The Magnificent Ambersons Movie Download

10 / 10

Fractured Magnificence; one of the great tragedies of cinema (not the film per say, but its history)
It’s almost common knowledge in the realm of the film world about the history of the Magnificent Ambersons, which leaves a minor problem when trying to criticize it. Orson Welles made the film’s final running length at around two hours and fifteen minutes. While he was out of the country filming ‘It’s All True!’ (another doomed film in the Welles cannon), RKO pictures, the studio that had granted Welles total freedom for Citizen Kane and a few future projects, cut out fifty minutes (mostly of the last fifty), put a happy ending, and released it on a double-bill with a B movie. Although it’s attributable in retrospect to the War starting up (after all, who wants a -downer- period piece) and to the difficulty the studio had with Welles’ reputation, the fact that the 90 minute version that now exists is the only version available is a tragedy in and of itself. Unless if someone follows the wild rumor that a print was dumped by the studios into the ocean and pulls it up, this is all we can get.

Still, incomplete Welles is more satisfying than no Welles, or most other studio product of the period. Welles takes Booth Tarkington’s novel (inspired in part by Welles himself as a child- George being Welles’ name) and makes it into a sumptuous, striking, and altogether unique drama of the changing of the times, and how people cope with changes or go with them. The story is one of those involving the minds and hearts of the upper class. Joseph Cotten (as usual charming &/or cool, dramatic) is Eugene, the man who wanted Isabel Amberson’s hand in marriage. She married another man, and their child George was early on a hard-head case (these scenes are some of the best of the film, with deliberate staging of close-ups, medium shots, and basically setting up the technical style of the Wellesian cinema). As he grows up, he’s still a little hard-headed (played in one of the top, intense performances in any Welles film by Tim Holt), as he is against the changing of the times, in particular of Eugene’s re-founded courtship of the mother following his father’s death. There is also the character of his Aunt Fanny, in another perfect performance from Agnes Moorhead (the mother from Citizen Kane).

Alongside this examination of a family’s downfall amid the changing of personal relations, and of George’s own complex emotional problems, and of George’s coming-of-age, there’s also the examination of the transition from the horse and buggy to automobiles, to the heavier boost of the industrial age. Welles as a narrator is somber, observant of it all, and mostly leaves the film to his actors. There’s some real thought put into the issues, and not just through the realistic (though of course theatrical) dialog, but more specifically through the style. ‘Kane’ introduced audiences to Welles knack at long-takes, deep focus, unusual and expressionistic close-ups, heightening the drama that unfolds. ‘Ambersons’ is no exception, and there are some very memorable scenes where the camera just stays on people, and then when it moves it makes the mis en scene more concentrated, direct. The use of light is also equally impressive at times- like in interior shots of a staircase when George and Fanny are in an argument, it’s all encompassing, and not distracting enough from the story. The best consistency of any Welles film, even when it has some flaws, is the control that can be seen through much of it (there’s also a very spooky shot that stays with me towards the end, as the camera pans across the town’s buildings, Welles’ mournful narration over it).

But then we come to the ending, where things come to a screeching halt. I’m not against happy endings, they can be almost mandatory in certain formulas in films. However, it sort of takes an excellent film dealing with strong, novelistic issues to a bad place when things are resolved in the way this film does- George gets in an accident, he loses the use of his legs. But then a scene comes (and one can tell the immediate change in the style from Welles to the studio’s) where loose ends get made, and without anything leaving curious for the viewer. I’m still not sure if anything else within the film was cut-out too, or if even I might have been fooled at another time by something not of Welles in the picture. It’s depressing to be sure, but at least there is enough left to analyze and contemplate in the Welles’ oeuvre- in some ways it goes more ambitious than ‘Kane’, at least in its period realm, the questions it raises. The lessons the history behind the scenes gives for future filmmakers and studios should be remembered, even as mediocrity (like RKO tried its best to make this film as) continues today in Hollywood.Read More