Film review

  • The Magnificent Ambersons

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Orson Welles (1942)

    RKO’s dismemberment of the film that Orson Welles shot is common knowledge.  The rough cut ran approaching two and a half hours.  After a lukewarm response from a preview audience, Welles and his film editor Robert Wise trimmed a few minutes but the result was no better received at a second preview.  Having relinquished his original contractual right to the final cut, Welles went to Brazil to make a film as part of Franklin D Roosevelt’s wartime ‘Good Neighbor Policy’.   In his absence, RKO excised more than forty minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons and reshot the ending, with the assistance of Wise and Welles’s assistant director, Fred Fleck.  The negatives for the deleted sections were later destroyed by the studio.  As you watch the end product, you may find yourself regretting you can’t be unaware of its notorious gestation.  If you could be unaware, though, how much sense would the film make?  What’s more, aren’t those in the know inclined to accept its incoherence – even turn a blind eye to what may be essential defects – on the grounds that the picture, which lasts less than ninety minutes, is so much less than Orson Welles meant it to be?

    Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons,  first published in 1918, is widely regarded as its author’s best novel, described by the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks as ‘a typical story of an American family and town – the great family that locally ruled the roost and vanished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city’.  Tarkington charts the declining fortunes of the aristocratic Ambersons over three generations, from the end of the Civil War to the early years of the twentieth century.  Orson Welles’s screenplay and voiceover narrative make immediately and explicitly clear that his subject is a now-vanished way of life.  Welles reads elegantly and his tone is regretful.  The effect of that combination is decidedly elegiac – even tautologously elegiac.  Manny Farber’s strongly negative review, dated 10 August 1942, is a response to the bowdlerised version that RKO had released in cinemas a couple of weeks previously (Farber confirms as much when he disparages the picture as ‘an eighty-eight-minute dim-out’).  His piece is persistently critical of Welles, who can hardly be held solely responsible for, say, the ‘blundering editing’.  But Farber isn’t wrong when he complains the film includes ‘a mess of radio and stage technique’, or about screen and soundtrack telling you the same thing simultaneously:  ‘Welles, off-screen, says Isabel Amberson is rejecting a suitor and you see the suitor rejected’.

    Isabel (Dolores Costello) rejects Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten) after he publicly makes a fool of himself and consequently of her.  Though her decision reflects Isabel’s social conventionality, it’s impulsive and it’s pivotal in the story.  Instead, Isabel marries dull Wilbur Minafer (Don Dillaway), whom she doesn’t love, and spoils their only child rotten.  From an early age, the grossly entitled George Amberson Minafer (played as a boy by Bobby Cooper) engenders a strong desire among the townspeople to see him get his ‘comeuppance’.  When the story moves forward to the dawn of the new century, and the elderly Major Amberson (Richard Bennett), Isabel’s father, hosts a grand college-homecoming party for his grandson, it’s soon obvious that George (now Tim Holt) hasn’t improved with age.  Also at the party is Eugene, now widowed and recently returned to the town with his daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter).  George finds himself in a bind.  He takes an instant dislike to Eugene, whom he dismisses as a social climber, but an instant liking to his daughter – a feeling that Lucy, although never blind to George’s faults, reciprocates.

    George’s chief affections, however, are for himself and his mother.  Wilbur Minafer, after losing large amounts of money through unwise investments, dies.  George is undisturbed by his father’s death except that it gives Isabel the chance to see more of Eugene, whom she regrets spurning all those years ago.  She isn’t the only member of the family in love with him:  so is Fanny Minafer (Agnes Moorehead), Wilbur’s spinster sister.  Perhaps it’s to subdue his alarm at the prospect of his mother’s remarrying – or perhaps it’s just his native unkindness – that causes George so mercilessly to tease his aunt about the torch she carries.  By now, Eugene is a successful and wealthy car manufacturer.  George, who rubbishes the idea of himself having to work for a living, both despises Eugene’s new money and is determined he won’t get his hands on Isabel.

