Orson Welles’ stunning follow-up to Citizen Kane was a poetic adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s tragic, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that chronicles the rise and fall of one wealthy family in turn-of-the-20th-century middle- America. Famously wrenched from Welles’ control and truncated by the studio, in it’s full form it would have rivalled Citizen Kane in the pantheon of cinema history. Yet, even in its unintended form, Welles’ magic shines through and it remains one of the greatest American films ever made.

As America anticipates the age of the automobile, The Ambersons are the wealthiest family in Indianapolis. Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello) is in love with Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), but chooses instead to marry the boorish Wilbur Minafer. But it’s a loveless marriage, leading Isabel to shower what’s left of her affection on their increasingly ill-mannered son George. After a twenty year absence Eugene, now a prosperous automobile manufacturer, returns with his daughter Lucy, who quickly captures the attention of the increasingly obnoxious and overbearing George. When George senses a rekindling of affections between Eugene and Isabel, he makes sure to go out of his way remove his mother from any possibility of a relationship with her first true love.

When initial screenings of the film led RKO studio bosses to become convinced the film would not be commercially viable, they hacked (and destroyed) 50 mins from Welles’ original leaving the director distraught and remarking that it looked as if it had been ‘edited by a lawnmower’. Welles later said, “They destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me”, famously confessing to Peter Bogdanovich “it was a much better picture than Kane—if they’d just left it as it was.” Despite this lament of a lost masterpiece this engrossing drama of American success, failure and the decay of the old aristocracy remains, like The Ambersons themselves, truly magnificent.

---