The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films: Part Two

Peter Hoskin and Matthew d'Ancona

4 July 2009

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Peter Hoskin and Matthew d’Ancona count down the final 25 of The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films

7.
The Magnificent Ambersons
(Orson Welles, 1942)

To understand Orson Welles’s sophomore effort — a tale of changin’ times, of horses giving way to automobiles, in turn-of-the-century Indianapolis — you need a bit of background information. The Ambersons we have today isn’t the Ambersons that Welles wanted us to see. The studio hacks thought his original 131-minute vision was too long and weighty for public consumption, so they chopped it down to 88 minutes in the director’s absence, inserted a few offensively mediocre shots, and discarded the leftovers. It could well be the most depraved act of sabotage in film history. As Welles lamented: ‘It was a much better picture than Kane — if they’d just left it as it was.’

Even so, there’s enough in the butchered cut to show that Welles had matured, both artistically and emotionally, since Citizen Kane (1941). I have in mind the dash and daring of the Christmas ball scene, which surpasses the fluidity of even Max Ophüls’s work; the light social humour of Joseph Cotten trying to start a car in the snow; and the whimsicality of Welles’s own narration. There’s even the occasional grim pleasure to be found in the studio-imposed clumsiness: the tonal shift towards the end of Ambersons comes with such scant warning or exposition that it feels like a jolt to the heart.

As much as I crave to see the full-length version of The Magnificent Ambersons, the one we’ve got is perhaps the ultimate testament to Welles’s genius. It makes a defiant, if unintentional, statement: ‘Look, I can make a masterpiece — despite it all.’ PH