The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

Orson Welles's follow-up to Citizen Kane comes to us today as one of the most studio-mutilated works of a major director ever, and to an extent it's easy to see where content has been crudely torn out or scenes refilmed to make them more sentimentally palatable to test audiences. Still, it's routinely cited as one of the masterpieces of American cinema, even in its compromised form, and so begs analysis as to what substance there is to it.
In a nutshell, it's the story of the decline of an old power family, an embodiment of American aristocracy, proving itself unable as the twentieth century begins to adapt to new technology, as represented by the arrival of the automobile, and new values, with the new money car maker seeking to marry the family's widowed matriarch and her son being unable to accept this. But one idea does not an epic make. It hangs massively on the character of the first-born scion of the dynasty, who is a ridiculously arrogant little prick, and should at least have been given a few redeeming characteristics for the sake of complexity, if nothing else. So the family goes down the toilet because of his whims instead of societal change, which surely can't have been Welles's intention.

5/10