This 2007 feature explores Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes – its Liverpool of 1956, the Hollywood movies in the picture houses and its evocative soundscape. We republish in tribute to Davies, who has died aged 77.
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Orson Welles‘ lost director’s cut of
The Magnificent Ambersons since he was in college in the 1990s, but now he has
Turner Classic Movies and a team of passionate producers to help him find what they call “the holy grail of cinema.” In 2022, you will get to see their cinematic expedition to Brazil’s film archives as depicted in
Best known for his directorial debut,
Citizen Kane, Welles signed on to direct his follow-up to that masterpiece with the promise from RKO studios that he would have final cut on
The Magnificent Ambersons. But then the film, a dark and thoughtful adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s hit novel about a wealthy Gilded Age family getting their “comeuppance,” performed poorly during test screenings. As Welles was already off to Brazil shooting his next project (the never-finished
Citizen Kane is overrated – but this Orson Welles classic isn’t
Orson Welles’s masterpiece was The Magnificent Ambersons, a thoughtful epic about American wealth and the motor car. But there’s a snag…
Anne Baxter arm in arm with Tim Holt in a scene from The Magnificent Ambersons
Credit: Bettmann
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.