Citizen Kane: Difference between revisions

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* [[Spinning Paper]]: A standard trope of early 1930s "B" movies, especially in films dealing with organized crime. It went out of style at around the time the [[Hays Code]] was adopted; any use after the mid 1930's is a deliberate invocation of the trope as tribute and parody. ''Citizen Kane'' is one of these. Making later parodies parody parodies.

* [[Stage Mom]]: At their first meeting Susan tells Kane it was really her mother's ambition for her to be an opera singer.

* [[Star-Making Role]]: Joseph Cotten, who went on to a long and very successful career as a leading man in Hollywood. In fact ''Kane'' was a Star Making Role to some extent for most of the cast, since the bulk of them were members of Welles' Mercury Theatre troupe and they were all making their film debuts together.

** Welles himself is an interesting aversion. He was a star since age 16, and became famous for his theatre and (cough) [[The War of the Worlds|radio]], and 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), but the movie almost destroyed his career.

* [[Stock Footage]]: The film contains a lot of this. For example, the newsreel has a scene where a man speaks to a political rally, denouncing Kane as a fascient. The crowd was simply stock footage and the man was an actor, filmed in a low-angle shot to hide the fact that no crowd was present. The background jungle footage for the picnic scene was lifted from ''[[King Kong|Son of Kong]]'' and, in an infamous case of [[Stock Footage Failure]], you can plainly see pterodactyls.

* [[Table Space]]: A very clever use of this trope to illustrate the deterioration of Kane's first marriage in a brief montage. The Kanes are shown at a small breakfast table being intimate and affectionate. We see snippets of arguments at other breakfasts. Then the scene ends with the Kanes dining in silence at opposite ends of a long table.