NFR Project: 'The Magnificent Ambersons' (1942)

 

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 19^th century. The Amberson 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 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.