#952: WELLES, Orson: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

WELLES, Orson (United States)
The Magnificent Ambersons [1942]
Spine #952
Blu-ray

Orson Welles's beautiful, nostalgia-suffused second feature — the subject of one of cinema's greatest missing-footage tragedies — harks back to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Indianapolis, chronicling the inexorable decline of the fortunes of an affluent family. Adapted from an acclaimed Booth Tarkington novel and featuring restlessly inventive camera work and powerful performances from a cast including Joseph Cotten, Tim Holt, and Agnes Moorehead, the film traces the rifts deepening within the Amberson clan — at the same time as the forces of progress begin to transform the city they once ruled. Though RKO excised over forty minutes of footage, now lost to history, and added an incongruously upbeat ending, The Magnificent Ambersons is an emotionally rich family saga and a masterful elegy for a bygone chapter of American life.

88 minutes

Black & White
Monaural
1:37:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2018

Director/Writer

From the novel by Booth Tarkington (1869-1946). He was 49 when he wrote The Magnificent Ambersons in 1918. (Read it here.)

Orson Welles was 27 when he wrote and directed The Magnificent Ambersons.

Other Welles films in the Collection:

#1104: Citizen Kane (1941)
#870: Othello (1952/1955)
#322: The Complete Mr. Arkadin (1955)
#1191: The Trial (1962)
#830: Chimes At Midnight (1966)
#831: The Immortal Story (1968)
#288: F For Fake (1975)

The Film

A son loves his mother. A mother loves her only son.

No, forget anything Freudian (Welles hated him!) ... and step into a time over 100 years ago, when family fortunes came and went, the ballroom was on the third floor, and love meant that

“At twenty-one ... so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma. Forty can’t tell twenty about this; that’s the pity of it! Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty.”

The Ambersons/Minafers/ and a Morgan: Major Amberson (Richard Bennett), Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), Isabel Amberson Minafer (Dolores Costello), Wilbur Minafer (Don Dillaway), Fanny Minafer (Agnes Moorehead), and Jack Amberson (Ray Collins).

Isabel and Jack are children of the Major.

Wilbur and Fanny are brother and sister.

Lucy is Eugene’s daughter.

Cotten, Lucy Morgan (Anne Baxter) and George Minafer (Tim Holt)

This film has achieved a kind of cinematic fame for its mutilation (the original cut was 135 minutes), and although it is still eminently watchable, we can only imagine what it could have been.

Pearl Harbor happened during the filming, which wrapped in March 1942. Welles disappeared to South America to make It’s All True, and over a period of many months, RKO — fearful of bad audience reactions at a Pomona preview — cut and cut and kept cutting, until it was trimmed down to its present length of 88 minutes. (Welles: “edited with a lawnmower.”)

All the removed celluloid was dumped into the ocean. Nothing survived, other than a few stills.

So how do we approach what RKO left us with?

We can enjoy what remains. The first third of the film is more or less intact to Welles’ vision, but even to a first-time viewer, the rest is confusing, disorienting and choppy.

The first several minutes feature a light gray frame which surrounds the film, as if all this antiquity was a Currier & Ives lithograph.

Despite the mangling of this film by the studio, what remains is fascinating viewing. A few Wellesian touches which deserve mention:

1. 0:03:08. As Welles describes the antiquated “serenade,” we see the musicians running towards the mansion. Eugene Morgan is carrying a bass viol, and nonchalantly turns backwards for a moment and falls onto the instrument, crushing it. Eugene looks up / cut / a MCU of Isabel, looking sternly down at Morgan. There is never any dialogue saying so, but it is eventually clear that this is the point at which Isabel and Eugene are destined to be apart forever. (Was he drunk, perhaps?)
2. 0:05:42. A carefully composed shot of gossiping women. A sewing machine takes up the lower third of screen left. At this exact moment, one of the women is framed in the empty space between the top and bottom of the machine!
3. 0:08:03. Another carefully composed shot with (l-r) the Major, a statue of a cherub, Isabel and Wilbur — with George (as a boy: the uncredited Bobby Cooper) in the middle. Molly Haskell (see below) describes it as “what might be a group portrait by Velázquez.”
4. 0:09:18. With Welles’ cool, soft-voiced narration under the images, here begins the first glimpses of the mansion’s interior. Reportedly costing $100,000, the set features four walls and a ceiling — unusual for any Hollywood film at the time. Every penny shows. The camera glides around like the dancers. It is gorgeous.
5. 0:19:55. George is trying to make a date for the next day with Lucy. As they bicker, Isabel is in the foreground between them, in complete dark silhouette.
6. 0:23:16. Fanny and George argue in front of Fanny’s bedroom door, while the shadow of a peacock statue haunts the bird-like face of Agnes Moorehead.
7. 0:24:26. The ice-house scene featuring real manufactured snow! The most thrilling filmic device (the film is full of beautiful dissolves, fade-ins and -outs, and one wipe) is the iris in on the distant sled (0:29:04).
8. 0:39:20. A long tracking shot follows George and Lucy as they ride in a horse-driven carriage. The camera moves along with them and finally reveals the dolly track — looking just like a streetcar track!
9. 0:42:06. George insults Eugene about his newfangled automobile, who not only doesn’t get angry, but seems to agree with George’s point of view. However, all the while, he is tightly gripping a spoon, an actor using a prop to show ambivalence about his own words.
10. 0:48:44. A nice ECU of the bath faucet; George is confronting his Uncle Jack, who is taking a bath, about the rumors concerning his mother.
11. 0:51:37. A magnificent long shot of Jack and Isabel entering a room on the first floor. The camera cranes up to George on the second floor, who looks up at Fanny on the third floor. There were apparently many such beautiful scenes now dissolved in the Pacific Ocean.
12. 0:54:19. A minor error in the subtitles, which read [Jack’s voice] as Eugene reads a letter he has written to Isabel.
13. 0:59:18. The parallel (the film is full of them) scene of #8 above. George and Lucy are walking in the opposite direction and Welles managed to get beautiful reflected images of the other side of the street in the shop windows.
14. 1:00:34. They pass a movie house which show (fake) posters, including one for Jack Holt (Tim’s father) in a (fake) film entitled “Explosion.”
15. 1:07:52. Isabel on her deathbed. Notice the spider-web lighting, which is further transformed at the scene with a careful change in lighting and a dissolve.
16. 1:10:00. Welles’ voice-over returns: “And now, Major Anderson is engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life....” Bennett — so old himself, had to be fed the lines by Welles — is bathed in a flickering light.
17. 1:11:58. Jack is saying goodbye to George at a train depot. “Two gentlemen of elegant appearance in a state of bustitude.” Which brings up this wonderful webpage.
18. 1:16:31. “Please try and understand” ... this scene between George and Fanny is justifiably celebrated. Moorehead is at her hysterical best. It seems to have been one of the scenes that was ruthlessly butchered by the studio.
19. 1:24:01. Take a good look at the left-hand column of the Indianapolis Daily Inquirer. Surely, a Charles Foster Kane-owned paper, there is a picture of Cotten as Jeb Leland and his “Stage Views” column. Even the music is from Citizen Kane.

