Sightlines · reception
How The Magnificent Ambersons was received
1942 · Orson Welles · The Magnificent Ambersons on Sightlines
The arc
In 1942 it was a box-office flop that RKO had cut by over 40 minutes and saddled with a reshot ending while Welles was in Brazil — yet it still snagged a Best Picture nomination. Today it's canon: it cracked the top ten of the Sight & Sound critics' poll in both 1972 and 1982, mutilation and all.
What’s debated
The eternal debate: would the lost full cut have topped Citizen Kane — and does the studio's tacked-on ending ruin the film or barely dent a masterpiece?
Its footprint
The destroyed footage is cinephilia's Holy Grail — the shorthand every 'studio butchered my movie' story gets measured against, with hunters still dreaming a full print surfaces in some Brazilian vault. 'The greatest film we'll never see' is practically its subtitle.
Where it stands
A consensus 'mutilated masterpiece' — you don't just watch it, you mourn it, which is exactly why Letterboxd reviews of it read like elegies.
Did you know? RKO recut the film while Welles was in South America shooting It's All True, junked the excised footage, and had others — including future director Robert Wise, then the film's editor — shoot a new happier ending. Welles never regained control, and the cut material is considered lost forever.