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 It's all in French monsieur! Here's a sample: "le film est une brillante et
melacolique evocation des mutations economiques et sociales de l'Amerique".
Whew! I couldn't have said it better myself! 1942, 88 minutes, DVD
Rich family takes it in the poop shoot! Woo-hoo! You know how I live to see
the elite get their's in the movies and real life and Orson Welles must've
thought that audiences back during the war wanted to see the same thing in this
almost-sprawling tale of a rich family that slowly fades in the face of
changing times and unconsummated and all-consuming passions. Welles, most
famous for being the quarter ton of fun that shilled for cheap wine, also may
be known to some of you more scholarly sorts for his movie Citizen Kane, which
also tanked at the box office. It turns out that even though Orson would have
been right at home telling stories about people's dysfunctions and foibles
through rich and powerful characters and his remarkably fluid camera work and
technical prowess in today's theatres, the Greatest Generation was having none
of it. Now of course, you've got films about how messed up people are coming
out in regular intervals and we don't even require that the families be wealthy
to enjoy and identify with their problems. In fact, movies like American Beauty and The Royal Tenenbaums portray middle class, if idiosyncratic, families dealing with all sorts of
issues and manage to be darlings of both critics and audiences. Oh, Orson
you were born about fifty years too early. But at least
you got to work with people like Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead instead of
Owen
Wilson and Mena Suvari. The Magnificent Ambersons is like the grandfather of all these "my family is crappy and ruined my life"
movies that all of us love, mainly because our own family has ruined our lives
and we like to see that we aren't alone in feeling like we were being fed a
steady
diet of pooh sandwiches by life and the people that are supposed to love us. I
really don't think there was any kind of acknowledgment by the general
population back in the forties that they were leading unhappy and empty lives.
Probably wasn't allowed during the war or something. Maybe they were too busy
worrying that Fritz was going to come over and steal their women. In any
event, The Magnificent Ambersons, as Kane before it to some extent, failed to find an audience,
was a big bomb, and spelled the end of Orson's career as big time studio
director that could do whatever he wanted with as much money as he wanted.  I suppose I should get the obligatory whining out of the way regarding how RKO
butchered this release. As many of you probably know, this 88 minute movie
actually had about fifty minutes of it shaved off by the boys at RKO after the
film had a disastrous test screening. For some reason they thought they
should show this movie to a bunch of punks on a Saturday night after these
fools had already sat through a test screening of the upbeat musical The
Fleet's In. It turns out that people weren't quite prepared to sit through
Orson's thoughtful meditation on the end of one way of life and the coming
technological boom after watching sailors sing and dance. Just to secure
themselves their place as some of the great villains in cinema history, they
burned all the footage they cut and none of that footage survives. They also
managed to tack on a happy ending to this film that goes so much against the
grain of everything you had been watching that you can't help but substitute a
grimace for the smile that crosses one of the character's faces as the movie
draws to a close. You just know in your bones that there would be no way this
character would be beaming after hearing about how the guy she's pined
away for in silence for years tells her that he's still wrapped up in her
sister even though she's been dead for awhile. The movie really does suffer
from the missing footage (Welles has said that they pretty much chopped the
third act) and I find myself in the unprecedented position of lamenting the
fact that this movie wasn't longer. Once the first half of the film has
finished, the remainder feels rushed and you are left feeling cheated since
Welles
did such of good job of setting the stage for what should have been a grand
finale with George Amberson having to deal with how much his life had eroded
since his privileged childhood. At the very beginning of the film, Welles tells
us (he was the narrator) that everyone in town wanted to see George get his
comeuppance and the entire movie was structured to show us that life has a way
of grinding down the sharpest of us and usually does it more than was deserved.
Just when things get going tough for George, the movie ends with him in the
hospital and apparently suddenly being a decent chap, even though he was still
the callow, pampered youth he had always been just a few scenes before. It
reminded me a bit of the ending of Kings Row , where they had two hours of gloom
and doom and then finished up with fifteen seconds of characters smiling at
each other, saying things were going to be okay. Do we long for happy endings?
Yes. Do we believe them? No.  In spite of the studio's meddling with this film, is it still worth seeing?
Without question, this one, even in its truncated form manages to weave an
enthralling tale of a family who was the apex of their time and what happens
when their time passes them by. Welles chooses the character of George, the
only son of Wilbur and Isabel (she is the Amberson) to represent the ideal
that nothing is forever and that the only thing in life that is inevitable is
change. Those that resist change, even if that change isn't necessarily for
the better are doomed to what amounts to a slow extinction. Wells sets all
this up with extraordinary care, showing us the fabulous life (champagne
dreams, no doubt!) these Ambersons lead, complete with their fancy clothes, the
best house in town (even if it did resemble the Munsters' house a tad), their
gigantic balls, and carefree sleigh rides. While we see the family holding
court and generally enjoying the fruits of all their wealth, we know from the
narrator that we aren't seeing a family in their prime, but are seeing them as
they used to be for years and years. We know that times are changing and that
this type of genteel and privileged life can't on forever. We have seen how
Isabel has denied herself her true love in Eugene Morgan (presumably because
he was a wild drinker, though this is only alluded to much later - I was frankly
never convinced we were given a satisfactory reason why she married someone
else, but then again the ways of the heart are often times mysterious and varied
are they not?) and has married the steady and unremarkable Wilbur. From this
union they had George, a hell raiser loathed by the townspeople and a kid whose
parents did exactly what he wanted. There's a great scene where his parents
are trying to tell him that he can't cuss out the townspeople when he gets mad
and he basically tells his parents to get bent and when they press him on it he
agrees that he won't use that kind of language again, adding as an after
thought,
"unless they make me mad". You can see the kind of person George will become
in these early scenes, a person for whom the rules don't apply and who is
entitled to treat people as beneath him. Is this kid's last name Skakel? I
was hoping there wasn't going to be a scene of him up in a tree masturbating or
something. 
