Critics reviews

By means of his deliberate pacing, his recurrent narration, his august surfaces, his extraordinary actors with their measured language and rigorous protocol, Welles situates the viewer in a time, a place, and a condition of life, managing the kind of deep immersion that is more often accomplished by the slow accretion of prose than by the staccato dynamism of cinema.

The film’s symbolic index remains merciless, even as its characters struggle to redeem their devastating insight into their system of mutual assured destruction. . . . Is there any director who simultaneously loves and loathes his characters as much as Welles does in Ambersons? He demolishes them like Stanley Kubrick; he adores them like Jean Renoir.

Much would of course be lost in RKO’s edit, but even in its surviving form, the film is a stunning demonstration of Welles’s genius for pinpointing the most expressive moments in the original text, while letting others go by.

Welles so deftly manages rhythm and tone—a complex blend of irony and empathy—and the intertwining of aural and visual effects that, even as time rolls relentlessly on and bitter memories accumulate, we constantly feel the exhilaration of virtuoso storytelling.

It is a melancholic and leisurely film . . . filled with love and life, and lingering moments, and in many ways very different from Citizen Kane. That feels like the work of an ambitious young man, eager to show off, while The Magnificent Ambersons feels like the work of a wise old man with nothing to prove. Yet it is still dazzling. The ball sequence is incredible for example.

Welles' great films all perform magic tricks: the tracking shot in Touch Of Evil, the funhouse climax from The Lady From Shanghai, the collage of Shakespeare texts in Chimes At Midnight, the misdirection of F For Fake. But Ambersons has at least two. The first is that it's a work of terrific wit that pokes fun of the mores and fashions of a bygone era but is also deeply sensitive; I'd rank it with the similarly personal Chimes At Midnight as one of Welles' most emotionally sincere films.

J'aime le souvenir de ces époques nues. (Baudelaire) There's no nostalgia like a modernist's nostalgia, Orson Welles on the "disappearing miasma" of Midwestern aristocracy is an ornate procession of engravings, half fondness and half dread... Welles' masterpiece, truncated torso and all, therefore the most exquisite of American pictures—the ultimate testament from a conjurer not yet thirty but already painfully conscious of the difficult art of growing old gracefully.

Personally speaking, my own life would be different if the world contained such an object as a complete Magnificent Ambersons. When I saw this desecrated masterpiece for the first time at the age of 13, I could actually feel where Welles' footage stopped and RKO's began: Ambersons is such a profoundly physical experience that the difference is plain.

While most critics would vote for Citizen Kane as the greatest American film, or certainly Orson Welles' best film, The Magnificent Ambersons has always moved me more deeply. Although inarguably compromised by the fake "happy ending" imposed by RKO when they took the film out of Welles' hands and recut it, Ambersons is still a masterpiece... with its richly-layered story of pride, loss and miscommunication, of Midwestern grandees losing their preeminence under the onslaught of industrialisation.

[It] was famously butchered by RKO — shorn of its final reels, with a sappy happy ending slapped on. But its greatness remains evident throughout. The story takes in decades and generations, but it's told through lighthearted vignettes; its melancholy is cumulative and subtle.

Unlike the glittering puzzle of "Citizen Kane," Welles's Booth Tarkington adaptation, "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942), unfolds like a grave, heartrendingly luminous dream, but both films evoke a piercing nostalgia. Though "The Magnificent Ambersons" was re-edited and given a less grim ending while Welles was out of the country working on another project, what remains is still haunting in its rapt beauty.

Many other films have sought to present the past, recreating the settings and costumes and props of an era. But Ambersons is about pastness. It conveys a melancholy recognition that things are always changing, that we struggle to make sense of events only after it's too late to affect them. It's a film centered on missed opportunities and what might have been.