Citizen Kane - Legacy

Legacy

Despite the critical success of Citizen Kane it nevertheless marked a decline in Welles's fortunes. In the book Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, Joseph McBride argues that the problems in making Citizen Kane caused lasting damage to his career. The damage started with RKO violating its contract with him by taking his next film The Magnificent Ambersons away from him and adding a happy ending against his will. Hollywood's treatment of Welles and his work ultimately led to his self-imposed exile in Europe for much of the rest of his career where he found a more sympathetic audience.

The documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane posits that Welles's own life story resembled that of Kane far more than Hearst's: an overreaching wunderkind who ended up mournful and lonely in his old age. Citizen Kane's editor Robert Wise summarized: "Well, I thought often afterwards, only in recent years when I saw the film again two or three years ago when they had the fiftieth anniversary, and I suddenly thought to myself, well, Orson was doing an autobiographical film and didn't realize it, because it's rather much the same, you know. You start here, and you have a big rise and tremendous prominence and fame and success and whatnot, and then tail off and tail off and tail off. And at least the arc of the two lives were very much the same..."

Peter Bogdanovich, who was friends with Welles in his later years, disagreed with this on his own commentary on the Citizen Kane DVD, saying that Kane was nothing like Welles. Kane, he said, "had none of the qualities of an artist, Orson had all the qualities of an artist." Bogdanovich also noted that Welles was never bitter "about all the bad things that happened to him", and was a man who enjoyed life in his final years. In addition, critics have reassessed Welles’ career after his death, saying that he wasn’t a failed Hollywood filmmaker, but a successful independent filmmaker.

Film critic Kim Newman believed the film's influence was visible in the film noir that followed, as well as the 1942 Hepburn-Tracy film Keeper of the Flame. Film directors Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, Francis Ford Coppola, Bryan Singer, Stephen Frears, Brian De Palma, John Frankenheimer, the Coen brothers, Sergio Leone and Luc Besson are all fans of Citizen Kane and it influenced their work.

The film's structure influenced the biographical films Lawrence of Arabia and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters – which begin with the subject's death and show their life in flashbacks – as well as Welles's thriller Mr. Arkadin.

The film, for its topic of mass media manipulation of public opinion, is also famous for having been frequently presented as the perfect example to demonstrate the power that media have on a society in influencing the democratic process. This exemplary citation of the film lasted till the end of the 20th century, when the paradigm of mass media depicted in Citizen Kane needed to be updated to take into account more globalized and more internet-based media scenarios. Since the film was based on William Randolph Hearst's actions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that model of media influence lasted for almost a century. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is sometimes labeled as a latter-day Citizen Kane.