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Presented by the Ridgewood Guild

“If you haven’t seen Citizen Kane , some consider it to be the Best Movie ever made” , PJ blogger and the staff of the Ridgewood blog 

Ridgewood NJ, 0n Wednesday nights from June to August 9:00pm (as soon as the sun sets and it’s dark enough to start rolling!) – The Ridgewood Guild will feature a complimentary movie for your enjoyment! Pack a picnic basket, bring your family and pull up some turf in Van Neste Park. Movies start when the sun goes down…about 9pm (8pm in August). June 10 – Star Wars June 24 – Citizen Kane July 8 – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off July 22 – Momma Mia!!! (Special Event) August 5 – Murder on the Orient Express August 19th – Harry Potter .

“There’s only one person in the world who’s going to decide what I’m going to do and that’s me.”
–Charles Foster Kane

On the film’s debut in 1941, the New York Times acknowledged that Citizen Kanewas “one of the great (if not the greatest) motion pictures of all time.” The paper hedged its bets, however, adding that “it was riding the crest of perhaps the most provocative publicity wave ever to float a motion picture,” and that this “pre-ordered a mental attitude.” The whirlwind surrounding the making of Citizen Kane is well known. Orson Welles, the brash prodigy of stage and radio, earned the envy and scorn of Hollywood veterans by striding onto the RKO lot with an unprecedented contract awarding him a three-picture deal, a massive budget, and the final cut of his first film—the Holy Grail of filmmaking. The controversial subject of his cinematic debut riled one of the most powerful men in the world, and upset the delicate balance of the studio system. Orson Welles earned every drop of ink written about his impending career in film.

Seventy years later, however, it’s clear that the New York Times need not have qualified its glowing review. As Times film critic A.O. Scottrecently remarked, “Citizen Kane shows Welles to be a master of genre. It’s a newspaper comedy, a domestic melodrama, a gothic romance, and a historical epic.” And it is still considered the best film ever made. In 1998, the American Film Institute polled 1,500 film professionals. The result was “100 Years… 100 Movies,” and Orson Welles’s masterpiece lorded over the list. Ten years later, the AFI commissioned another poll. Citizen Kane retained the top spot. As noted by the late, influential critic Kenneth Tynan, “Nobody who saw Citizen Kane at an impressionable age will ever forget the experience; overnight, the American cinema had acquired an adult vocabulary, a dictionary instead of a phrase book for illiterates.”

The contract that gave birth to Citizen Kane was an unthinkable gamble by RKO, but the studio had good reason to bet on Orson Welles. At 20, he lorded over Broadway, first with Voodoo Macbeth, a reworking of the “Scottish play” set in the Caribbean and starring an all-African American cast. He followed triumphant reviews by establishing the Mercury Theatre and rewriting Julius Caesar, setting it in Mussolini’s Italy. The curtain rose to universal acclaim. In a 1938 cover story,Time magazine wrote of Welles, “If the career of the Mercury Theatre, which next week will be six months old, seems amazing, the career of Orson Welles, who this week is 23, is no less so. Were Welles’s 23 years set forth in fiction form, any self-respecting critic would damn the story as too implausible for serious consideration.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/05/citizen-kane-at-70-the-legacy-of-the-film-and-its-director/237029/