The Magnificent Ambersons‘ Lost Footage Remains One of Cinema’s Greatest Mysteries

In 1942, Orson Welles made the greatest film that never existed. Coming off the critical success of Citizen Kane—a film that, despite not initially doing well at the box office, is now universally heralded as a masterpiece—he chose to adapt The Magnificent Ambersons. It follows a once-affluent Midwestern family living in the second industrial revolution of the 1870s, who are on the brink of financial ruin and obsoletion. But what might have been Welles’ true masterpiece never quite ended up seeing the light of day. When the director showed up to RKO Pictures with a dense 131-minute cut, the studio proceeded to excise 43 minutes and reshot the ending to be more uplifting. On the striking revision, Welles said, “They destroyed Ambersons and they destroyed me.”
He’s not necessarily being hyperbolic. RKO didn’t just eliminate those 43 minutes—they destroyed them, allegedly melting them down so that the nitrate could be used in the war. A substantial group of optimists believe that the footage is still out there, though. Turner Classic Movies is now sponsoring documentarian and Ambersons footage truther Joshua Grossberg to go to Brazil, where he believes Welles’ version is hiding, and return with the holy grail of cinema. If found, Grossberg and TCM will work together to restore the film.
But what happens if these pioneers actually find these lost negatives collecting dust in a forgotten archive somewhere? In order to truly understand the effect that might have on us looking back at the past from the 21st century, we must first look at Ambersons’ current ending, and the context of the society in which it was Frankensteined.
Part of why RKO changed the ending of Ambersons is because Welles’ cut performed poorly at a test screening. And the truth is, it could very well be the case that the director’s cut was an opaque mess; maybe we’ll never know. But the cultural context tells a different story. Ambersons was shot from October 1941 to January 1942, a time when much of the world was already deep in the throes of World War II. The United States didn’t enter the war until just after Pearl Harbor—which happened mere weeks before production on Ambersons wrapped. It’s not hard to imagine that, because of this, audience demand for happy endings was at an all-time high. More than that, though, American audiences yearned for a story of American prosperity.
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