In the 1950s, Citizen Kane began to emerge as a milestone film—but not, at first, in the United States. In France, where the postwar study of cinema as an art form was flourishing, the first serious appreciation of Citizen Kane acknowledged the film as a cinematic achievement.

The Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II prevented importation of American films, so Citizen Kane did not reach France until 1946, where it played with great success. There, during the 1950s, a cadre of young film writers, including André Bazin and later François Truffaut, appraised Citizen Kane with a blend of appreciation for the film itself, combined with a near euphoric hero worship for the man who had produced so extraordinary a film so early in his career.

“To shoot Citizen Kane at 25 years of age,” wrote Truffaut of Welles in 1959. “Is this not the dream of all the young habitués of the cinématèques?”

Several French film magazines printed reviews and articles about Welles and his film, but it was La Revue du Cinéma (now Cahiers du Cinéma) that led the acclaim for Citizen Kane. In a number of issues, the magazine printed articles that analyzed Welles’ direction, Toland’s photography, and, most important, the overall influence of Citizen Kane on film as an artistic medium rather than as a purely commercial enterprise.

Thanks in large measure to film writers in France, the film world again began to see Citizen Kane as a masterpiece, just as it had done when the motion picture debuted in 1941.

That view had not yet been revived in the United States. With few revival theaters in operation, and the convenience (and profit potential) of videotape and discs still decades away, the vast majority of films disappeared: the negative went into the studio vaults (if the studio was responsible enough to maintain proper storage), most prints were destroyed, and the movie never returned to the screen.

For more than a decade, such was the case with Citizen Kane; praised though it was, the film did not have the golden box office performance that would ensure regular rerelease to America’s theaters.

For the first half of the 1950s, Citizen Kane was not shown anywhere in America where a ticket-buying audience could see it…