Orson Welles' RKO career was short and very bittersweet. Hailed as the new boy wonder in 1940, by 1942 that reputation had soured to the point where Welles was considered persona non grata. His tenure at RKO generated two immortal classics for the silver screen that effectively ostracized Welles from the director's chair but left him with a fairly lucrative acting career elsewhere in Hollywood. The first of his RKO/Mercury Player Productions was Citizen Kane (1941). The second was The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), an even more sombre outing based on Booth Tarkington's 1918 novel.
The screenplay by Welles opens with a superb time capsule of the gay 1890s in Indianapolis. Society is gentile and relaxed. Cordiality and superficiality rule the roost, but propriety is the beacon and the hallmark of all good taste, and at the forefront of respectability are those magnificent Ambersons - the wealthiest family in town.
Daughter Isabel (Dolores Costello) is amiably pursued by Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), a middle class suitor. After a clumsy moonlight serenade Isabel allows herself to be spirited away by the rather dower Wilbur Minafer (Donald Dillaway) instead. The two are married and have a son, George (Bobby Cooper) who is spoiled rotten as a youth and grows up to be a defiant and rebellious prig (played as an adult by Tim Holt).
Upon returning home from studying the law at college George is given a rather lavish reception by his grandfather, Major Amberson (Richard Bennett). In the interim Wilbur has died leaving Isabel to rekindle her romance with Eugene, himself a widower. Eugene's daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter) briefly becomes the focus of George's romantic interests.
Instinctively, George scorns Eugene - not only in his chosen profession as one of the proponents of the automobile, but also because he refuses to regard his mother falling in love with anyone else. For all their wealth and privilege George, like the rest of the Ambersons, is a very backward thinking man. He would prefer the time of gentlemen to his current age of the industrialist. Very quickly Eugene's fortunes come to rival the Amberson family wealth.
George's Aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead) and Uncle Jack (Ray Collins) inform George that Isabel has long admired Eugene, even before she met his father. This realization sends George into a rage. He interrupts his own romance with Lucy, rebuffs Eugene and takes his mother on an extended trip to Europe where they live obscurely until illness forces Isabel to return home.
The bond between Isabel and George is vaguely tinged with a hint of incest in the book that the film cannot explore. Hence we are left with a curiously possessive mother/son relationship indeed. Isabel's strange and compelling far away glances and her periodic cradling of her adult son in her arms is meant to suggest a relationship far more insular and self-destructive than it at first appears.
When Isabel and George return to Indianapolis they find a very different home than the one they left behind. One thing unchanged is Eugene's love for Isabel. But Eugene is once again thwarted in his attempts to see Isabel by George, then by Fanny who has becoming increasingly erratic in her behaviour. Isabel confesses on her death bed that she would have liked to see Eugene one last time.
Grief stricken over his daughter's loss, Major Amberson gradually succumbs to depression and an opium addiction and dies. Jack decides to leave town and take a job in New York. He tells George plainly that he has finally received his comeuppance for all his wickedness. Through bad investments the family's fortunes have all been squandered. George is forced to forsake the law and get a job at one of the local factories to support his Aunt Fanny who has completely lost her mind. The Amberson mansion is boarded up.
Although she loves George, Lucy never reconciles with him, telling her father the story about a Native American chieftain who was pushed out in a canoe after he became too obnoxious and overbearing for the rest of the tribe to tolerate. Lost and alone, George wanders the streets - unable to comprehend how the world has moved on without him.
In the final moments we learn that George has had a terrible car accident that has crippled his legs. Eugene rushes to his side, the two reconcile and Eugene and Fanny leave the hospital together with renewed hopes for a brighter tomorrow.
This final sequence was not shot by Welles, nor did it receive his consent when he screened the rough cut. RKO further elected to butcher the movie by excising nearly 40 minutes of footage Welles did shoot from the last third of the film.
Viewed today, one can see how lethal and heavy-handed these cuts are. The last act of The Magnificent Ambersons is nothing more than an extended montage of snippets and sound bytes, the cohesive narrative completely absent. Major Ambersons drug induced diatribe is interrupted by a slow fade to black right in the middle of his thoughts. We lose Fanny's progressive descent into madness. She's relatively sane in one scene, then stark raving crazy in another immediately following it as she reveals to George that they have no inheritance to live on.
The tempo, the mood, the careful craftsmanship that is Orson Welles at his best near the beginning of the film is gone in this final third. There's no build up to George's car wreck. We simply fade up on a wreck with a bunch of strangers talking about what happened. But we never see George again. Instead, the scene dissolves to Eugene leaving George's hospital room. He is met by Fanny who lovingly takes him by his arm as the two stroll proudly down the hallway with Eugene insisting that George will be well once again. All is forgiven. All is well.
In this upbeat ending Fanny appears just as she did at the start of the movie - her madness a thing of the past, or perhaps merely a fantasy of our imagination. How has she recovered? Why has she recovered? Why have George and Eugene reconciled? They were mortal enemies. No. The pieces simply do not fit. It's no wonder The Magnificent Ambersons tanked at the box office. It is a fundamentally flawed and severely fractured masterpiece. To be sure there are touches of greatness sprinkled throughout. But the last act is shockingly bad.
Rumour has long suggested that Brazil might hold a full Welles cut of the film in some archive. After RKO took over the picture from Welles they shed 40 minutes and destroyed the original camera negative and prints of these additional scenes. As such it is difficult to judge the film as it currently exists. Clearly, this is not the movie Orson Welles intended his audience to see. Editor Robert Wise has gone on record as saying that the film was not better in its longer cut, but simply 'longer'. Nevertheless, it would be fascinating to reassemble the missing pieces for today's audiences to be the judge.
Perhaps someday we will have that opportunity. In the meantime Warner Home Video has seen fit to release The Magnificent Ambersons in its truncated form along with Citizen Kane on Blu-ray as an exclusive through Amazon.com. The Magnificent Ambersons is advertised as digitally remastered on DVD. Despite this claim, the transfer is a below par effort for WHV. The image is thick and occasionally murky. The mid register of the gray scale is rather harshly contrasted. Edge effects are prevalent and crop up from time to time.
Overall, most of the image is free of digital manipulations, but age related dirt and scratches are fairly obvious and occasionally distracting. The audio is mono as originally recorded and adequate for this presentation. For shame - Warner's DVD has NO extras - not even chapter stops! Bottom line: with a back story as intriguing as that of Citizen Kane it would have been good form on Warner's part to include a making of documentary or audio commentary as supplements.
FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)
3
VIDEO/AUDIO
2.5
EXTRAS
0
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