Night of the Hunter
(Charles Laughton, 1955)
The kind of jerry-built accidental masterpiece that every suburban idiot in film school thinks he could make just that little bit better. Never mind the uniquely bizarre friction created by the gathering of such mismatched talents as Laughton, Lillian Gish, co-author Stanley Cortez, James Agee, Shelley Winters, Peter Graves and the mighty mighty Robert Mitchum, because someone's going to get their nasty mitts on it anytime now and bugger it up six ways from Sunday.
The Magnificent Ambersons
(Orson Welles, 1942)
They can do what they like with Citizen Kane, but not with its melancholy and beautiful successor. Because there are some 30 minutes missing from the final version of The Magnificent Ambersons (an act of revenge on Welles by RKO Studios, the pigs), one can easily envisage someone deeming it worth redoing and thus "fixing" it. After all, there's Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1916 novel to draw on, so who needs Welles' screenplay?
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