Acclaimed Flop: Hard to believe, but the "Greatest Film of All Time" was a box office failure for its time. Eventually it made a profit in repertory screenings and Welles lived off its royalties even when he was down and out in Europe.
Blooper: A scene intended to take place at a jungle-themed party reused some jungle clips from The Son of Kong, and the producers failed to notice the pterodactyls in the background on the initial theatrical release. This became a lot more obvious on home video, and later releases would edit them out.
Creator Backlash: To a marginal extent. While Welles never regretted or hated the film, much like Alan Moore and Watchmen he did regret how it overshadowed his entire career. He stated that he found the film too gimmicky and not mature, and he regretted how Marion Davies was wrongfully associated with the film. Despite this, he stated in interviews that Kane is the only film of his with which he is entirely satisfied in that it came out exactly as he wished with no budget constraints and no Executive Meddling, though personally he preferred The Trial and Chimes at Midnight.
Orson Welles: I've regretted early successes in many fields, but I don't regret that in Kane because it was the only chance of that kind I ever had. I'm glad I had it at any time in my life. I wish I had it more often. I wish I had a chance like that every year, there'd be eighteen pictures.
Darkhorse Casting: Most of the cast were new to film, with ten of them being Orson Welles' associates from the Mercury Theatre.
Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, William Alland, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane and Paul Stewart all made their film debuts.
Denied Parody: Orson Welles denied that Kane was based on William Randolph Hearst. It's unclear whether Welles was telling the truth or just was trying to avoid getting sued to Hell and back by Hearst,note Especially considering things such as Kane's line "You provide the prose poems. I'll provide the war." being strikingly similar to a phrase famously attributed to Hearst, "You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war." but Hearst certainly went out of his way to make sure everyone would think Kane was based off him. How very Charles Foster Kane of him. Welles actually tried to get around this by including a line in the film in which a journalist makes a reference to both Kane and Hearst, thus indicating that Hearst actually exists as a separate entity in the Citizen Kane universe. In later interviews, Welles said that Hearst along with Howard Hughes and other industrialists were certainly influences on Kane, but that Kane was never intended as a parody/critique/insult to Hearst specifically or other industrialists, it was meant as a serious exploration of an American mythical hero, the tycoon and capitalist.
Descended Creator: Director Orson Welles plays the titular role of Charles Foster Kane. This is made more noticeable in that, except for eight-year-old Kane (played by Buddy Swan), Welles plays Kane through all ages, all of them being Welles in makeup.
Dueling Works: For a long time, Citizen Kane competed for #1 on a film list with Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. The 2012 list saw it finally replaced from Sight and Sound's Best Film List. The critics list placed Vertigo ahead of it, while the directors list placed Tokyo Story ahead of it.
DVD Commentary: Roger Ebert contributes an excellent, in-depth commentary notable for the breakdown of cinematography, shot design, and other interesting tidbits.
Dyeing for Your Art: To simulate heavy drunkenness, Joseph Cotten stayed awake for 24 straight hours, resulting in some unscripted flubbery (that caused Welles to grin despite himself).
Enforced Method Acting: Poor Dorothy Comingore endured physical and mental abuse from Orson Welles and ended up a near wreck by the end.
Soprano Jean Forward dubbed Dorothy Comingore’s singing voice. Bernard Herrmann deliberately wrote the part in such a high range that even a trained singer would strain to reach the high notes, which is why Susan is audibly struggling.
From Entertainment to Education: The film is often used to teach cinematography, and as a master work in storytelling and narrative form, and pretty much defined cinema as an artist's medium, with all its different visual and audio techniques used cohesively to tell a complex story.
Magnum Opus Dissonance: Orson Welles saw Chimes at Midnight as his masterpiece, but that was also driven by people using Citizen Kane to write him off as a One-Book Author, he was generally proud of Kane and stated that it was his only movie that he's totally satisfied with, having no budget or executive compromises as he did on his other films.
To simulate being drunk, Joseph Cotten remained awake for 24 straight hours. You can see Welles break character and grin when Cotten flubs his line and says "dramatic crimiticism." Of course, it was a Throw It In! moment.
Orson Welles himself let himself go during the famous room trashing sequence, even hurting himself badly bloodying his hands while doing it. After filming the scene, Welles breathed, "I felt it. I felt it."
On-Set Injury: Orson Welles tripped down a staircase and chipped his anklebone, forcing him to use a wheelchair for the next two weeks. He also gashed his own hand during a scene where he destroyed a room. He quickly improvised, grabbing a curtain and using it to cover his bleeding hand while he completed the scene, which appears in the film.
One-Take Wonder: When Kane's wife leaves him, he completely destroys her bedroom. Given the destruction Orson Welles caused to the set, the first take of this infamous scene was, understandably, the only take.
Production Posse: Famously so, as the cast was from Welles' Mercury Theatre.
Star-Making Role: Kane was a Star Making Role to some extent for most of the cast, since the bulk of them were members of Orson Welles' Mercury Theater troupe and they were all making their film debuts together.
