Amazon.co.uk Review
Legendary director Orson Welles' debut feature
Citizen Kane (1941) has been massively hyped as the greatest film ever made, yet his follow-up,
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), is perhaps the finer achievement. Though the flamboyant visual style that marked
Kane is still in evidence, this time it serves a subtler purpose than mere look-at-me showmanship. Adapted by Welles from Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1917
novel, the movie chronicles the decline and fall of an elegant turn-of-the-century family amid the profound social changes signalled by the invention of the automobile. Spoiled rich-kid George Amberson Minafer (Tim Holt) grows up into a self-satisfied bully who is universally despised by the townsfolk. After jealously attempting to thwart the budding romance between his widowed mother Isabel (Dolores Costello) and car manufacturer Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), he gets his much-anticipated "comeuppance".
It's a brooding and poignant tale that gathers emotional force from Welles' acute observation of group dynamics. The core of the drama lies in those harrowing scenes where the family squabbles mercilessly on the staircase of their gloomy mansion--exhibiting a mutual dependency in pain that a later generation would characterise as dysfunctional. Just occasionally, the film breaks free from its claustrophobic atmosphere and opens out for some bravura cinematic spectacle: a ride across a wintry landscape in the new-fangled horseless carriage and a luxuriant ball that allows Welles' famous tracking camera plenty of exercise. If you find Ambersons a bit over-scaled for its short running time and strangely abrupt in its continuity, there's an explanation. After a disastrous preview, the RKO studio brass took the film out of the director's hands and slashed it from 131 to a mere 88 minutes. Compounding the crime, they ordered a few key moments reshot to water down the "depressing" tone, which explains the lame happy ending. Despite its desecration, The Magnificent Ambersons remains a masterpiece--brilliantly conceived, photographed and acted (Agnes Moorehead deserving to be singled out for her phenomenal turn as the frustrated spinster-aunt Fanny Minnifer). That's Welles himself reading out the closing credits for the movie, and the pride one can detect in his voice is fully justified. --Peter Matthews
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With an Amazon.co.uk 
