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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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The Godfather
The Godfather, released in 1972, was adapted from Mario Puzo's novel and became both a massive box-office success and a critical landmark, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and establishing Francis Ford Coppola as one of the era's most significant American directors virtually overnight. Marlon Brando's performance as aging mob patriarch Vito Corleone, delivered with cotton stuffed in his cheeks to create the character's distinctive jowled appearance, won him the Academy Award for Best Actor, though he famously declined the award in protest of Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans. The film's 1974 sequel, The Godfather Part II, is one of the only sequels in film history considered by many critics to surpass the original, and the two films together are frequently cited as the high-water mark of what a multi-film crime saga can achieve both commercially and artistically. The Godfather's influence on the crime genre — its operatic pacing, its sympathetic treatment of characters engaged in genuinely violent criminal enterprise, and its meditation on family loyalty and the corruption of the American immigrant dream — has made it one of the most frequently referenced and imitated films in the subsequent five decades of American cinema.
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