Robert Wise's most famous editing assignment. Rosebud may be the cinema's beloved red herring, but the mystery of Charles Foster Kane is solved very early on, and that is Welles's devilish coup. The gothic, labyrinthine aesthetic of Citizen Kane is its great mystery. Stylistically, the film is as distanced and inaccessible as Kane himself, protected in his perverse loneliness by a No Trespassing sign. The narrative is like the jigsaw puzzle with which Susan Alexander Kane vaguely amuses and tortures herself in the dark "theater" of the Kane castle. Welles didn't invent chiaroscuro lighting, deep focus cinematography, oblique camera angles, and lightning flashbacks, but he used them in a Brechtian way to alienate us from the monster he created. The hollowness of his American success story played out in full is captured in a magnificent overhead shot of Kane's art collection, crated for auction, looking everything like the naked city of film noir.