Francis Ford Coppola, who has been busy promoting his long-awaited Megalopolis, is October’s guest film picker for Turner Classic Movies – and his cinematic choices are impressive.
The 85-year-old director of the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now put his stamp of approval on four iconic films airing on the cable channel this month: James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein, Michael Curtiz and William Keighley’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus and Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.
Coppola noted that Ambersons remains a “masterpiece” despite RKO Pictures decision in 1942 to cut the film down from 131 minutes to 88 minutes and tack on a happy ending while Welles was shooting It’s All True in Brazil.
“My dear friend and wonderful colleague, the late Billy Friedkin, said that understanding the riddle of The Magnificent Ambersons is the Chalice, the Holy Grail of cinema,” Coppola said. “Because Welles never got to finish it his way. He had to go make another film in Brazil that he was obligated to do. What happened while he was away, RKO decided the picture didn’t preview well, and they started changing it. Welles was trying to rectify that with memos being sent back to RKO, and we never got the final Welles cut. But to see the film, it’s so beautiful and so unusual, that it just breaks your heart that we lost the chance of knowing… Who knows, maybe someday the real version will turn up, the real version of The Magnificent Ambersons. But even in its current form, it’s a masterpiece, but the real Welles masterpiece of The Magnificent Ambersons we do not have. It may be a lost film.”
Watch Coppola’s comments on all four films below.
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