    In a key episode of the film, which takes place the day after the homecoming party, the main characters set off for an outing in the snow.  (Stanley Cortez’s shadowed black-and-white photography is at its most beguiling here.)  Isabel and Fanny accompany Eugene in his new-fangled car.  George insists that he and Lucy take a sleigh ride.  On the way, they pass the ‘horseless carriage’, stuck in the snow.  George mockingly tells its occupants to ‘get a horse’.  Soon afterwards, the car gets moving again and the sleigh overturns.  Eugene gives everyone a ride back home.  The initially despised automobile is the central symbol of socio-economic change throughout The Magnificent Ambersons.  It’s part of George’s eventual, manifold comeuppance.  Years later, now orphaned and penniless, he has to get a job – first as a clerk in a lawyer’s office then, to increase his wages, in a chemical works.  As he wanders distractedly round the streets of the town-turned-city, with its factories and slums, he’s knocked down by a car.

    Here’s where the issue of what was removed from the film starts to loom large (at least if, like me, you haven’t read the Tarkington novel or Welles’s still extant shooting script[1]).  George’s mother fixation may well represent the doomed introversion of a particular social class in a particular generation, its refusal to engage with the world at large and the future.  That’s not, though, how the drama plays out.  In terms of ruining prospects of happy relationships – for Isabel, Eugene, Lucy and himself – George is the most influential character in the story.  And, of course, it’s possible for – and could be dramatically fascinating to see – a weak personality to exert such power.  But Orson Welles diminishes George too thoroughly.  Tim Holt, though his acting is competent, is excessively unprepossessing.  He makes it hard to understand what Lucy ever sees in George, whose flaws would register more strongly if he had a deceptive surface charm.

    George’s dullness does have the effect of making him seem individual but that, in conjunction with the related puzzle of his influence on others, rather detracts from his epitomising self-destructive privilege.  Indeed, the Ambersons, as a clan, come across as particularly dysfunctional rather than as typical of their time and place – except perhaps for Jack (Ray Collins), Isabel’s elder brother and a sometime Congressman.  Several scenes feature very fine naturalistic acting:  a conversation between Fanny and George as she plies him with strawberry shortcake; Jack telling Eugene and Lucy about seeing Isabel and George abroad, during their extended trip to Europe which follows her decision to turn down Eugene a second time; Jack’s farewell exchange with George at a railway station.  (The film’s best performance comes from Ray Collins, followed by the vivid eighteen-year-old Anne Baxter.)  It’s no coincidence that these rhythmical sequences aren’t remotely melodramatic.  As such, they stand out from much else in The Magnificent Ambersons.  Perhaps they’re more salient than they should have been thanks to RKO’s cuts but there are too many high-voltage dialogues between George and Fanny, in which Agnes Moorehead does the lion’s share of the acting.  Lovelorn Fanny gets increasingly unhappy and desperate so Moorehead has to keep upping the ante.  There’s no denying she’s histrionically powerful.  But in a film that is legendarily insufficient she’s too much.

    22 December 2020

    [1] The shooting script is available as part of a remarkably extensive online resource at Joseph Egan’s The Magnificent Ambersons website.

     

     

     

  • Forrest Gump

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Zemeckis (1994)

    I’d never seen it before.  My cinema visits weren’t so frequent in the mid-1990s; once Robert Zemeckis’s romantic comedy-drama became a byword for cutely uplifting awards bait, there wasn’t much incentive to watch it on television.  The British TV premiere was on BBC1 on New Year’s Day 1998.  I know that because the writer and broadcaster Frank Muir died suddenly during that night and I recall a newspaper report in which his son-in-law Geoffrey Wheatcroft said that Muir had watched Forrest Gump with his family shortly before going to bed for the final time.  I think this stayed with me because it made me wonder what will be the last film that I see.  I’ve now at last watched this one (on BBC iPlayer, a few days after its latest screening).  I won’t repeat the experience and have already seen three films subsequently.  It’s something of a relief to know I won’t depart this life on Forrest Gump.

    Nor will I read Winston Groom’s 1986 novel of the same name, from which Eric Roth’s screenplay is adapted, though Wikipedia says that Roth changed the source material extensively.  (For both those reasons, I won’t connect any of what follows in this note to Groom’s original.)  In a framing device for the narrative, the slow-witted, open-hearted title character sits on a bench by a bus stop in Savannah, Georgia, initiating conversation with a succession of people who temporarily share the bench with him.  Thirty-something Forrest (Tom Hanks) tells these strangers the story of his life through flashbacks.  Raised by his adoring, determined single mother (Sally Field) in Greenbow, Alabama, the boy Forrest (Michael Conner Humphreys) wears leg braces to correct a spinal curvature.  On his first day at school, he meets a little girl called Jenny Curran (Hanna R Hall) and they immediately become friends.  Other kids give Forrest a hard time because of his physical disability and low intelligence.  On one occasion, he flees a group of bullies, running so fast that his braces break off and his pursuers, even on bikes, can’t catch him.

