The Magnificent Ambersons: rebirth for ruined Orson Welles masterpiece that rivalled Citizen Kane
The idea of deleting scenes from a film by renowned actor-director Orson Welles would be sacrilege today. But just after he made his masterpiece Citizen Kane for RKO in 1941, studio executives butchered his next great movie, The Magnificent Ambersons, burning extensive footage without consulting him.
Welles was so devastated that he later lamented: “They destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me.”
Although the film is still considered a masterpiece and is admired for its visual creativity, expressionistic lighting and complex camera angles, Welles had intended a dark story about the demise of a wealthy family in the early 20th century. But RKO cut about 45 minutes, deleting some of the more “downbeat” scenes and giving it a happy ending.
Now a US film-maker has almost completed an ambitious project to recreate Welles’s original vision for the film, which starred Joseph Cotten, who also appeared in Citizen Kaneand with whom Welles went on to make The Third Man in 1949.
Brian Rose has used the latest technology to reconstruct lost material and animate charcoal sketches that prompt the viewer’s imagination into visualising what Welles once saw: “The few who saw his original version believed it was the greatest film they had ever seen.”
He built the entire physical set, working out camera angles from surviving “road map” evidence, including various screenplay versions and storyboards.
Rose told the Observer that, of 73 scenes in the original film, 21 were either cut completely or reshot, and 39 were shortened: “Only 13 were left intact. They just radically altered the film. These changes were all made without Welles’s approval.”
Among scenes that he has now restored is a subplot involving a boorish uncle.
He said: “Many scenes were cut because the character of George, the spoiled heir to the Amberson fortune, was deemed too unlikable. In one scene, he behaves coldly to his widowed mother after learning she has fallen in love again.
“There was also a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy. The camera moves from one end of a ballroom and then back up the other end [while] you have about a dozen different characters walk in and out of frame, and crisscrossing subplots. It was really ahead of its time. Yet all but about the last 50 seconds of the shot was cut.”
He added: “The original ending is just brilliant, but the studio reshot it. The scene involved two characters who have not seen each other in a number of years and are reconnecting. It was eight minutes long, with only about two minutes’ worth of dialogue. The rest conveyed their awkward, pained silence.”
He spoke of his anger that RKO deliberately destroyed such footage, reducing the film from 132 to 88 minutes, and refusing to keep a copy, even against the advice of figures such as David O Selznick, the Gone with the Wind producer: “There were people who recognised the value of the film.”
Rose noted that RKO faced circumstances beyond its control. Although Citizen Kane – the story of the rise and fall of a fictional newspaper proprietor – is considered one of cinema’s most influential films, it was a box-office disappointment. It outraged the reallife media mogul William Randolph Hearst, who tried to discredit Welles and destroy the 1941 film, ensuring that it was not mentioned in his publications.
Just as Welles was planning to finish Ambersons, he was sent on a goodwill mission to Brazil to film the carnival in Rio. In his absence, RKO panicked over the response to a test screening – even though the audience was dominated by teenagers, who were never likely to respond to a dark artistic film about American history.
Rose said: “I’ve read the responses in the archives. They said the movie stinks, but every now and again you get somebody who says: ‘This is the greatest movie I’ve ever seen.’”
He added that audience tastes had also changed: “In the course of making this film, Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States entered the second world war. That led to a total shift in what audiences wanted. Look at the films being made in 1941 – darker pictures like The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane – and films made in 1942, where everybody wanted musicals and escapist entertainment because of the really bleak outlook for the United States and the world.”
He has recreated about 30,000 frames, and explains: “That’s why it’s taken about four years.”
There are still faint hopes that a copy of the original was sent to Welles in Brazil, but if so, its whereabouts are unknown.
Joshua Grossberg, a film-maker who is working on a documentary on the subject, told the Observer: “What Brian Rose has accomplished is significant in giving cinephiles, and Welles fans specifically, a glimpse of what could have been – the original version of The Magnificent Ambersons.
“Still a masterpiece in its truncated 88-minute form, Brian’s reconstruction deftly fills the gaps, revealing how much more complex Welles’s second film really is, both thematically and stylistically. Those who saw the wunderkind director’s original vision claimed it even surpassed his ambitions for Citizen Kane.”
He added that his forthcoming feature, The Lost Print: The Making of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, would be released in cinemas next year and would chronicle his 28-year search for the lost print: “It is, in the immortal words of one of our advisers, director William Friedkin, the ‘holy grail of cinema’, and we look forward to revealing new details from our investigation.”