Happy Birthday, Orson: Library celebrates with ‘Citizen Kane,’ May 6

0

Surveys have called it the greatest movie ever made.  Amazingly, the man who made Citizen Kane was just 26 years old when the picture was released in 1941.

citizen kane posterYou can debate the film’s merits tonight, Wednesday, May 6, 2015, at a free screening in the Morristown & Township Library.  (Doors open at 6:15 pm, showtime at 6:45; refreshments will be served. Run time: 119 minutes.)

What’s indisputable is the genius of Orson Welles, Hollywood’s Boy Wonder.  The library is celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth with a series of his movies.  Next up:

Wednesday, May 13, 2015, 6:45 pm: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Wednesday, May 20, 2015,  6:45 pm: Touch of Evil (1958) (PG-13)
Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 6:45 pm: The Chimes at Midnight (1965)

Welles co-wrote, directed and starred in Citizen Kane, a film inspired in part by newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst.  Welles achieved national fame with his infamous 1938 radio drama War of the Worlds, a mock newscast that inspired panic about a Martian invasion.

RKO Pictures was so impressed that the studio gave the precocious Welles unprecedented control over his Citizen Kane project.  The public was less impressed.

The movie bombed at the box office.

LEAVE A REPLY