David Thomson's Top Ten Films: Citizen Kane

Intoxicating, complicated fun

Yes, of course Citizen Kane has to be here still, no matter whether it ranks number one or number 10. And please don't jump to any obvious conclusions about its importance being based in deep focus photography, the use of ceilings, overlapping sound or the melodramatic way in which a bumptious kid named Orson insisted on doing everything his own way – as if, the previous year, a Howard Hawks hadn't been as brave, difficult and egotistical, without anyone noticing, let alone protesting. No, the principle reason for putting Kane in the list is that it is such intoxicating, complicated fun still. It rocks.

But the segue from His Girl Friday isn't incidental. For this is another picture about the newspaper business in which the drive of satire (or despair) is directed less at the vanities of newspaper people than at the larger nonsense that newspapers stand for a progressive, informed society.

It's far clearer now, in the giddy age of television, that Charlie Kane's Inquirer was part of the showbiz trickery meant to delude politics, culture and so on. Don't forget the sanctimonious way in which Kane promises to make the Inquirer as important to his New York as the gaslight – and then extinguishes the light. To be sure, Citizen Kane has a very rueful commentary on those who would seek to run our affairs – but it is just as disdainful of the common man. The one is on stage, the other is his audience. Citizen Kane is a black comedy on America, so prophetic that it knew the looming possibility of a Ronald Reagan decades ahead.

So wake up with Citizen Kane. As if it was your christening robe, fold away the notion that the film is a bold attack on the tyranny of William Randolph Hearst, and appreciate how far it is a fond and neurotic picking away at the open wound of being George Orson Welles. In other words, this is a movie about the egotist in search of power and self-expression, unscrupulous enough to re-word his attempt as "love" or "the good of the people" – or even "a truly artistic movie".

Yes, Citizen Kane dazzled Hollywood and helped a new generation learn how to "see". But it had offended the old order long before they saw it, in that Welles treated Hollywood as a playground he could bully, instead of a corrupt system for which he should kiss arse and pay his dues. But don't feel too much pity for Welles, on that account. Belonging to that system was never his desire. He never belonged to any club or group except the varieties of being Orson Welles. He was as resolved to be thrown out as Kane is determined not to play politics by the rules – note that he cannot accept Boss Jim Gettys's compromise, and wait a year or two more. He has to go to Xanadu – his private kingdom, and the proper abode for all infant geniuses. (By contrast, Howard Hawks was so much more grown up in that he could make outrageous films with such skill that no one took offence.)

So Kane is a collection of bogus tricks? Yes, of course. Welles was a magician by instinct and training, and nearly every "device" in his groundbreaking film is either self-critical or a dead end. It's only as you sort through that famous novelty that you begin to detect the one authentic thing about the film – its emotion. For Orson Welles loved himself, without irony, qualification or restraint. And the heart of Citizen Kane is the way in which the elaborate flashback structure writhes around self, giving the pained ego so many chances to think about itself. In other words, while the film seems to be friends and enemies recalling Kane, it is actually Kane stroking himself.

Thus the tragedy and the dismay of the film. For Kane is an egotist without purpose, a gatherer of things who can easily imagine them all being burnt as he dies and who has only this wondrous pact with his audience – with us – that we alone (not that busy, unkind world) heard "Rosebud" and know what it means. Not until The Godfather pictures did Hollywood get close again to a film that describes the psychic landscape of the child tyrant. And that figure, of course, has always been the model for everyone in Hollywood.

Not mad, but alone.

It's that agony of passion that keeps the film alive, that desperate attempt to own feeling – as opposed to seeing it all go up in smoke. This is the product of a relentlessly materialist society, one devoted to nothing but showbiz surprise. And just as Orson Welles was a rare genius who saw all of that, he was also a genius who had not an atom of belief in anything except himself. So he grew vast and died.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk