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. We may suspect that, as it was intended, The Magnificent Ambersons would have surpassed Citizen Kane, but we shall never see that version and so know for sure.

Welles would not again have the full support of a Hollywood studio. After being shut out for a fifth time, this time from Touch of Evil (1958), he gave up on the system, looking to Europe for finance and hospitality. Clinton Heylin rebuts the argument that Welles’s misfortunes had to do with deep-seated flaws in his own character, notably some sort of unconscious will to fail. True, he was disinclined to play the corporate game (or merely inept at it), but various moguls and accountants were happy to make life as difficult as possible for him. And yet, even with executives ranged against him, Welles was so talented that it still seems absurd that he should have fared so badly. Why then did he? Reading this book I was repeatedly struck by a sense of the seriousness of Welles’s artistic intellect.