The Magnificent Ambersons

Made: 1942

Cast: Tim Holt, Agnus Moorehead, Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins

Director: Orson Welles

Screenwriter: Orson Welles, based on the book by Booth Tarkington

Cinematographer: Stanley Cortez

Producer: Orson Welles

"Oh, I don't know about going into a profession."

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

"A Yachtsman."

            It's an odd thing to watch a movie and to think about how it should be, rather than what is. Sometimes you watch a movie wanting to change what you don't like, or sometimes the director’s cut of a finished product is the way to go, but in the case of Orson Welles' Magnificent Ambersons the director feels like we do in the audience. He wants the movie on the screen to be the movie he made. What a concept, right? More than any other director, Orson Welles' career has been sabotaged by Hollywood Studios. He only directed ten feature films (don't even get me started on the ones he never got to release or make) and not even all of those are available on dvd (Blu Ray has about 3 I think). Yet many people consider him the greatest director of all time...how many of these people have seen all of his movies? It couldn't have been easy.

            Magnificent Amberson's would be up there with Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, Wuthering Heights, and any other number of period piece drama's from the late 30's early 40's, if it was allowed to simply "be". But the RKO studio had to tinker with it, they gave Welles free reign and total "creative control" on his first two movies and when they saw the cut for this one in 1942, they believed their test audience and their box office and the current world war fears, and they thought it was too depressing for mainstream consumption. So they chopped off 80 minutes of footage, had editor Robert Wise re-edit the parts into a condensed version and filmed (without director Welles) two or three new scenes that made the ending happier. The movie it should be said was based off of a book, and it was one of Orson Welles' favorites as well as a Pulitzer Prize winner. His movie would have stayed true to the novel. The Magnificent Ambersons now exists as the greatest tragedy in movie making history, and what we have left of it we have to imagine up ourselves. Thankfully, it is still a really great movie.

            It involves the story of George Amberson Menifer, whose mother was heir to a great fortune and huge mansion in which the grandfather and sister also live. The town they live in in the late 1800's is being rapidly changed by roads and the new invention the "horseless carriage" or as we say it, the automobile. The main manufacturer of this new "car" is Eugene Morgan who George's mother had also dated before she got married to her current husband. He comes back into her life in a big way while she is still married, and George does not like it. He also doesn't like that Eugene is the father of Lucy, his new love interest. George is afraid of course, that if Eugene marries his mother, he will be step-brother to Lucy, not boyfriend. The details of these two families are told very quickly at the beginning of the film, with a voice over by Welles in his distinct voice. George, it should be stated, is the epitome of a spoiled brat. He treats women like garbage, especially what should be considered his best friend, his aunt Fanny. Geroge becomes the wedge between the two soul mates, and keeps them apart for his own selfishness. It should be stated that Eugene is the anti-George: Self made man, building his personal fortune, working with new technologies, and well..happy and content. He is also a competitor for affections from his mother. "I don’t believe in the whole world scrubbing dishes, selling potatoes, and trying law cases," is one of his early quotes. He basically serves as the inspiration for the last 70 years of princes, sons, and daughters that act the same way, the best current example being Prince Joffery in HBO's Game of Thrones.

What happens in the movie is the stuff of melodrama for sure, but the way in which it is told is largely new. Welles works with cinematographer Stanley Cortez to make the mansion into one of the most life like creations in movies; it seems bigger than the town, actually. Zooming camera takes and life-like gargoyles among the patrons are common. The dialogue, also written by Welles, is relevant to this day. "The faster we are carried, the less time we have to spare." "She dances like a girl of 16," "Most girls of 16 are pretty bad dancers." "The times are gone. They aren't old, they're dead! There aren't any times but new times." Fifteen minutes in the movie, you already have a cast of interesting characters. Aunt Fanny, played by Agnus Moorehead, is a special kind of creation, with acting found only in a gothic melodrama from this era. She has three breakdowns about different things in life throughout the film, each on getting more hysterical than the last. Her brother Max (Ray Collins), often the moral center of the family, says at one point, "I really don't know of anything Fanny has got, except her feelings toward Eugene." She is also in love with Eugene, forming a sort of love triangle, played out again by the cinematography in one great shot where all three gaze upon each other with voluptuous eyes. Joe Cotton as Eugene sparks an intelligent conversation about automobiles, which are "going to alter war, going to alter peace." This is done at the dinner table where George insults him in an extreme way. Cotten has extreme range for an actor, and can be seen in the previous year’s Citizen Kane as a sympathetic best friend and a year after this in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt playing one of the most disturbing serial killers in any horror movie. Each line of dialogue fuels the story along and it is all done masterfully....until about an hour in the movie when it all breaks down.