The bulk of the movie takes place about twenty years after Isabel tells Eugene
to take a hike. Gene comes back to town with his daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter)
in tow. Gene is an inventor whose newest contraption is the horseless
carriage. It's evident right from the get go that time has not dimmed his
feelings for Isabel and even though she is happily married, she obviously still
fond of him. George has been away at school and comes home just as big a jerk
as he's always been. He takes a liking to Lucy and she seems to be sweet on
him as well, but it becomes plain to see that his lack of desire to do anything
other than be rich and spoiled sours her on marrying him. She asks him about
what profession he's going to engage in and he says that he doesn't want any
kind of profession but thinks that maybe he'll find some type of "cause" to get
involved with. I was wondering why someone who seemed nice and smart like Lucy
would bother with such a caustic and selfish prig like George, but to her
credit she didn't put up with it for long and the next thing you know, she's
taking a trip without telling George. Meanwhile, Isabel's husband
Wilbur has gone and croaked, worried to death over some investments he made in
Enron and Martha Stewart and you can see the family's fortunes begin to turn at
this juncture. Gene and Isabel renew their friendship and spend lots of time
together and George, who has always had no respect for Gene or his horseless
carriage contraption, freaks out when his aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead) pretty
much lays it on the line that Gene and his momma want to bump uglies. George
is the personification of the status quo and more importantly, stagnation. You
see this in his views on the coming of automobiles, his desire that his mother
not get involved with Gene, his continual refusal to "grow up" and be something
more than a rich kid, and insisting on wearing that silly wavy perm of his.
George spends all his time and energy trying to keep the outside world at bay,
determined that what he's always known, or really what he always believed,
about the order of things be preserved like some type of wild beast stuffed and
mounted on a dusty study wall somewhere. What he gets for his troubles is a
universally miserable experience as he has to watch his mother waste away, she
having denied herself her love with Gene again, this time for George's sake. The movie about this time, like the Amberson family itself, begins to peter
out, just kind of evaporating into darkness as George's ultimate fate is dealt
with in quite an abbreviated fashion. He is now saddled with his aunt and
between the two of them, they don't have the money to survive, so he decides to
get a job in a dynamite factory. He gets hit by a car, busts up his legs, Gene
and his aunt visit him in the hospital, he makes up with Gene and that's that.
And yes, it was all resolved in pretty much that sort of pell-mell fashion,
completely at odds with the finely crafted and deftly paced first part of the
film, to the point that the whole thing is rather jarring and you get the idea
that Welles just lost steam and was trying to wrap it up as fast as he could.
We know that's not the case, but that's how bad all that chopping left this
film. The command that Welles shows with the camera and the sets in this one,
combined with the powerhouse and soulful performances of all involved
demonstrate that this would have been the follow up to Citizen Kane that Wells wanted - bigger, more involved, darker, and something that would
resonate with the audience more than his acknowledged masterpiece, after all
this was about the problems we have finding our place not only in this world,
but even within our own family, something everyone experiences in their
lifetime. Kane was about some guy crybabying over a sled or something. Yeah, I had a blankie
I
really liked, but I grew up and got over it. What you are left with in The Magnificent Ambersons is much like George himself - unfinished and remarkable for the potential that
was wasted. It's still an excellent film (and Welles is again a virtuoso
behind the camera), but you just can't help wondering wistfully what might have
been if those dullards in that Pomona screening sixty years ago had appreciated
what they saw. This isn't available on DVD in the U.S. as of this writing and
this is the French DVD box set that we have here. It's a handsome looking
package and comes with a sixteen page collector's book with numerous photos and
text in French. There are also some audio interviews featured on the disc, the
most impressive of which is one (in English) that director Peter Bogdonavich
did with Welles years ago. It's worth the 30 Euros by itself to hear Welles
call
his female lead Dolores Costello a "dumb showgirl" and saying that she was so
ugly they tried everything including shooting scenes through linoleum to make
her look better. He also talks about how he used to kick the cameraman off the
set so that Welles could light the shots himself and that this cameraman would
sit out in the sun and cry all day. The interview runs over fifty minutes and
is as full of stuff like that as Welles is so obviously full of himself. It's a
really nice package and if you have an all region DVD player capable of playing
Pal discs, it would be a nice addition to your classic film collection.
Hopefully, whenever they release it here, they'll give it similar treatment
(maybe they could include a copy of the shooting script so we could see exactly
what was cut). The splendor of the The Magnificent Ambersons is only partly diminished by the butchery that the bean counters did on it and
even sixty years later you'll marvel at what how much truth Welles was able to
lay bare in what remained.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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