NFR Project: “The Magnificent Ambersons”
Dir: Orson Welles
Scr: Orson
Welles
Pho: Stanley Cortez
Ed: Robert Wise
Premiere: July 10, 1942
88 min.
This is a famously mutilated
masterpiece. It’s not alone: other noted films marred by missing footage include
von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), Browning’s London After Midnight (1927),
and Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937). But Ambersons was plagued by a
seemingly avoidable series of ill-advised edits and reshoots, initiated by the
studio against the wishes of its writer and director, that destroyed the last
third of the film and supposedly imposed a fake, happy Hollywood ending on it.
In other words, it’s
the classic romantic tragedy of American culture, one of those times when
wallets outbid hearts and a creative genius was stymied. It marks the point
after which Welles had to struggle to get projects made, an increasingly severe
drawback that seemingly drove him to self-destruction. This production turned
into a nightmare.
What’s there is
brilliant, an American horror story, in which an idiotic young man triggers the
loss of his soul as well as his fortune, changing from a prince of post-Civil
War upper-crust society into a wounded and tormented manual laborer. Welles
understatedly characterized the effort as “downbeat.” It is founded in a literal
horror of capitalism, the idea of losing it all.
The players include
various of Welles’ ensemble, the Mercury Players – Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead. They are expert. Peculiarly, they are vulnerable and grand, confused
and tragically certain, insistent on bending the world to their will until
life defeats them. A classic American anti-success story.
We open late in the 19th
century. The Ambersons reside in the highest estimation of the townsfolk of the small
city of the Midwest of America, as they are its wealthiest and most successful
family. They live in a magnificent mansion (its confines would be later used in
the Val Lewton horror films). The house is a character unto itself; its profuse
abundance of set pieces, art works, and elaborate furniture set the Ambersons as
an encumbered, materialistic result of what would naturally result no matter
who was in their place.
The cruelties of
American speculation kill them off and they deserve it; they have forgotten how
to thrive in adverse circumstances. All the characters erode during the course
of the movie; they are ground down by life. Nobody comes out unscathed. A
staggering admission about a society for which you’re supposed to be making escapist,
popular entertainment.
Its patriarch is industrialist
Major Amberson (Richard Bennett), who served in the Civil War. His daughter Isabel
(Dolores Costello) marries Wilbur Minafer (Don Dillaway); their son George (Tim
Holt) is a spoiled brat, a dolt who counts on his money to make everything
right.
Wilbur makes a
string of bad investments, and inconveniently dies. Inventor and automobile
pioneer Eugene (Joseph Cotten), new-made millionaire and a former suitor of
Isabel’s, returns to town and woos her. Simultaneously, Eugene’s wonderful daughter
Lucy (Anne Baxter) is both attracted to and critical of George.
Eugene and Isabel fall
in love; George furiously forces them to part, making his mother take him on a
trip around the world. His mother gives in to him, and destroys her happiness
and her health. She comes home to die; Eugene barges in, demanding to see her,
he is too late.
Throughout, Welles
and cinematographer Stanley Cortez’s vision is deeply focused, smoothly flowing,
delicate and voluptuous, capable of creating timeless images while advancing
the plot. The Amberson’s lighting is dark and moody. We are presented initially,
with corny glee, the absurdities of the changes in fashion, as we are given as
a comic preview of the havoc the changes of destiny that overwhelm and destroy the
characters in front of us.
(Bernard Herrmann's score, what there is of it, is excellent; the studio took out over half of it and the composer angrily ripped his name from the credits.)
The family falls
apart. Agnes Moorehead, fresh from playing Kane’s mother in Citizen Kane,
here plays Fanny, Wilbur’s sister and aunt of George. In a performance etched
in acid, she goes from a coltish young lady to a mad woman. She loses
everything. She ends up crouching in the darkness, up against a disconnected
boiler, crying and undone. It’s one the best performances put on film. Watch
her when she’s on the screen; she is really completely in the moment, uniquely and
dynamically there even when stock-still. When Isabel dies, she seizes George
and whispers into the night, “She loved you!” She looks up, and it’s a supplication,
and fervor, and heartbreak.
The city grows. It
grows dirty and dark and crowded around the Amberson mansion. The city rises;
and the Ambersons become irrelevant. George and Fanny must go and live in a
boardinghouse. George wants to study to be lawyer, but he can’t earn enough
while doing it. He goes to work in an explosives factory.
It is simultaneously
a grieving for that unique and signal American dread: the loss of fortune. The most heinous of sins: thou shalt not be poor. Financial insufficiency sits its victim in despair. Bankuptcy begs the mercy of
forgetting. The family shatters, and time passes, and things change, and we see
landmarks obliterated and memory fail. The family passes from a unified,
exemplary pinnacle to a fragmented sliver of survivors, not exactly a wholesome
message at the time for a country at war.
At the point where
George gets to his knees and prays at his dead mother’s bedside during his last
night in the mansion, Welles’ film held true to his original vision. We quickly
see that, ironically, George has been run over by a car and has broken both his
legs. After this point, two clunky scenes are obviously reshoots – the first
with Cotten and Baxter, and then Cotten with Moorehead – resolving all the plot
points neatly and bringing us to a close. Lucy goes to the hospital with Eugene
and reconciles with George. Eugene will take care of George and Fanny.
Is this what Welles
wanted? Is it congruent with the end of book? It is interesting to note that
Welles’ Mercury Theatre produced a radio version of the story on The Campbell
Playhouse on Oct. 29, 1939, a full three years before the film was made. Walter
Huston played Eugene, and Welles played George. Its ending suggests a
reconciliation in the hospital as well; it simply must have developed more
organically on film, accounting for the loss of a reputed 40 minutes of footage.
It's not just a history
lesson. The content is dark, twisted material. A young man’s unresolved complex
about his mother leads to her death. He spends himself into penury. He is ignorant
and savagely unpleasant, yet he is reconciled at film’s end and is guaranteed
salvation from the consequences of his actions. The ending negates what has
come before; George is saved by the deus ex machina, the god of the
machine that floats down and makes everything all right at the end. Perhaps this
miraculous deliverance is ironic, as it was at the end of Brecht’s Threepenny
Opera (1928).
So you have
three-quarters of a profound examination of the destruction of an American
family . . . then it goes a bit south.
Can we see the rest
of the movie? Can we recreate that missing 40 minutes of footage and
reintegrate into what was organically Welles’ intention? It has been announced
that, using AI, there will be an attempt to complete the film. The outfit Show
Runner, in consultation with Brian Rose, who has spent five years gathering documentation
as to how the film should end, intends to recreate it. They estimate it will
take two years. Will it pan out? Can we reach back into the past and fill in
holes? Should we? Can we not accept it for its tattered self?
What is there demonstrates
a maturity of vision that was profoundly deeper than what passed for show in
Hollywood. It was a revolutionary synthesis of vision and sound, of performance
and setting. IF Welles had seen it through, would he have nailed it, or muffed
it? Welles had the goods; like George in the film, oddly, he is a victim only
of fate and of his worst tendencies. His unnecessarily limited output was
always brave and challenging.
The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all
the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Mrs. Miniver.
