A star but not a team player

In January 1942 Orson Welles finished filming The Magnificent Ambersons, his follow-up to Citizen Kane (1941). When he flew to Rio the next month to begin work on a new project (which would soon be scuppered by the RKO studio), he left behind a rough cut of a picture about the decline of a genteel 19th-century family and the coming of a new world. The ending was meant to be devastating. The Amberson mansion has become a retirement home, encroached upon by tarmac and traffic. ‘Everything is over,’ Welles explained some years later, ‘everything is buried under the parking lots and the cars.’ Only this is not the end of the film as we have it. RKO executives had The Magnificent Ambersons re-edited, excising a full third of its 132-minute running time and adding scenes shot against Welles’s wishes. At 88 minutes it is wonderful but it is a ruin.