The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
The words "Directed by Orson Welles" appear on screen, and something shifts in you. You sit up a little straighter. You prepare yourself. This is the man who made The Third Man producer Carol Reed look over his shoulder, the man who redefined what a film could even be with Citizen Kane. So when The Magnificent Ambersons left me checking my watch before the first hour was out, I felt something close to personal betrayal.
The film follows the decline of a wealthy Midwestern family, the Ambersons, as the world modernises around them and their stubborn pride accelerates their own ruin. On paper, it's rich material. In practice, at least in the version that exists today, it's a slow, stuffy, oddly airless experience that never quite catches fire. The melodrama piles up, scene after scene, but it rarely pulls you in. It plods. And for a filmmaker whose work usually crackles with restless energy and visual invention, that plodding feels almost inexplicable.
Almost inexplicable, until you do a little digging. Because the version we're watching isn't really Welles's film. The studio hacked over an hour out of the original cut, reshot the ending without him, and binned the excised footage entirely. Gone. Welles himself reckoned the uncut version would have bettered Citizen Kane. Whether that's confidence or hubris, I suppose we'll never know. What I do know is that the narrative seams are visible throughout. Scenes feel truncated. Relationships that should breathe are compressed. There's a hollowness to the whole thing, like listening to an album with half the tracks removed and wondering why it doesn't hang together.
And then there's the presentation itself. The copy I watched was genuinely poor, with a distracting white border around the edges of the frame that kept dragging me out of whatever spell the film was trying to cast. I understand these things happen with older pictures, but it compounded the frustration considerably. You're already fighting to connect with the story, and then the image itself keeps nudging you and reminding you that you're watching a damaged artefact.
I want to be fair, because there are moments here where Welles's instincts shine through regardless. The framing occasionally does something unexpected. A performance catches the light in the right way. You can feel the ambition underneath, buried but not entirely smothered. The bones of something genuinely great are in there somewhere, and that almost makes it worse. A bad film from a journeyman director is just a bad film. A compromised masterpiece from a genius is a tragedy, and The Magnificent Ambersons lands somewhere in that uncomfortable territory.
But I have to be honest about the experience as it actually exists, not as it might have been. Sitting through this cut, today, it's a frustrating, drawn-out watch that I didn't much enjoy. The story never grabbed me, the pacing is punishing, and the emotional beats land with less force than they should. I kept waiting for the film to spark into life the way Welles's best work does, and it never quite got there.
Two and a half stars. A fascinating historical footnote, a genuine victim of studio interference, and proof that even the most visionary directors can be undone by people with scissors and a balance sheet. If a restored cut ever surfaces, I'll be first in the queue. Until then, this remains one of cinema's great what-ifs, and a genuinely difficult sit.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1942 | Watched: 2026-07-26
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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