Citizen Kane

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Orson Welles’ film, released in 1941, which is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, films yet made. Welles plays the lead role of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate, and Welles directed, produced and co-wrote this story of loneliness at the heart of a megalomaniac. The plot was partly inspired by the life of William Randolph Hearst, who then used the power of his own newspapers to try to suppress the film’s release. It was to take some years before Citizen Kane reached a fuller audience and, from that point, become so celebrated.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Stella Bruzzi 2 episodes
  Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London
• Ian Christie No other episodes
  Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London
• John David Rhodes No other episodes
  Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge

Reading list

• What is Cinema? Vol II
  Andre Bazin (University of California Press, 1971) Google Books →
• Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu
  Simon Callow (Penguin, 1995) Google Books →
• Raising Kane and other Essays
  Pauline Kael (Marion Boyars, 1996) Google Books →
• Citizen Kane: BFI Film Classics
  Laura Mulvey (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019) Google Books →
• The Magic World of Orson Welles
  James Naremore (Oxford University Press, 1978) Google Books →
• Orson Welles' Citizen Kane: A Casebook
  James Naremore (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2004) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m001g37l

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001g37l

Auto-category: 791.4372 (Film history and criticism)