Citizen Kane (1941) on screen in Newtown on January 18

Orson Welles’ controversial masterpiece, Citizen Kane, will be shown at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Thursday, January 18 at the historic Edmond Town Hall Theater in Newtown, CT.  Tickets are $3, and the matinee will be captioned for those with hearing impairment.
 
Director Orson Welles also starred as the recently deceased newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane.  For the story, a reporter investigates Kane's life, interviewing his significant others in order to decipher his enigmatic last word, “rosebud.” 
 
The reporter interviews Kane’s college friend, Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), who recounts Kane's marriage to Emily Norton (Ruth Warrick), "He married for love -- that's why he did everything. That's why he went into politics. It seems we weren't enough. He wanted all the voters to love him, too.”  Leland goes on to observe, "He never believed in anything except Charlie Kane.”  He believed so much in himself, he decided to run for governor, running on a platform of anti-corruption, promising to investigate and bring down his formidable opponent.  
 
In 1941, the character of Charles Foster Kane seemed to be drawn on real-life newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst.  Welles insisted that Kane was a fictional character, a composite of titans from that era.  Hearst, who reportedly never saw Citizen Kane himself, was so incensed by what he heard that he refused to run ads for the film in his publications, and even accused Orson Welles of being a Communist. 
 
Despite the negative pressure to pan the film, it received glowing reviews from several New York critics.  Citizen Kane won the 1942 Academy Award for Best Writing of an Original Screenplay (Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz) and was nominated in eight other categories.
 
Mary Fellows is sponsoring this film "to support one the best movies ever made that never made any money for the first 55 years, on this, my 55th birthday!"  Come see it and have a slice of her birthday cake, too.
 
Don’t miss a film in the 2018 Someday Cinema Series, presented by the Newtown Cultural Arts Commission. For all the details, visit bit.ly/SomedayCinemaSeries2018 or and Someday Cinema Series on Facebook.
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Submitted by Brookfield, CT

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