Joseph Cotten went on to a long and very successful career as a leading man and character actor in Hollywood.
Ray Collins (Jim Gettys) enjoyed a prolific career as a Hollywood character actor. Besides Kane, he's probably best-remembered for his role as Lt. Arthur Tragg on Perry Mason towards the end of his career.
Welles himself is an interesting aversion. An acknowledged child genius, he was a theatrical star since age 16, and became famous for his theatre and radio. He had in fact made three films prior to this (a bizarre short in 1934, a 40-minute film that was intended to be part of a hybrid stage play/movie performance in 1938, and he narrated a version of Swiss Family Robinson a year before Kane came out). As an actor, Welles came to be in demand for playing sinister anti-hero/villains and specialized in One-Scene Wonder but as a director he struggled to find funding for his works. As such Welles found greater demand as an actor than as a director.note That didn't stop him from making some of the most famous films in history.
Sadly averted for Dorothy Comingore, who delivered a powerful performance as Susan Alexander but saw her career derailed by alcoholism and poor decision-making even before it was permanently ended when she was put on the Hollywood blacklist.
Streisand Effect: Most people today, outside of specialists in mass media, know Hearst largely for his association with this film. Ironically, at the time, Hearst was somewhat aware of this trope as a result of his yellow journalism origins, and tried to avoid it by refusing to mention the film: rather than rail against it or say that it was terrible, Hearst ordered his newspapers to not mention it at all. This is thought to be a primary reason for its failure, that and bribing distributors not to play it in many theatres.
In the long-run, Hearst's persecution of Welles and sabotage of the film's release permanently linked him with Kane, to the extent that a biography of his life is titled "Citizen Hearst", and Kane's satirical depiction of Hearst as this controlling frustrated politician became how people remember Hearst. Most biographers argue that Hearst was not really as much of a Byronic Hero as Kane is, nor such a Domestic Abuser, likewise, Hearst's good deeds such as his championing of George Herriman's Krazy Kat, E.C. Segar's Thimble Theater (which gave us Popeye) and other comics artists is forgotten in favor of his association with the Yellow Press.
Samuel Fuller who worked with the Hearst Press in his youth and later became a film-maker (and who also admired Welles) noted that the real Hearst was not like Kane at all, arguing that Hearst was neither as personally aloof or a Control Freak. Even Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum noted that Xanadu was a Shallow Parody of Hearst's estate San Simeon. He noted upon visiting San Simeon that contrary to the extravagant, gaudy and tacky Xanadu, San Simeon is actually reflective of good aesthetic taste. Incidentally, in 2012, Hearst's descendants actually screened Kane at San Simeon in part to posthumously bury the hatchet, but also to highlight to visitors how different San Simeon was from Xanadu.
Welles for his part regretted the damage the film may have done to Marion Davies' reputation since he greatly admired her work in King Vidor's classic Show People. He also said that he intended Kane to be a larger-than-life media tycoon figure rather than based solely on Hearst, who he did not have any personal grudge against.
Throw It In!: Joseph Cotten stumbling over the word "criticism". It was a genuine flub, but fortunately both he and Welles stayed in character (albeit Welles grins) and Cotten follows up with a brilliant ad-lib "I AM drunk", so it stayed in the film as-is.
Underage Casting: Orson Welles was only 25 years old when he played Charles Foster Kane from age 25 until his 70s.
Towards the end of his life, Welles was asked to provide a commentary for the film. He declined, as he was done talking about it.
Welles was originally going to make an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but the executives didn't believe they could possibly stretch a budget far enough to cover it, so he made Kane instead.
Welles originally intended for Kane to basically be a different person in each flashback, since each narrator would remember him differently. Welles admits that although there is some of this present in the movie, it doesn't actually work as he intended. What could be written off as one person's biased remembrance could also be explained as Kane himself changing as he got older, which is what most people assume is the case.
In 1989, Ted Turner (having secured the home distribution rights for the film in 1986 through Turner Entertainment Co.) announced that the film would receive a Colorization, but this was cancelled following immense backlash among critics, cinephiles, and the Welles estate (Welles himself was aware of Turner's increasingly controversial pursuit of colorization, allegedly stating in 1985 just weeks before his death: "Don't let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons.") Supposedly, an entire reel of the film was fully colorized, but only one minute of it was ever revealed to the public (as part of the 1991 BBC documentary The Complete Citizen Kane).
Jedediah Leland was originally named Bradford Leleand.
There actually is an operatic version of Flaubert's Salammbô. Written in 1900, it's by Ernest Reyer. There have been two or three others. Rachmaninoff and Mussorgsky had a go at it, too, but Reyer's is the best known. Presumably they either didn't know about it or it wouldn't have worked for other reasons; possibly because the title role is sung by a mezzo-soprano (deeper register) and they needed something Susan (and Dorothy) couldn't tackle.
in part to posthumously bury the hatchet, but also to highlight to visitors how different San Simeon was from Xanadu.