¹ Some ignore the matter altogether: I count 9 lines on Rosebud in a 40-pp. chapter on Citizen Kane in Charles Higham's The Films of Orson Welles (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970). There are brief discussions in: Peter Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Orson Welles (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), p. 4; William S. Pechter, “Trials,” Sight & Sound, Winter 1963/64, pp. 6-7; William Johnson, “Orson Welles: Of Time and Loss,” Film Quarterly, 21 (Fall 1967), 15, 21; and Peter Cowie, A Ribbon of Dreams: The Cinema of Orson Welles (London: Tantivy, and New York: A. S. Barnes, 1973), pp. 34-35. Cowie and Johnson both seem to concede the embarrassing aspect of Rosebud but try to make it palatable by stressing its less disappointing aspects, such as the associations with Bernstein's evanescent girl-in-white or the little glass paperweight. Bogdanovich and Pechter both take the newsreel editor's disclaimer as the film's position on Rosebud. A somewhat fuller discussion appears in Joseph McBride's Orson Welles, Cinema One (New York: Viking, 1972), pp. 38, 41-44. McBride also emphasizes the newsreel editor's disclaimer and argues that Rosebud is intended to deepen the mystery rather than clear anything up. He fails to explain, however, why this is any less an oversimplification than the other interpretation of Rosebud would be. Andrew Sarris once reasoned that the shallowness of Rosebud as an explanation is appropriate to the shallowness of Kane's conceptions—a conclusion in which nothing is concluded, perhaps, but one of the rare efforts to confront the problem of accounting for Rosebud head-on (“Citizen Kane: The American Baroque,” Film Culture, 2, 1956, 14-16). Pauline Kael's widely read essay, “Raising Kane,” in The Citizen Kane Book, (Boston: Little, 1971), pp. 1-84, is an elaborate restatement of familiar charges from the 1940's about Rosebud—that it is facile and devoid of intellectual content, like the film as a whole, Peter Bogdanovich's reply to Kael, “The Kane Mutiny,” Esquire, Oct. 1972, pp. 99-105, 180-90, contains important statements about Rosebud by Welles. I thank Ronald Gottesman and Vance Kepley, Jr. for their assistance and advice.

² Stanbrook Alan, “The Heroes of Welles,” Film (Great Britain), March/April 1961, p. 14.

³ Welles, “Citizen Kane Is Not about Louella Parsons' Boss,” Friday, 14 Feb. 1941, p. 9, rpt. in Focus on “Citizen Kane,” ed. Ronald Gottesman (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 67-68.

⁴ The dialogue is transcribed from the screen; the characterizations in parentheses are from the shooting script (printed in Citizen Kane Book).

⁵ Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Simon, 1954), p. 482.

⁶ From an early draft of his Nobel acceptance speech, in Blotner Joseph, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random, 1974), p. 1357.

⁷ American, pp. 25, 27. There is a photocopy of American in the Theater Arts Library at the Univ. of California, Los Angeles (see Motion Pictures: A Catalog, Boston: Hall, 1972, 1, 514). I thank Howard Suber and the UCLA Theater Arts Library for making this copy available to me.

⁸ Of those who have suspected there is more here than meets the eye, Joseph McBride has gone most deeply into the matter. McBride argues that the dramatic locus in the film is Thompson, that the film treats the growth of his perspective, and that we ought to share his growing disillusionment with his assignment. Orson Welles, pp. 37–42.

⁹ Some plot variations: In The Front Page itself this reporter-boss conflict ends in a standoff. It is hinted throughout that Hildy Johnson if he stays on will lose his humanity and end up another Walter Burns. Eventually, Hildy is able to summon up the strength to walk out on Burns, but at the end Burns is playing a nasty trick that will get Hildy arrested and brought back. In Five Star Final the resolution is more embittered. After an editor's attempts to give his paper higher standards cause a drop in circulation, his publisher calls him on the carpet and tells him to build it up again by running a series of sex scandals under the guise of a morality campaign. The editor reluctantly goes along but quits the business after the campaign brings scandal and ruin on a whole family. Yet another variant appears in Hi, Nellie (Warner Brothers, 1934), where the underling gets into hot water because of his moral scruples and has to come up with a better story in order to be reinstated. A bank fails because of missing funds the day after the banker disappears. An editor refuses to print a story accusing the banker for lack of evidence. His publisher demotes him because every paper in town has “scooped” them. To get his job back, he turns detective and finds the real culprit. See “Raising Kane,” p. 20, for a partial catalog of newspaper films of the thirties. Herman Mankiewicz received screenwriter credit for a 1935 MGM newspaper comedy, After Office Hours.

¹⁰ Cf. American, pp. 322–25, and Citizen Kane Book, pp. 419-20, and see “The Kane Mutiny,” pp. 181-82.

¹¹ Hitchcock Alfred, interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, in The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak (Chicago: Regnery, 1971), p. 92.

¹² Houseman John, Run-Through: A Memoir (New York: Simon, 1972), p. 456. Revised Final Script, 24 June 1940 (copy in the Film Study Center, Museum of Modern Art), pp. 168, a-20, 159-62. Citizen Kane Book, p. 294. Welles to Bogdanovich, “The Kane Mutiny,” pp. 181-82. This paragraph is an outline of an essay in progress on the film's evolution.