DVD of the Week: The Magnificent Ambersons

The editing-room butchering of Orson Welles’s second feature, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” from 1942 (which I discuss in this clip), is one of the most egregious artistic crimes in the history of cinema. Not only did RKO, the studio for which he made the film, order reshoots done by directors other than Welles but they also recut the film drastically and destroyed the footage that was removed. The main reason for this was the intensely negative reactions at a test screening; it didn’t help that Welles was off in South America filming “It’s All True” while editing was being completed. There’s a fascinating discussion of the terrible story in “This Is Orson Welles,” a book-length collection of interviews with Welles by Peter Bogdanovich, accompanied by a wealth of supplements provided by the book’s editor, Jonathan Rosenbaum (including a script of the material that was cut from the film). One of questions concerns the reason that Welles to let one film go in order to dash off and make another. In a letter to Bogdanovich, Welles explains that it wasn’t by choice—he was recruited to do so as a part of the war effort—and that the studio had agreed to let Welles finish the editing, but went back on its word. In any case, the film as it stands is a vision of a lost world of graces and traditions that are as alluring as they are confining, as beautiful as they are useless—as well as a portrait of the makers and the victims of modernity.