Citizen Kane Screenplay PDF Download — Summary & Analysis

The opening scene includes just one great Citizen Kane quote. Here are some of the other best Citizen Kane quotes: 

• “It's a tough thing to do in a newsreel. Seventy years of a man's life.”
• “But how is he different from Ford? Or Hearst for that matter? Or Rockefeller — or John Doe?”
• “Here's a man who might have been President. He's been loved and hated and talked about as much as any man in our time — but when he comes to die, he's got something on his mind called "Rosebud." What does that mean?”
• “I'll let you in on a little secret, it is also my pleasure — to see to it that decent, hard-working people of this city are not robbed blind by a group of money-mad pirates because, God help them, they have no one to look after their interests!”
• “Just old age. It's the only disease, Mr. Thompson, you don't look forward to being cured of.”
• “Charlie lived on power and the excitement of using it — but he didn't believe in anything except Charlie Kane.”
• “Remember the working man? You used to defend him quite a good deal. Well, he's turning into something called organized labor and you don't like that at all.”
• “To love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody knows…his own.”
• “If the people of this state learn what I found out this week, he wouldn't have a chance to — he couldn't be elected Dog Catcher.”
• “Don't you worry about me. I'm Charles Foster Kane. I'm no cheap, crooked politician, trying to save himself from the consequences of his crimes.”
• “That "Rosebud" — that don't mean anything. I heard him say it. He just said "Rosebud" and then he dropped that glass ball and it broke on the floor. He didn't say anything about that, so I knew he was dead — He said all kind of things I couldn't make out.”
• “I don't think any word explains a man's life.”

Citizen Kane Script Takeaway #2

Citizen Kane is a story about America

Citizen Kane encapsulated themes of American culture better than most movies before it. That’s because nothing was safe from Mank and Welles’s scope; not Wall Street, not The White House, and certainly not Hollywood. 

Mank and Welles built a multidimensional portrait of the target they painted. Charles Foster Kane was neither good nor evil, neither kind nor unsympathetic – he was complex, changing, growing, and decaying; much like us all.

If Hearst was upset with the insinuation that he bore resemblance to Kane, it was because he was insecure with himself. Kane was a character that capitalized on the power he was given, and earned the ire he received. To see him either as a condemnation of corporate greed or as a messianic social figure is to do a disservice to his characterization.

Let’s review an excerpt from the Citizen Kane script to see how Welles and Mank exposed themes of American insecurity and how those same themes still ring true today. 

Everything in American politics is diametric. You either support or condemn; you either exalt or despise; and ultimately you either win or lose. And the loser often cries “fraud at the polls” to sow doubt in the mind of the American public.

To insinuate Kane’s insecurity attributed to any one man would be absurd – not just in politics, nor industry, nor education, nor the playground; a loser will often cry “cheat” at the peril of loss. 

Kane deserved to lose his gubernatorial race. Not because he lied to his wife, but because he lied to himself. His pursuit of “justice for the working man” wasn’t built upon noble ideals but rather an unquenchable need for love. It’s because of this that we regard his characterization as perhaps the finest fictional representation of populism in cinema history.

Let’s review the “Kane vs. Boss Jim Gettys” scene from the final-cut. As you’re watching, think about how the scene is different in the film compared to the script – and pay attention to how the filmmaking exaggerates the drama.

To me, Rosebud is a symbol for forlorn desire. It’s everything Kane had taken away from him; his mother, his youth, and his understanding of love. But Welles and Mank never outrightly tell us “what Rosebud means;” instead they show us it was the name of Kane’s childhood sled.

Let’s check out the clip from the final-cut to see how Welles and the production designers built a labyrinthian set for the film’s final scene.

At the end of a man’s life, there lies a score of all the good, all the bad, all the gained, and all the lost – and although that may amount to a considerable sum, there will always be an outlier remaining. For Charles Foster Kane, that outlier was rosebud. For you, it may be something else. But whatever it is, it will likely be something you’d never expect, something tucked deep away in your imprisoning subconscious.

It’s because of this forced introspection that we consider Citizen Kane to be one of the greatest stories ever-told – meditative, harrowing, yet utterly uniting.