Citizen Kane

The film opens at the sprawling Florida estate of Xanadu, where the elderly Charles Foster Kane dies alone, whispering a single word—'Rosebud'—while clutching a snow globe. A newsreel obituary surveys his life as one of America's most powerful newspaper magnates, and a reporter named Jerry Thompson is assigned to uncover the meaning of that final word by interviewing people who knew Kane. The story is told in non-linear flashbacks through five different narrators. From the memoirs of banker Walter Parks Thatcher, Thompson learns that Kane's mother came into wealth when a gold deed on her Colorado boarding-house property made her rich. She arranged for Thatcher to become young Charles's legal guardian, forcibly separating the boy from his parents while he played in the snow outside with a sled. By the time he reached adulthood, Kane had inherited a vast fortune and used it to seize control of the New York Inquirer, where he embraced yellow journalism and deliberately inflamed public opinion to boost circulation, including manufacturing a pretext for the Spanish-American War. Business manager Bernstein recalls how Kane assembled a talented newsroom staff and built his media empire. Kane's first marriage, to Emily Norton—niece of the U.S. President—eventually collapsed despite producing a son, the relationship undone by Kane's self-absorption and political ambitions. His close friend and drama critic Jedediah Leland describes Kane's affair with Susan Alexander, an untrained amateur singer, discovered by political rival Jim W. Gettys during Kane's gubernatorial campaign. Gettys exposes the affair publicly, ending Kane's run for governor and destroying his political future. Kane divorces Emily and marries Susan, then constructs an entire Chicago opera house solely to launch her singing career, imposing the public humiliation of a career she never wanted. When Leland pans Susan's catastrophic debut, Kane fires him but finishes writing the scathing review himself. Susan recounts her miserable years at Xanadu—an isolating, grand but joyless estate—including a suicide attempt, and ultimately she abandons Kane after a violent confrontation. Butler Raymond then tells Thompson that after Susan left, Kane ransacked her room in a rage, smashing everything, until he found a snow globe and uttered 'Rosebud' with tears in his eyes. Thompson concludes he has failed to crack the mystery—'Rosebud' is just a piece of a puzzle, he says, not an answer to Kane's life. As workers at Xanadu sort and discard Kane's vast possessions, one worker tosses an old childhood sled into a furnace; the camera reveals the sled's painted name: 'Rosebud.' The film ends on the smoke rising from the chimney and the estate's 'No Trespassing' sign—the meaning revealed to the audience but forever unknown to the characters.

Sources: Wikipedia, TMDb overview