Welles breaks all the rules and cracks like a plant out-growing its pot the very capacity of the category we have established. For of all the metteurs en scène he is the most gifted and the most startling. Like many of the others he came from the theatre…. Now, with all the resources of the cinema at his disposal, it was to be expected that he would be even more potent. Seen for the first time, Citizen Kane is just that. The punches are so quick and deadly that his problem becomes not so much one of keeping our attention as of getting us to recover fast enough to take more punishment. Every trick, every effect known to the expert illusionist and master shock-tactician is deployed, down to the screech of the cockatoo. Viewing the film again, one sees not so much this naïve desire to...