From: Garion1000 garion1000@gmail.com Again, its not that important, I am just curious. Could maybe someone with a copy of the encyclopedia Britannica could look up Citizen Kane and see if it mentions Rosebud.

_Very_ interesting.

I don't think I can answer the question you were implicitly asking, namely "how does the Britannica handle 'spoilers.'" Or perhaps the answer is that the Britannica doesn't deal in plot summaries so doesn't _need_ to handle them.

The 2006 DVD version has no article on Citizen Kane specifically. (!)

A search on exact phrase "Citizen Kane" gives these results:

“Citizen Kane” (film by Welles)

* major reference * discussed in biography * history of Great Depression * innovations in directing * production by RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. * role of o Mankiewicz o Moorehead * treatment of Hearst

The "major reference" is in a section of a long article about movies describing the Hollywood studio system! It is mostly about cinematographic advances in the service of Welles' vision:

Britannica says (about half snipped) "The most extraordinary film to emerge from the studio system, however, was Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), whose controversial theme and experimental technique combined to make it a classic. (blah blah) radically innovative use of sound and deep-focus photography as it examined the life of Charles Foster Kane, a character based on the press baron William Randolph Hearst. (blah blah) complicated flashback structure (blah blah) paradoxically revealing not greatness or might but pathetic insecurity and emptiness. (blah blah) newly available Eastman film stock (blah blah) plastic-coated wide-angle lenses opened to smaller than normal apertures (blah blah) cinematographer Gregg Toland achieved a photographic depth of field that approximated the perceptual range of the human eye (blah blah) techniques of ambient and directional sound that Welles had learned from radio. (blah blah) functioning on several levels at once, the historical, the psychological, and the mythic. Although recognized by many critics as a work of genius, (blah blah financial failure no more Welles films).

In Welles' biography, all it says is "In 1940 Welles, on contract to R.K.O., went to Hollywood and made the classic Citizen Kane (1941), which portrayed the life of a newspaper magnate (suggestive of William Randolph Hearst, who sought to ban the movie)"

Another mention, in an article about motion pictures, says "Different scales are occasionally juxtaposed in a single shot to produce an unmistakable dramatic or rhetorical effect. In Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) significant characters are repeatedly framed in the right or left foreground while in the background an action takes place which disturbs that character or which that character somehow controls...."

No plot summary. No identification of Marion Davies. No identification of "Rosebud" with a) a sled, or b) Davies' clitoris.

(Double-take) "Wide-angle lenses opened to _smaller_ than normal apertures?"