The Magnificent Ambersons

In the Midwest the Ambersons are the richest family in town. Their daughter Isabel marries someone other than Eugene, the man she loves, and raises a spoiled boy, George. Years later Eugene returns as an automobile manufacturer. George does everything he can to stop his mother going back to him. At the same time the motor car is changing the city and the Amberson world is collapsing. Orson Welles wrote, produced and directed, from Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer-winning novel. Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Agnes Moorehead and Tim Holt are in the cast. The film's story is not only what is on screen. Welles's rough cut ran 131 minutes; after preview screenings RKO took control and removed more than forty minutes. The studio also reshot the ending to be happier. Welles later said that finished the narrative: without that part there is no plot, only some rich people fighting in their house. The excised footage was destroyed to free vault space. The print sent to Welles in Brazil has never been recovered. When more than half of Bernard Herrmann's score was cut he demanded his name be taken off the credits. It lost 620,000 dollars at the box office. It still took four Oscar nominations including Best Picture, entered the National Film Registry in 1991 and is now regularly counted among the greatest films ever made. Who it is for: anyone curious about the most famous lost cut in film history and about Welles's sense of the image. Who it is not for: viewers who want a whole. What we have is not the director's film but the studio's version, and you feel it plainly in the last section.