The Magnificent Ambersons
Available on VHS
Jon Langmead
The Magnificent Ambersons is the Orson Welles film with a lot of heart; more passions and less swagger. Citizen Kane, for all of its obvious greatness, is a calculated sledgehammer: part of the fun of it is how deliberately and successfully it tears down film history and begins again. I got to see Ambersons on film in 1998 in a film revival house in Baltimore; its power and pull are much different from those of Kane. While Kane set about making new film definitions with each painstakingly composed shot Ambersons subtly works within the boundaries re-imagined by its predecessor. A lot of film heads spend a lot of time discussing the film's rich history and how it should have been Welles' masterpiece; it's odd that it isn't better known by more people.
That has been changing recently. A&E has produced a $16 million version based on Welles' script, which was itself an adaptation of the Booth Tarkington novel. Wes Anderson has cited Ambersons as a direct influence on The Royal Tenenbaums and there is also a fine article in the January edition of Vanity Fair by David Kamp on the film's history and the ongoing controversy surrounding it.
Welles' original cut ran over 130 minutes; the cut that exists today is just under 90 minutes. Welles' version was famously re-edited by RKO studio executives and editor Robert Wise while he was in Brazil filming It's All True. Footage was cut, Welles' ending was replaced with one scripted and shot by the studio, scenes were inserted, and the score was changed so substantially and obviously that composer Bernard Hermann (Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver, Psycho) removed his name from the film. The version of Ambersons that made it to theaters in 1942 floundered and died quickly.
Unlike other Welles films saved and re-constructed during the 1990's—Othello, It's All True, and Touch of Evil—there seems to be little hope of finding the lost Ambersons footage. Judged by what remains, and depending on how biased you are going in, the film stands on its own. It doesn't need the Kane legacy and it doesn't need scholarly debate on what could have been. It juts between the deadly serious and unsettlingly raw (the scenes between Tim Holt's George and Agnes Moorehead's Aunt Fanny) to the almost joyously playful (pieces of the fantastic opening montage; the picture telescoping on the Ambersons and Morgans as they drive off after freeing their car from the snow).
The film focuses on the decline of the Indianapolis Ambersons, a once rich family whose era is in the midst of being ushered out by technology and the turn of the 20th century. George is the spoiled, entitled, youngest Amberson heir. He fights to keep his mother, Isabelle (Dolores Costello), away from Eugene, (Joseph Cotten), her former suitor who has returned as a successful automobile developer. Slowly, the family falls apart and their fortune dwindles. During the film's ball scene where George falls in love with Eugene's daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter), Eugene has a great line when told the ball is just like old times; "Times that are gone aren't old, they're dead. There aren't any times but new times." The film is a eulogy for lost time. George stubbornly stands in the way of the new times, desiring instead to marry Lucy and be a yachtsman. By the end of the film he has been run down, literally.
Welles had originally cast himself to play George but felt he was too old for the part. He opted for Tim Holt; a good choice because he doesn't overshadow the role with his charm the way Welles would have. Welles' script is beautifully put together and the audio mixes some lines to stand out in front, others to be obscured by train whistles or other pieces of dialogue. Every scene, every movement, every sound, every shadow is loaded with significance. There are some frightening silences, particularly during Fanny and George's conversation in the kitchen. The film builds on the contrast technique used in Citizen Kane where distance, blacks and whites, light and shadow all work together to create the scenes and the characters. The film is like a beautiful black and white graphic novel.
When George returns home for the last time, we hear Welles in a voice-over saying, "Tomorrow, everything would be gone." He could be talking about aging and accumulating loss. Ultimately, no one in film gets anything they really want; everyone loses something. The studio's final scenes are overly simplified; the answers all come too cleanly. In the clumsy ending, Cotten and Moorehead, two of Welles' original actors from Kane and the Mercury Theater, appear to be sharing a joke as they try to get off camera quickly as possible; "Can you believe we're actually saying these lines?" It has little to do with what has come before it.
Ambersons, only his second film, is often seen as the axis on which much of the Welles legacy turns. It was the film that signaled the end of his contract with RKO. It marked the end of his financial and artistic freedom; the remainder of his films were shot with little budget or cut to the desires of studio executives. The Vanity Fair article makes Ambersons into Welles' Rosebud; it makes it appear that he never really came to terms with the pain of losing control of Ambersons.
It's sometimes too attractive of a trap to assume an artist's creations are always thinly veiled references to themselves. Still, it's tough not to draw your own parallels between George Amberson and Orson Welles, two entitled young men who had and lost everything, and these tragic parallels undoubtedly are of more interest to some than the film itself. We get the sense that George will never again regain his lost stature. Welles, however, working outside of Hollywood for the rest of his career, made some of the finest examples of film as a work of art.
If any director's work bleeds the belief that film can exist and can be judged on the same level as a master painting or a great sculpture, it's the work of Welles. Most importantly, he worked in the era before directors were revered as great visionaries; before Scorsese, Spielberg, DePalma, and Coppola. He was working before people realized films needed and deserved to be conserved. He was working before movies were held up as art. It could be argued that Orson Welles is one of the driving reasons they are seen as such today.
Welles was a film master, the ultimate purveyor of smoke, mirrors, and magic. The Magnificent Ambersons stinks of heart, of Welles' desire to advance film as a medium and to help raise the standards by which movies were regarded. See it for the great scenes with George and Fanny, see it for Joseph Cotten, see it just to say you've seen it, but see it see it see it.
Related resources
Check out ambersons.com for photos, video clips, and best of all, scans of original magazine articles about the film.