Citizen Kane

Charles Foster Kane: Rosebud...

Citizen Kane (1941) Directed by Orson Welles

"For those given to making lists, "Citizen Kane" still remains on everyone’s list of the ten best films; often as the best film ever made. But for Welles himself things started to fall apart almost immediately. The Hearst newspapers declared war on him for his supposed travesty of Hearst’s personal life. On Kane’s deathbed, he whispers the word “Rosebud.” This is thought to be the key, somehow, to his life. In the film it turns out to be a boy’s sled, which Mr. Stephen Spielberg recently bought for $55,000. In actual life, Rosebud was what Hearst called his friend Marion Davies’s clitoris, the sort of item that producers of children’s films tend not to collect. "

-- Gore Vidal, "Remembering Orson Welles"
The New York Review of Books, June 1 1989.