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.