Citizen Kane

1941

Orson Welles directed, co-wrote, and starred in this study of a newspaper magnate whose dying word sends a reporter chasing down everyone who knew him. The story arrives in fragments, each witness offering a different Charles Foster Kane and none of them the whole man. Joseph Cotten plays his oldest friend and Dorothy Comingore the second wife he tries to turn into an opera star, with Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, and Ray Collins filling out the circle. Welles was twenty five when he made it, and Gregg Toland's deep focus photography is still the reason film students watch it first.