Magnificent Amberson's would've been in the top films ever made on most critics lists if it were allowed its original running time. There is no larger crime in cinema then the burning of the Magnificent Amberson's final reels, an evil act of vandalism by RKO studio itself that was oblivious of Welles' cinematic genius. A two and a half hour movie was cut to 88 minutes. This was done while Welles was filming another documentary in Brazil and had already finished the movie. Composer Bernard Herrmann, who later did the score for Psycho, Taxi Driver, Vertigo, to name a few, had his name removed from the credits when he saw how the studio cut up the last part of the movie. Cinematographer Stanley Cortez states that three of the best scenes in the movie were all cut, including and extended ball room scene at the beginning, a tracking crane shot through the mansion that lasted several minutes in one take up and down the staircases, and the final scene in the original movie at Fanny's house and her final confrontation with Eugene. The last 28 minutes play like something out of a bizarre student film, and not in a good way: Lucy and Eugene have a scene where it looks like she is reading cue cards and spouting off some Native American words about her feelings toward George (truly awful), the grandfather has a babble about the meaning of life mentioning about how "the earth came out of the sun, and we came out of the earth!" filmed in an odd lighting that was possibly dynamite experimental film making for its time (oh well!), and the happy ending where everybody makes up and laughs and smiles at each other. This is not to mention the tens of scenes that are cut short and totally implausible, like Uncle Max's leaving at a train station.....for some reason. At one point George actually screams "This doesn't make any sense!" talking to Fanny, but he might as well have been Welles' voice talking to us all these years on.

Still, it's an amazing movie. Just a year after the much more revered Citizen Kane, Orson Welles had a different kind of movie that still resonates day. This is rare enough for a movie that is 70 years old, even rarer for an elaborate costume drama. There is a sense of supreme hopelessness to the movie, a sense of depression about how technology can change us for the worse which is really more of an idea for science fiction than a costume/period drama. The use of shadows and lights is even more revolutionary than Welles used in Citizen Kane, as characters often disappear in the darkness when the script requires them to and certain scenes linger like still photographs in your mind. The plot sets the stage, but watching it unfold is really fun, and one gets the sense all the characters would have gladly all destroyed each other as we watch George, one of the most dislikable lead characters for a movie ever up to the 1940's, get his "come-uppance". Lucy (a young, pre-All About Eve Anne Baxter) has an amazing scene (that ends too soon) towards the end of the movie where George pours out his feelings for her and she just sits there spitting platitudes at him...but once he walks away she has a great frown appear on her face and then faints in a nearby drug store (faints off screen, but why??).

Orson Welles is one of the greatest directors the movies were ever blessed to have, and I say it that way because the man probably could have done anything. He could have stayed in theater where he was revered like he was in the 1930's; he could have stayed in radio where he got famous doing the War of the Worlds broadcast that made some Americans believe we were actually being invaded by aliens; he could have gone to work for NASA to explore space. His best movies as a director: Citizen Kane, Magnificent Ambersons, Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil, make a great case study for human nature. Our emotions are what make us human, but also what doom us into unhappiness. We are frail, we are imperfect, we are going to make mistakes no matter how hard we try. Not exactly the stuff that Hollywood studios yearn for. He influenced future directors that exist in the outskirts and champion independent cinema like John Cassavetes, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Harmony Korine, and David Cronenburg, but also people that can make great subversive mainstream movies that tell seemingly moral tales with a darker truth lying underneath: P.T. Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Billy Wilder, F.F. Coppola, Carol Reed, Sidney Lumet, etc. I could talk for days about how much Welles influenced everything that came after his first two movies.

What Magnificent Amberson's shows us is the cinema's unlimited potential; it's a bastardized movie that is incomplete and feels that way. There are many examples of this in film history, take Eric Von Stroheim's Greed (1924) to John Huston's Red Badge of Courage (1951) to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner to (1982) to Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985). Perhaps the greatest crime is that there are no "bonus features" on this dvd, and no special edition or Criterion to celebrate its story (as of 2013). It could have been the greatest movie of them all.....it has the potential to be. It and Citizen Kane are the epitome of "grandeur" on the silver screen. But it all comes down to expectations. The audience of 1942 was not ready for the darkness of Magnificent Ambersons; the movie it should and could have been for the 21st century couldn't exist because we didn't exist yet either. Great art is never of its time.