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Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane, released in 1941 and co-written, directed by, and starring a 25-year-old Orson Welles, is widely regarded by film historians as one of the most technically innovative films ever made, pioneering deep-focus cinematography and unconventional narrative structure techniques that were unusual for mainstream studio filmmaking at the time. The film's thinly veiled portrait of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, whose life closely paralleled that of the fictional Charles Foster Kane, prompted Hearst to launch an aggressive campaign to suppress the film's release, pressuring theater chains and threatening to withhold coverage in his own newspapers. Welles's use of a nonlinear structure, told through multiple conflicting flashbacks from different characters attempting to understand the meaning of Kane's dying word "Rosebud," was considered a radical narrative departure from the more straightforward storytelling conventions of Hollywood films at the time. Despite Hearst's suppression campaign limiting its initial commercial success, Citizen Kane's critical reputation grew substantially over subsequent decades, and it topped the British Film Institute's influential Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made for 50 consecutive years, from 1962 until finally being displaced in 2012.
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Casablanca
Casablanca, released in 1942 during World War II, was filmed almost entirely on the Warner Bros. studio lot, with production ending just as the actual Allied invasion of North Africa, on which the film's setting was loosely based, was making international headlines — a coincidence of timing that boosted the film's contemporary relevance and box-office success. The film's screenplay went through extensive last-minute rewrites during production, and the film's famously ambiguous, bittersweet ending — in which Humphrey Bogart's character sends Ingrid Bergman's character away with another man for the greater wartime cause — was reportedly still being finalized even as filming was underway. Casablanca's dialogue produced some of the most quoted lines in film history, including "Here's looking at you, kid" and "We'll always have Paris," phrases that have become permanently embedded in American popular culture well beyond audiences who've actually seen the film itself. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and its combination of wartime romance, political intrigue, and a genuinely bittersweet rather than conventionally happy ending has made it one of the most enduringly beloved and frequently revisited films of Hollywood's studio era.
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