The Magnificent Ambersons: rebirth for ruined Orson Welles masterpiece that rivalled Citizen Kane

The studio ‘butchered’ the legendary director’s 1942 film. Now an ambitious project is under way to restore it

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 Kane and 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.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jun/18/magnificent-ambersons-rebirth-for-ruined-orson-welles-masterpiece-that-rivalled-citizen-kane