SOURCE: "Raising Kane," in The Citizen Kane Book, Little, Brown and Company, 1971, pp. 3-84.

In the following essay, Kael examines the film Citizen Kane, the cinematic milieu in which it was made, the film's biographical sources, and the careers of Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz to support her controversial hypothesis that authorship of the film's Academy Award-winning screenplay belongs mainly to Mankiewicz.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher. A great deal in the movie that was conventional and almost banal in 1941 is so far in the past as to have been forgotten and become new. The Pop characterizations look modern, and rather better than they did at the time. New audiences may enjoy Orson Welles' theatrical flamboyance even more than earlier generations did, because they're so unfamiliar with the traditions...