"There's no secret to how you attack somebody.

The "Godfather" of Fox News



The one who let it all slip away.

 You call them a dirty son of a bitch.  And if you can't use the word son of a bitch you put it in something else in the paper ...  And you always suggest sodomy.  Always.  That's important.  And the communism business, which was lousy, a cheap, rotten way to hurt somebody.  And it would stick in America.  You know, by pointing a finger and calling him a communist.  That could stick."

That is a quote from Jimmy Breslin about William Randolph Hearst and Orson Welles, from the Oscar-nominated documentary, The Battle Over Citizen Kane.  (Made by two gentlemen named Epstein and Lennon, which I have always found amusing.) 

And you would like to believe that things have changed in seventy years.  But they have not, really.

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Today sees the release of the 70th Anniversary Edition of Citizen Kane on blu-ray.  All editions include The Battle Over Citizen Kane with the 1941 masterpiece. 

What Pauline Kael said decades ago is just as true, if perhaps, truer today:  "Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened.  It may seem even fresher." 

She is so right.