Rosebud: Not Just a Sled

posted December 30, 2011

A still from "Citizen Kane." Warner Home Video

Much has been written about how Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane so annoyed its quasi-subject, media baron William Randolph Hearst, that he set the dogs on Welles. Peter Rainer, a Bloomberg News arts and culture critic, revisits the sordid response, on the occasion of Warner Home Video’s 70^th-anniversary re-issue of the film in a restored, three-disc edition, on both DVD and Blu-ray.

Rainer describes a documentary film included in the package, The Battle Over Citizen Kane, which tells the tale of Hearst’s anger at Welles and his co-screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Turns out it wasn’t the depiction of Kane/Hearst that bothered the magnate so much, but a Freudian reference to his mistress’s genitals.

Say what?

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