Here, for Xanadu's landlord, will be held 1940's biggest, strangest funeral; here this week is laid to rest a potent figure of our Century - America's Kubla Kahn - Charles Foster Kane. In journalism's history, other names are honored more than Charles Foster Kane's, more justly revered. Among publishers, second only to James Gordon Bennet the First: his dashing, expatriate son; England's Northcliffe and Beaverbrook; Chicago's Patterson and McCormick;
Citizen Kane (1941)
NARRATOR
A screenplay character in Citizen Kane (1941).
- lines
- 14
- words
- 782
- scenes
- 1
- dialogue
- 5.0%
- avg words / line
- 56
- shortest / longest
- 7 / 129
Sample dialogue
Denver's Bonfils and Sommes; New York's late, great Joseph Pulitzer; America's emperor of the news syndicate, another editorialist and landlord, the still mighty and once mightier Hearst. Great names all of them - but none of them so loved, hated, feared, so often spoken - as Charles Foster Kane. The San Francisco earthquake. First with the news were the Kane papers. First with Relief of the Sufferers, First with the news of their Relief of the Sufferers. Kane papers scoop the world on the Armistice - publish, eight hours before competitors, complete details of the Armistice teams granted the Germans by Marshall Foch from his railroad car in the Forest of Compeigne. For forty years appeared in Kane newsprint no public issue on which Kane papers took no stand.
scene 5 — INT. OF A MOTION PICTURE PROJECTION ROOMThat same month in Union Square -
scene 5 — INT. OF A MOTION PICTURE PROJECTION ROOMFifty-seven years later, before a Congressional Investigation, Walter P. Thatcher, grand old man of Wall Street, for years chief target of Kane papers' attack on "trusts," recalls a journey he made as a youth...
scene 5 — INT. OF A MOTION PICTURE PROJECTION ROOMFor wife two, one-time opera singing Susan Alexander, Kane built Chicago's Municipal Opera House. Cost: three million dollars. Conceived for Susan Alexander Kane, half-finished before she divorced him, the still unfinished Xanadu. Cost: no man can say.
scene 5 — INT. OF A MOTION PICTURE PROJECTION ROOMThen, suddenly - less than one week before election - defeat! Shameful, ignominious - defeat that set back for twenty years the cause of reform in the U.S., forever cancelled political chances for Charles Foster Kane. Then, in the third year of the Great Depression... As to all publishers, it sometimes must - to Bennett, to Munsey and Hearst it did - a paper closes! For Kane, in four short years: collapse!
scene 5 — INT. OF A MOTION PICTURE PROJECTION ROOM
Bookends
Last week, death came to sit upon the throne of America's Kubla Khan - last week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane.