If You Still Don't Know What "Rosebud" Means, I Won't Ruin It For You

(#17) Watch 25 Classic Movies

1.   One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
2.   A Streetcar Named Desire
3.   It's a Wonderful Life
4.   Some Like it Hot
5.   The Terminator
6.   Terminator 2: Judgement Day
7.   The Princess Bride
8.   Ben-Hur
9.   Ferris Bueller's Day Off 
10. Sixteen Candles
11. Blade Runner
12. The Natural
13. Chariots of Fire
14. The Graduate
15. Cool Hand Luke
16. Casablanca
17. Enter the Dragon
18. Citizen Kane

I enjoyed everything about this movie except for the karate.

But seriously. This was my first Bruce Lee movie and I watched it with some reluctance. I am very squeamish and tend to avoid violent movies. And I did wind up closing my eyes during some of the fighting. But there was enough else going on in the movie to keep my interest.

For example I appreciated the symbolism in using the room full of mirrors to demonstrate that “the enemy has only images and illusions” to hide behind. Also how Bruce Lee refuses to use any weapon but his own body even though he is literally fighting in a room housing 100 exotic weapons.

(One of those spears might come in handy against Mr. Metal Claws)

Because Bruce Lee was a pioneer of this genre, I like to think about what things were being done here for the first time or in a new way, and what things would then be imitated for the next 30 years. For example, the screeching sounds he makes while fighting are now iconic and used by every idiot pretending to “karate chop” someone. Or how in the final scene literally 1,000 guys are surrounding Bruce Lee but they attack him one by one so that he has the chance to fight them off. Or the idea that karate is somehow a reasonable means of fighting crime. Were these all new ideas at this time?

Also even though several people are murdered throughout the movie, I was most disturbed when the villain pretends to kill his cat in the fake guillotine. Why is that? Why are the animal scenes always the worst?

Okay, I “get” it.

I get the formatting of the movie as a newspaper interview. I get why Rosebud represents everything that Kane had, lost, and spent his life trying to regain. And no amount of money or power could bring it back. I understand.

I just didn’t find it all that enjoyable.

To be fair, I knew what Rosebud was before watching, so the element of mystery was already gone for me. Is that such a big part of the excitement of the movie that it falls a little flat without it?

I guess I didn’t really understand Charlie Kane as a character either. In the beginning he seems like a pretty cool guy, out to change the world. The undoing of his political career, because of his affair, changes him into the mean old man he becomes known as toward the end. But even when he loses his bid for governor, he still has his newspapers. He can still control the news and make a difference that way. He can still travel the world buying expensive statues. I didn’t get why that would so completely derail him. Did he even love his first wife?

I was also confused about the…”Rosebud” (just in case anyone out there still doesn’t know what Rosebud is) being at Xanadu. If he had it in his possession, why didn’t we get some good scenes of him just staring at it, wishing he could bring it to life again? Did he even know that it was there, amongst his pile of treasures? Was it the same one, or just a replica? I would even settle for a scene from the beginning of Rosebud sitting lonely in the snow waiting for its owner to return. I didn’t feel that catharsis of understanding at the end of the movie that I was hoping for.

The movie did have a lot of great one-liners, though. Including:

“If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.” –Charlie Kane

“I always gagged on the silver spoon.” –Charlie Kane

“Old age. It’s the only disease…that you don’t look forward to being cured of.” –Bernstein

And then my favorite monologue by Kane, describing how he is two different people:

“The trouble is, you don't realize you're talking to two people. As Charles Foster Kane, who has 82,634 shares of Public Transit Preferred…Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel. His paper should be run out of town. A committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of $1,000 dollars.”

Contributing $1,000 to a committee to boycott yourself? If that’s not badass, I don’t know what is.