The acting is terrific throughout. The casting of Holt was brilliant — Welles surely knew he would have miscast himself — and Anne Baxter (granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright) at 19-years-old is positively radiant and plays poor Lucy with such subtlety. Moorehead was nominated for an Oscar (losing to Teresa Wright), and Collins, Cotten and the rest are superb.

The film is what it is.

Film Rating (0-60):

51

The Extras

The extras are plentiful and extraordinary.

The Booklet

Fifty-seven page booklet featuring essays by authors and critics Haskell, Luc Sante, Geoffrey O'Brien, Farran Smith Nehme, and Jonathan Lethem, and excerpts from an unfinished 1982 memoir by Welles. All required reading. The booklet uses an old typewriter font — the cover reproduces the scripts front page with all the Welles credits, and, cleverly, the penciled-in FINAL crossed out!

Commentary

1. featuring scholar Robert L. Carringer, who — as they say — wrote the book. His commentary fills in a lot of blanks and enriches the viewer with pertinent observations all along the way through this disquieting mess of a masterpiece;
2. featuring scholar James Naremore and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. They compliment each other, while they occasionally interrupt each other’s thoughts — but both are superb Welles experts.

Video interviews

with film historians Simon Callow and Joseph McBride

Again, packed with good info.

Video essays

by scholars François Thomas and Christopher Husted

Husted is an expert on Bernard Herrmann, whose score goes uncredited, most likely because he was as disturbed as Welles at the mutilation of his glorious music. Husted provides a chart showing all the dramatic and musical parallels in the film, most of which were made moot by the final disjointed product. If you’ve never heard of Ėmile Waldteufel (1837-1915), Husted will fill you in.

The Dick Cavett Show

Welles from 1970. Cavett seems completely awed, but Welles manages to spin some funny (and perhaps tall?) tales from his life. Jack Lemmon sits by, amused.

Silent film

Segment from a 1925 silent adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons.

Actually, the two-reeler is a 1927 edited version (“Two to One”) from the original 1925 “Pampered Youth.” This is a fantastic, early adaptation which Welles surely must have seen. There is an unbelievable out-of-control fire where Eugene rescues Isabel, thus finally gaining George’s approval.

Audio interview 1

interview with Welles conducted by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich.

Audio is often a tough sell on DVD extras. This one is worth your time.

Audio interview 2

from a 1978 AFI symposium on Welles.

Also well worthwhile.

Welles:

“The basic intention of the picture was to make this golden world and then show that what it turns into — and what is left of the picture is only the golden world and a kind of arbitrary ringing down of the curtain by a series of clumsy quick devices because the bad black world that came was just too much for the people at that time and I wasn’t there to be able to fight for it. I remember that even Joe Cotten wrote me in South America and says you have no idea now that we’ve seen the whole picture together with an audience how terrifying and frightening the last part of the picture is — it’s just too much for the audience. So that even though people who had my interests at heart felt that I’d gone too far; I don’t believe I had — that was what I wanted to do with it — it was a very tough picture and it’s still in some ways ... I can think of it as in many ways what I like best of anything I’ve done, but completely absent from it is what would have been its whole point.”

Radio plays

Two Mercury Theatre radio plays:

1. Seventeen (1938), an adaptation of another Booth Tarkington novel by Welles, who says he preferred Tarkington to Mark Twain! Again, imagine your ancestors — sitting by their Philco radio 
   with the Mercury Theatre on the Air 

    making these plays for your ears! Seventeen is quite similar to Ambersons in both style and plot, and makes for an hour of superb entertainment. If you can only just imagine it!

   
   
2. The Magnificnt Ambersons (1939). And here, of course, one can imagine Welles dreaming up his film as he produced the radio play. With only 60 minutes, he wisely cut out the character of Fanny — but he also managed to get in a bit more Tarkington that may have been cut from the film:

EUGENE

No, Lucy I wouldn’t worry too much about George. You need only to remember three things to explain all that’s good and bad about George.

LUCY

Three?

EUGENE

He’s Isabel’s child, he’s an Amberson, and he’s a boy.

LUCY

Well, Mr. Bones, of those three things, which are the good ones and which are the bad ones?

EUGENE

All of them.

Trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

38

51 + 38 =

89

By Director
By Spine #