(1942) “In those days they had time for everything.” Mid-America, turn of the 20th-century: Joseph Cotten pursues lost love Dolores Costello (ex-silent film star, an ex-Mrs. John Barrymore and grandmother of Drew), despite her imperious son Tim Holt (B Western regular and co-star of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), himself smitten with Cotten’s daughter Anne Baxter, amid lavish balls in the sumptuous mansion of patriarch Richard Bennett (father of stars Constance and Joan) and sleigh rides through Currier & Ives landscapes — although the noisy, smelly motor car is on its way. Welles’s adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzerwinning novel was his low-key, reflective follow-up to Citizen Kane — and the only one of his films in which he didn’t appear at all (though he does narrate, à la his radio persona) — chronicling the decline of a family and the end of an era, highlighted by dazzling, multistory sets, lustrous photography by Stanley Cortez (The Night of the Hunter), and Agnes Moorehead’s New York Film Critics Award-winning performance, its peak her tour de force kitchen breakdown scene done in a long-running single shot. In the wake of studio upheavals during Welles’s absence in South America for It’s All True (see March 24), Ambersons was shorn of nearly an hour from his original conception, re-edited, and its ending re-written and re-shot by others, but “even in this truncated form it’s amazing and memorable.” – Pauline Kael.