So this is the movie that Orson Welles made right after Citizen Kane. It’s an adaptation of a novel that’s simultaneously about a) a rich family’s fall from grace, and b) the changing landscape of the early twentieth century as automobiles transform the shape of cities and cultural mores. (There’s a little montage at the beginning about the rise of quick-changing fashion.)

It’s ambitious, and tbh kind of a failure. Part of this is the fault of the studio — this is one of the most famous studio-butchered movies. Initial test screenings went badly, and the studio decided to make drastic cuts to the movie, removing like an hour of material and rewriting the ending against Welles’ will. (He was unable to stop them, as they had contractual rights to the final cut.) All the footage they cut has been lost, as far as anyone knows, so there’s no way to see Welles’ version, but from descriptions of the changes, I suspect it’s sort of a mixed bag.

Because a lot of the changes are things that toned down melodrama, as apparently audiences were laughing at these supposed-to-be-tragic scenes where people were weeping or whatever, and I think I’m with the studio on that. I’ve never read this novel — nobody has, it’s only remembered at all because of this movie — but I suspect that it’s unforgivably over-the-top on the melodrama front, in the way that popular books of that era tended to be. Even in what remains, there are scenes of people shouting at each other and being weepily sad in ways that seem way overdone.

But then some of the changes removed the “effects of technological progress” stuff, which is too bad — it clearly still exists in the movie as a theme, but it’s one that has no real payoff at the end, and would have if Welles’ vision had been left intact. As it is, there’s a lot of talk about it, but it’s kind of disconnected from the main plotline of the movie, a flaw that belongs wholly to the studio editing.

The biggest change, and the most egregious, is that the studio gave the thing a happy ending. This is DUMB DUMB DUMB, because the whole fucking movie is a tragedy. It’s set up as a tragedy, it plays out as a tragedy, and then in one last scene, suddenly a guy comes in and sets things right, and yay all’s well that ends well, whoo. It’s ridiculous and offensive, the worst stereotype of studio meddling.

Still and all, even in the absence of studio fuckery, I don’t think this would have been a Citizen Kane-level movie. No matter what, this was going to be a bit of a sophomore slump. It’s too broad, too obvious. It’s actually surprising to me that it’s on this list, because it really doesn’t seem particularly notable — it’s hard to imagine someone just straight-out putting this on their list of ten greatest movies, even though that’s apparently what happened.

But it is interesting as a famous botch job, and (thanks to those studio cuts) it’s a brisk watch at just over 90 minutes, and even second-rate Welles is still a solid craftsman, so I don’t hate it.