The Magnificent Ambersons
LANDON’S TAKE:
Orson Welles is celebrated as one of the foremost visionaries in the history of American filmmaking. He’s also renowned as the perennial artist against the system. While both of these factors make Welles perhaps the ideal auteur – someone satisfied with nothing less than a perfect articulation of his individual vision within the collaborative medium of filmmaking – it also presents some unique problems in examining works that were taken away from him.
The classically celebrated auteurs of studio era Hollywood (e.g., Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock) were known for creating individuated worldviews across their body of work either despite or even because of the strictures inherent in Classical Hollywood filmmaking. This was not Welles, who from his rise to infamy with the 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast to his first studio feature made a name by challenging the assumed utilities of a medium. Neither could Welles be a “rebel auteur” like the Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller types who proceeded him – his tastes were too aristocratic and his interests too grand and sleek to settle for gritty interventions in genre and narrative formula.
Perhaps no other film exhibits the massive creative conflicts that Welles’s career uniquely wrought than his first seriously compromised work, 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons, a film whose identity (barring an archival miracle) bears the shared but divergent authorships of both Welles and RKO Studios. The stories of Welles’s conflicts with RKO while making Ambersons have been a much-discussed subject of fascination for decades. The film itself, then, is most often approached in terms of what could have been, of the film hinted at in sections and fragments of RKO’s final product.
But Ambersons is also fascinating as a compromised text. It’s a film by which one can witness a gradual exchanging of authors, an exchange between an individual and an institution whose traces are not always immediately legible. As with the gradual transition that the film depicts from simple, patient, pastoral Midwestern living to the insidious promise of a forthcoming industrial hellscape, Ambersons itself seems to make a deliberate change from a text enamored with the possibilities of form and its inventions to a work that’s wholly nearsighted, its momentum achieving the point of defeated exhaustion. For a film under ninety minutes, The Magnificent Ambersons makes a strange and long journey that eventually rearranges completely the relationship between theme and style, eventually leaving audiences as a film that no longer resembles its initial self – which, again, is ironically fitting for a narrative that tracks a massive historical transition. Yet Welles – like the narration he provides as one of the world’s most recognizable celebrity voices to bookend the film – feels present throughout, even within glaring stylistic choices that seem to have come from an island entirely separate from Welles’s inimitable approach to filmmaking.
And that’s precisely what makes Ambersons such a fascinating work within Welles’s oeuvre. Unlike the similarly re-cut Touch of Evil, whose every frame bears out Welles’s playful resistance to Hollywood norms, Ambersons attempts to stage an admittedly Hollywood-averse theme about the social loss of industrialism through an ambitious style, but one still conversant within the strategies of Classic Hollywood. And unlike Welles’s later non-Hollywood work, like Chimes at Midnight or F for Fake, one can never rest easy assuming that every frame, cut, and music cue they witness is part of an “Orson Welles film.” Ambersons proved to be the cautionary tale that would set the course for the rest of Welles’s career as a creative who sought the resources of Hollywood but became fundamentally (and justifiably) distrusting of its power.
Yet a potent-to-latent sense of radicalism still pervades the film. Throughout, Welles intervenes in the styles and assumptions of the classic studio system towards a more lyrical filmmaking style. Welles’s opening narration, in which he details the pre-industrial customs of Indianapolis from horse-drawn transportation to hat sizes, suggests a cinematic mode of adapting literature that is simultaneously filmic and literary, potently utilizing the evocative possibilities of both montage and descriptive language. Until the stale two-shots that occupy much of the film’s re-shot third act, Welles is as visually inventive here as he was with Kane.
The film’s use of character pushes its ambitions even further. Ambersons’s central character and resident Peter Campbell, Tim Holt’s George Minafer, is a wet blanket of a man whose failings in personality are brought into stark relief opposite the bottomless charisma of Joseph Cotten’s Eugene Morgan. His guiding narrative role is to interfere with the trajectories of two would-be lovers, his widowed mother (Dolores Costello) and Cotten’s self-made man. George is the last stubborn doorstop in an inevitable historical change from the inherited virtues of the aristocracy to the tenacious ambitions of industrialists. There have been few protagonists as small and historically insignificant as Minafer. The inverse of the world-shaping but empty Charles Foster Kane, Minafer is defiant that the world stays as it was when he found it.
Yet Ambersons offers remarkable empathy to its unlikeable protagonist, and sees profound loss in the world as it was. Just as Kane wasn’t a litigious attack on William Randolph Hearst, Ambersons is an examination of a complex and tragic character playing an unenviable role in history. And the film is remarkable for not simply portraying George’s petulance as such – his principles, however arbitrary they may seem, bear out truth as the world shifts drastically before him, with few remembering the quieter days before dynamites and steam engines. If you forget the suggestion for a minute that Welles is ostensibly asking us to wax nostalgic for the 19th century American aristocracy, Ambersons exhibits an almost subversive message about the alienation promised of the technologies of the 20th century, fully evident in the war occurring at the time of the film’s release. Perhaps Welles hoped that cinema would be the one industrial invention to bring us all back together.
