The Magnificent Ambersons

Experience the greatest films from Hollywood’s Golden Age back on the big screen, every week at The Loft Cinema!
 
Orson Welles’ beautiful, nostalgia-suffused second feature—the subject of one of cinema’s most infamous missing-footage tragedies—harks back to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Indianapolis, chronicling the inexorable decline of the fortunes of an affluent family. Adapted from an acclaimed Booth Tarkington novel and featuring restlessly inventive camera work and powerful performances from a cast including Joseph Cotten, Tim Holt, and Agnes Moorehead, the film traces the rifts deepening within the Amberson clan—at the same time as the forces of progress begin to transform the city they once ruled. Though RKO excised over forty minutes of footage, now lost to history, The Magnificent Ambersons is an emotionally rich family saga and a masterful elegy for a bygone chapter of American life, not to mention a touchstone for subsequent generations of filmmakers, including Wes Anderson, whose 2001 drama The Royal Tenenbaums is largely a tribute to Welles’ classic. (Dir. by Orson Welles, 1942, USA, 88 mins., Not Rated)