    The moment the leg braces break off is the first opportunity for Robert Zemeckis to use special visual effects, which will be a major feature of Forrest Gump.  The sequence is also the bridge from the boy to the grown-up hero.  In his late teens (Tom Hanks’s boyishness allows him easily to take over at this point), Forrest is still the target of bullies and Jenny (Robin Wright from now on) is still urging him to run, from contemporaries now in cars.  This time, he runs onto and across a sports field, where his remarkable speed catches the attention of a football coach.  Though Forrest is no scholar, this is enough for him to win a sports scholarship to the University of Alabama, where he’s coached by Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant (Sonny Shroyer).   He’s not the first famous – or about to be famous – name to cross Forrest’s path.  His mother runs a boarding house out of the Gumps’ Greenbow home.  One of her tenants is Elvis Presley (Peter Dobson).  Forrest (still in leg braces at this stage) jerks about as he dances along to Elvis’s guitar music, thus inspiring the latter’s own stage moves – as Forrest and his mother soon discover, in astonishment, from a TV screen in a local shop window.

    It’s soon clear Forrest is going to coincide with key figures and events of the mid-twentieth century, so as to tell not just his own story but (sort of) the story of his American generation.  A combination of his own talents and virtues, and the operation of chance – or, as Forrest sees it, God’s will – means the protagonist, from that football field sprint onwards, repeatedly comes good.  At Alabama University, where he witnesses George Wallace’s notorious ‘stand in the schoolhouse door’, Forrest is selected for the national College Football All-America Team and gets to meet President John F Kennedy at the White House.  After graduation, Forrest enlists in the army and is sent to Vietnam.  When his platoon is ambushed in the Mekong Delta, his good friend Bubba (Mykelti Williamson) is killed but Forrest saves the lives of several comrades, including the platoon lieutenant, Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise).  Forrest is awarded the Medal of Honor and gets a handshake from Lyndon Johnson.  Forrest then develops a flair for table tennis and gets involved in ‘ping-pong diplomacy’:  that leads to a guest spot, alongside John Lennon, on Dick Cavett’s show and a third Oval Office encounter, with Richard Nixon.  When they were doing military training, Forrest agreed to join Bubba in the shrimping business.  He now uses his sporting celebrity to endorse a table-tennis paddle-making company in Alabama and his fee to buy a shrimp boat – the only one in the locality to survive Hurricane Carmen in 1974.  Forrest’s boat makes a commercial killing and the hugely profitable Bubba Gump Shrimp Company is born.

    The unwilled, accidental, inexorable progress of holy fool Forrest calls to mind that of Chance the gardener in Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979).  Forrest’s involvement with epoch-making people and happenings, especially the trick of incorporating him into archive film of these people, evokes Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983).  What’s distinctive about Zemeckis’s whimsical meek-shall-inherit-the-earth story, compared with those other two films, is the lack of irony with which it’s told – a quality reinforced by Alan Silvestri’s soupy-triumphal score.  That music also signals the more familiar sentimental focus that will gradually develop as Forrest’s collisions with history peter out.  In their White House conversation, Nixon asks Forrest where he’s staying in Washington and suggests somewhere better.  You can see what’s coming:  in his new accommodation, Forrest observes and reports the Watergate break-in.  After that, the current affairs stuff is negligible (save for a continuing, odd preoccupation with failed assassination efforts:  the wounding of George Wallace gets as much attention as the killing of the Kennedys and there’s later footage of attempts on the lives of Presidents Ford and Reagan).  Forrest’s financial success, which risks obscuring his spiritual significance, also has to be played down.

