a statue?

    The transition between outside and inside with the light going off at the window and then the shot reversing via the arched window certainly is excellent; again, something I’d not noticed previously.

    The fisheye lens to represent the view from the snow globe is pretty great.

    That bit about the woman with a parasol, I get that mixed up with an anecdote in The Great Gatsby… again, I’m dumb.

    On the subject of ‘…by Orson Welles’, I hate auteur theory for the reasons you gave – there are so many people involved, and in this case so many equally brilliant people, that it really is insulting to them. It speaks to the ego that Welles shares with Kane.

    And while the nurse didn’t have a line, she wasn’t just in Citizen Kane, she was the first person seen in it. That’s not nothing!

    My 80-year-old dad watched the movie for the first time this week on BBC4 and loved it – he always thought it would be really boring…

    Rob, you mention that there will be extra shows; I don’t know how far off grid you’re planning to go, but the first five minutes of the original version of The Haunting, directed by Citizen Kane editor Robert Wise – who made more great movies than Welles – would make for an interesting comparison.

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