July 10, 1942 –
Orson Welles‘ butchered masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons, was released by RKO Pictures, on this date.
After a disastrous preview (which occurred a week after the Pearl Harbor attack,) it was clear to the execs at RKO that the film was too long, too dense and too somber. Orson Welles, however, had decamped to Brazil, where he was in the midst of working on a film called It’s All True (which was never completed). Welles had been shipped out there under the auspices of Nelson Rockefeller, one of the chief shareholders in RKO, to make a film boosting US-South American wartime relations. With him out of the way, however, the onus of re-cutting and trimming the film fell on editor Robert Wise.
Like El Dorado or Shangri-La, a work print of Welles’ version supposedly exists in a vault somewhere in Brazil, tantalizingly, just out of reach. TCM is still sponsoring an exhaustive search through a major Brazilian film vault.
But wait, all is not lost, a Welles superfan named Brian Rose — himself an accomplished filmmaker — has used animation and countless hours of painstaking research to recreate missing footage from The Magnificent Ambersons. Rose hopes to eventually share his version of The Magnificent Ambersons with other Orson Welles enthusiasts.
The Haus of Dcaligari 