Paris (AFP)

Passionate about Orson Welles, an American documentary filmmaker is preparing to relaunch the highly uncertain quest for a missing film by the Hollywood master: the original version of "The Splendor of the Ambersons", which moviegoers have been without news for three quarters of a century.

Director Joshua Grossberg has announced that he wants to go to Brazil around September 2021, where he hopes to stay for a month or two to find traces of this film.

A documentary on this research is to be shot at the same time for the American channel TCM.

"La Splendeur des Ambersons", shot in 1942 just after "Citizen Kane", has become a classic, but in its version edited by the major of the time RKO, remind the initiators of the project.

"The original shots that were deleted were melted down to recover nitrate during World War II," they said.

Dissatisfied with Orson Welles' editing, RKO had dismissed the latter, cut 43 minutes of film, while adding despite the opposition of the director of the takes and a reworked end.

But a working copy could have been in the hands of Orson Welles when he went to Brazil to shoot his next film "It's all True", hopes Joshua Grossberg.

These are the images he wants to find and restore, then project this "director's cut" (director's version) on the big screen.

"I'm very excited because (the search for this film) is a 25-year odyssey for me," the director told AFP, who plans to explore avenues he has identified in recent years.

"The best scenario would be that a film collector has it in his vast collection, or even the Brazilian film library, but has not identified it," he said.

"Maybe a family inherited it and don't even know the value of what they own."

“If the film has survived, will it have been stored in good conditions?” He wonders.

"There's a chance it will work. So far no one has cross-checked the information I have. It's worth a try."

To the skeptics, he reminds that the long version of Metropolis by Fritz Lang, released in 1927, was not found until 2008, in an Argentinian museum.

Beyond this quest, the documentary must shed light on this legendary film and the figure of Orson Welles, one of the myths of the Golden Age of Hollywood, explains Mr. Grossberg, who hopes to also distribute his film in Europe. .

Asked by AFP, film restoration specialist Serge Bromberg underlines the highly uncertain nature of such a quest.

"Me too, I looked for these coils, which supposedly were in France, but they were not there," he commented.

While stressing that finding them would represent "the holy cross" of lovers of cinema history.

© 2021 AFP