Citizen Kane is overrated – but this Orson Welles classic isn’t

I avoid lists of the 100 greatest books, plays, paintings or films because they are inevitably meaningless. People have short memories and so rank the more recent above the antique. If strict criteria exist for evaluating such things (and I doubt they can, except at the extremes of the obviously good and the obviously awful), no two respondents to such surveys interpret them in the same way. And if somebody can tell me how, and why, Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending is superior either to Elgar’s First Symphony or Parry’s Jerusalem (which, according to Classic FM’s preposterous annual “chart”, its audience thinks it is), then please do: it isn’t.

Orson Welles’s 1941 Citizen Kane routinely leads lists of the greatest feature films. It wouldn’t even be in my top 50. A different matter altogether is The Magnificent Ambersons, the film Welles wrote and directed straight afterwards, about the ruin of a grand American family from a thriving town in the Midwest.

It was based on the novel of the same name by Newton Booth Tarkington, a double Pulitzer-prizewinner barely recognised outside America. Tarkington was no writer of potboilers, but a man capable of deep reflection. The novel, more perhaps than the film, deals with the philosophical question of how America was changed at the turn of the century by the advent of the motor car.

The central character is George Minafer (played with the right degree of loathesomeness by Tim Holt), an arrogant young man spoilt abominably by his mother, who was born an Amberson. It is her family’s wealth, its origin never quite explained, that fuels George. At a grand party given by his Amberson grandfather, George meets, and takes an immediate dislike to, Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten, a serial collaborator with Welles), who had been an admirer of his mother, Isabel (Dolores Costello, formerly one of the greatest silent cinema actresses). He is now a widower, making his own fortune as a motor manufacturer. The root of George’s dislike is snobbery; he idiotically believes that a man making his own money is unfit for the society of such families as his own, their money made a couple of generations earlier.

Then the dynamics change. George’s father loses much of his money, and dies soon afterwards. Now Isabel is a widow, Eugene courts her. He has become astonishingly rich through his car business, which means George detests him even more. The loathing intensifies when George realises he is pursuing his mother, and, in his arrogance, he forbids her to see Eugene. Eugene asks her to choose between them: she chooses George, who takes her to Europe – and as far as possible from Eugene. She falls mortally ill, but he swinishly keeps Eugene from visiting her deathbed.

Then the full retribution of fate is unleashed. George’s Amberson grandfather, off whom he has been living, dies. It turns out his estate is bankrupt. George turns to his Aunt Fanny, played stunningly by Agnes Moorehead, but she too is broke. He stops his unpaid training to be a lawyer, and instead takes on manual work in a chemical factory. The refined, pre-industrial life into which he was born has been ended by progress. The crowning irony is that he is almost killed when hit by a car. Just before, a crushed George has been filmed praying by his dead mother’s bed. The narrator – Welles – notes that no one was around to see George receive his “comeuppance”. In the end Eugene indicates, with a generosity absent from his supposed social superiors, that he will look after both the fallen George and his distraught aunt.

The tragedy of this brilliant film is that Welles shot a 135-minute version and then went off to Brazil to do war work: Pearl Harbor had happened during the production. The film is spiritually dark, and Welles knew the tone would annoy RKO Pictures. He also knew the film was too long, but he did not expect that RKO would, in his absence, cut 40 minutes and re-shoot the ending, which enraged him. All we now have is the studio’s mangled version; Welles’s rough cut, sent to Brazil, was lost. A new search has recently been launched for it. If it is out there somewhere, finding it would be a little like finding the Holy Grail – and all those top 100 lists might have to be re-written.