    The Watergate joke, occupying barely a minute of screen time, contrasts with protracted descriptions of the post-Vietnam tribulations of Lt Dan.  Bellicose Dan, after losing both legs in the war (more special effects), has turned into a wholly embittered, drugs-and-drink-ridden veteran until Forrest offers him a partnership in the shrimp company that makes them both millionaires.  While he’s still in the lower depths, there’s a scene involving Dan and a couple of prostitutes that seems meant to be emotionally tough and real.   Although unpleasant, it isn’t either of those things but it is an example of how Forrest Gump, every so often, professes gritty substance.  (The first time this happens is when the three cyclist bullies throw stones at and chase the boy Forrest.)  Zemeckis seems to think his film’s largely benign world view will make his illustrations of human cruelty more remarkable.  They are remarkable in the sense of noticeable – but that’s only because of the gulf between them and the highly exaggerated folksy innocence of Forrest, his mother et al.

    Zemeckis and Eric Roth concentrate increasingly on Forrest’s unrequited love life.  He and Jenny keep separating and reuniting.  Sexually abused as a child, Jenny becomes a hippie in the late 1960s:  Forrest catches sight of her at an anti-Vietnam War rally, just as he’s talking with Abbie Hoffman (Richard D’Alessandro) in his stars-and-stripes shirt.  A few years later, as Jenny struggles to recover from drugs addiction, she visits Forrest in Greenbow.  He proposes marriage to her, they make love but she leaves next morning and breaks his heart.  This propels him into more running, in a big way:  Forrest spends the next three years on a cross-country marathon that attracts a lengthening procession of fellow-travellers and considerable media attention.  He eventually decides it’s time to stop running; it’s now also time for the film to break out of its flashback structure into the present tense.  Forrest is sitting on that bench because Jenny, who now lives in Savannah, has written asking him to visit her.  When he gets to her home, he learns they have a son, Forrest Jr (Haley Joel Osment, in his first cinema role).

    In the course of the story, Forrest loses the two women most important to him – first his mother, then Jenny.  Both deaths are hygienic, painless and peaceful, as only Hollywood deaths can be.  Mrs Gump, with an accepting smile, announces that ‘It’s just my time’.  (As he emerges from the memory of her death, Forrest tells his bench-mate that his mother had cancer but you’d never guess it.)  Jenny, after telling Forrest he’s a father, also tells him, ‘I have some kind of virus’.  It’s now the early 1980s:  the thought crosses your mind the virus could be AIDS.  But of course Jenny’s wild days are far behind her now – like Zemeckis’s interest in linking Forrest’s biography to contemporary American headlines.  Jenny and Forrest marry (this time she proposes to him) and return to Greenbow with their little boy.   In the closing sequence, after Jenny’s death, Forrest sees his son onto the same school bus his mother once saw him onto.  It even has the same driver (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) as it did all those years ago.  A small mercy:  there’s no repetition of the clumsily staged joke that accompanied that first-day-of-school departure early in the film, when the bus driver struggles to get Forrest to utter a word because his mother told him not to speak to strangers.  Zemeckis has Mrs Gump standing so close to the bus entrance that she must be able to hear what’s going on.

    Though hardly deserving of the rare second consecutive Best Actor Oscar he won for Forrest Gump (after Philadelphia the previous year), Tom Hanks makes the film less intolerable than it would otherwise be.  A few years ago, he told Graham Norton that he modelled Forrest’s emphatic Southern accent on the natural speaking voice of Michael Conner Humphreys (who’s actually from Mississippi), the boy Forrest.  Although the cloying grandiosity of the piece makes it impossible to enjoy, Hanks’s performance is likeable in making you feel that he devised a characterisation through imagination rather than ‘researching’ people with learning difficulties.  The main supporting performances are adequate.  The smaller parts tend to be gruesomely overplayed, although Michael Conner Humphreys and Haley Joel Osment are honourable exceptions.

    Robert Zemeckis opens with shots of a white feather floating in the sky, where it keeps being caught by the wind.  The feather is delicate but somehow plucky, though at the mercy of nature.  Needless to say, Zemeckis closes with the same image.  Most of what comes in between in Forrest Gump is just as vexing, though not quite everything is the film’s fault:  Zemeckis can’t be blamed for the fact that, at this distance in time, Forrest’s red baseball cap, even without an acronym emblazoned on it, inevitably evokes the MAGA model.  The script’s most famous line (which, in 2011, won a place in the American Film Institute’s top 100 movie quotes of all time) is another matter.   Forrest recalls that ‘Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get’.  Really?  Either the contents guides to chocolate selections never made it across the Atlantic or this is a rubbish analogy.

    20 December 2020

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