Citizen Kane - The Complete Screenplay also Raising Kane by Pauline Kael

This is the complete screenplay of Citizen Kane, one of the world’s most famous and controversial films

It was a film “designed to shock” (Kenneth Tynan) and it’s still recognised as having one of the most staggering film debuts in the history of Hollywood

Not only was this Orson Welles’s first film as actor and director but most of the cast were also new to the cinema

Yet so controversial was the subject matter that an $842,000 bribe and the concentrated wrath of the Hearst newspaper empire combined in an attempt to strangle its distribution

And the authorship of the film is still a subject of conflict

Also included is Pauline Kael’s long essay Raising Kane dissects a maze of Hollywood lore to re-evaluate these and many other fascinating stories about the making of this remarkable film. Her account is followed by the original screenplay, illustrated with stills and frame enlargements

“Citizen Kane revolutionised film-making, and the question of its authorship is as important to the cinema as that of Hamlet to the theatre ... Pauline Kael explains how the picture came to be made and concludes that the man most responsible for its creation was not Welles but Herman J. Mankiewicz” ~ Kenneth Tynan
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