DREW’S TAKE:
I can remember the long quest to Ambersons that Orson Welles – my fellow Wisconsinite – took me on. I first saw Citizen Kane (1941) upon its DVD release in 2001. I was a senior in high school, in the middle of my own film production, and found a profound source of inspiration. After all, Kane is the cinematic equivalent of The Great Gatsby (1925) – a poetic, tragic, occasionally funny, and cynical portrait of the American Dream. The graphical matches of the opening montage, the mirror scene, the charismatic power of Kane’s campaign speech, the cacophony of the film’s soundtrack… Kane is one of those films I watch two or three times a year for my classes and I find a new subject of fascination every time I see it.
From that point on, I digested every Welles I could find. I remember seeing Touch of Evil (1958) for the first time (on the “recut” DVD) and being hypnotized by its aesthetics while being left confused by its plot. I watched every incarnation of Mr. Arkadin (1955) on the Criterion set as an undergraduate. I once again felt intoxicated by the promise of cinema when I watched F for Fake (1973) for the first time as a graduate student at UCLA. I used the school’s archive to watch Welles’s unaired television pilot “The Fountain of Youth” and TCM to finally catch Journey into Fear (1943) and The Immortal Story (1968). Over the span of six years, I was constantly on the hunt of The Magnificent Ambersons. Then, one day at Cinefile Video in West Los Angeles, I finally found it.
It was a French region coded DVD from Cahiers du Cinema. We can take it for granted now (Ambersons finally came out on DVD in the U.S. about four years ago, well into the era of Blu-Ray), but for the bulk of DVD’s lifespan one of Welles’s most acclaimed films was not available to viewers. I had to buy a Region Free player from Cinefile to watch the disc! I begin by way of this long-winded introduction because our reception of films is shaped by our personal lives and the conditions in which we subjectively experience them. For instance, I was a single 19 year old boy the first time I saw Kieslowski’s Blue (1993). I could appreciate it aesthetically and even thematically, but the loss of a family was an abstract concept for me. Rewatching it now – after being married for almost ten years – and its a different film. I feel her loss more profoundly. The movie did not change; I did (hence the reason why I find the fetishization of watching films for the “first time” is a bit illogical). In short, the first question I ask myself when I dislike a film is if my dislike stems from the film itself or from the subjective baggage I’m bringing to it.
I ask myself this question every time I watch Ambersons. I’ve seen it on a DVD with a poor transfer and a DVD with a strong transfer. I’ve seen it in theaters – as a double bill with Kane – both in 35mm. The quest to seeing Ambersons for the first time – including all the reading and research about Welles I had done – had built the film up into a myth. Think the Great and Powerful Oz. Instead, when I finally saw that Region Coded DVD, I found the cinematic equivalent of a man behind a curtain, pretending to be something he isn’t.
I like Ambersons, but I find it a film more easy to admire aesthetically than to love. Andre Bazin and the French critics lauded the film for continuing the realist traditions of Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game (1939). Stanley Cortez’s deep-focus, long take, moving camera (especially in the elegant ballroom sequences) is masterful. By favoring movement and depth of field over montage, the film provides us with a view of a continuum of reality. Our natural vision does not “cut” in to a close up or a shot/reverse shot. We have to use our eyes to track through the space of Ambersons – to watch in a different, arguably more “active” way (although I cringe at that word; Welles and Sergei Eisenstein require different types of interaction).
Yet, it’s the character of George (Tim Holt) that stunts my admiration. I am reluctant to use the rationale that George is “unlikable” because I think that is a ridiculous criticism. After all, I love Kane and Charles Foster Kane is unlikable in his own way. The difference between Kane and George is that one character has an arc and the other does not. Kane starts off – temporally, not narratively – as a child, beaten by his father, and forced to leave home. Our empathy starts off on his side and it is nurtured by his charisma and his desire to change the world. Granted, that desire gradually sours and we can see the seeds of his destruction as early as the “Declarations of Principles” scene. Yet, the overall objective is not that we can “empathize” with Kane; it is that we can understand why he does what he does.
George is a different breed of anti-hero. He begins the film as a self-absorbed, spoiled, child. We are told in the opening moments that his dastardly behavior has prompted the majority of the town to await his eventual comeuppance with glee. As the film transitions from George the child to George the college student, he does not skip a step in his self-absorption. Actively attempt to obstruct the blossoming romance between his recently widowed mother Isabel (Delores Costello) and her childhood lover Eugene (Joseph Cotten), George insults the latter’s trade over dinner, takes his mom on a length trip to end her romance, and bars him from seeing her as she approaches death. Now, it would be one thing if George’s behavior stemmed from his mother’s relationship and the perception of “disrespect” that it projects onto his birth father’s marriage. As it is presented however, it is merely the full manifestation of what is already inherent in his personality. In a film with such fully realized characters as Eugene and Isabel (and coming so quickly on the heels of one of the great anti-heroes in Kane), George comes across as being a one-dimensional caricature.
Now, this central problem may have been an artifact of the book by Booth Tarkington. It may have been magnified by RKO’s interference. As Landon observes, unlike other Welles “recuts,” we cannot be assured that this is Orson Welles’s film and not a compromised text. Yet, I cannot feel that this status allows critics and viewers to project a film onto Ambersons that we have never been able to substantiate. Essentially, it must have been a Great Movie because it was cut by the studio and still stands as a Good Movie. In short, Welles’s undermined quest towards Ambersons has produced its own legacy, a legacy that flavors viewers perceptions of the film as much as my own path to the film did.
