Last year, we saw some modest commemoration of the fact that Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ debut directorial effort often lauded as the greatest film of all time, celebrated its 80th anniversary. This year marks another important (if complicated) 80th anniversary, this time for Welles’ follow-up to Citizen Kane, 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons. It’s a film whose conception was nearly as fraught as Kane, only the tragic thing about Ambersons is that the film was heavily re-edited in post-production and every known copy of Welles’ supposedly superior original cut was destroyed. However, even in the condensed 88-minute version, Welles’ budding mastery of filmmaking is unmistakable, and the film is full of numerous wonders even if it’s easy to spot that something’s missing from the whole affair, which is also what makes the movie fascinating on multiple levels.
The extent to which the quality of The Magnificent Ambersons was compromised by its studio, RKO Pictures, meddling in its post-production has often been debated. However, the exact chain of events that led to Orson Welles’ film being wrestled away from him has remained fairly consistent. A big part of understanding how the film was edited and released is that filming wrapped shortly after the U.S. entered World War II. Due to the advent of the war, Welles was asked by the U.S. government to head down to Brazil to shoot a documentary as part of the Good Neighbor policy — a strategy of keeping nations around the globe allied with the U.S. Since post-production hadn’t even begun when he was hastily expected to embark on this journey, Welles ended up recording his unmistakable voice-overs for the film in a recording studio in Florida just before heading off to Brazil. It was also during this time that Welles was coordinating with editor Robert Wise (who Welles had worked with on Citizen Kane) what to include in the rough cut of the movie, giving Wise a decent amount of authority over the film’s post-production while he was in South America.
What was then supposed to happen…never actually happened. After sending the original 131-minute rough cut of The Magnificent Ambersons to Welles in Brazil, Wise intended to fly down to Rio de Janeiro and work with him to cut down the film into something the studio would accept. However, the studio decided not to take this route. Instead, producer George Schaefer, who had been a champion of Welles at RKO, panicked when he saw this first cut of Ambersons. He thought the film might be too downbeat, so it’d be best to get the film in front of an audience, and see how they reacted, which resulted in a disastrous test screening in Pomona, CA. Though there were some audience members who enjoyed the film, the reactions to this test screening was overwhelmingly negative, with many people walking out early into the film. There are a few reasons one could pinpoint as to why this screening went over so poorly. These include that the dawn of World War II wasn’t the best environment to release a bittersweet ode to upper-class society-types at the turn of the 20th century, that the audience had originally come to see a light-hearted musical comedy, and that the rowdy screening took place on St. Patrick’s Day and the theater was located near several colleges.
If Schaefer wasn’t already nervous about the film’s commercial prospects, this screening didn’t help, writing to Welles “never in all my experience in the industry have I taken so much punishment or suffered as I did at the Pomona preview.” After that screening, Robert Wise cut the film down to 117 minutes and had a much more positive reception at a screening in Pasadena, though that didn’t seem to satisfy the studio. Welles was in contact with Wise through phone and telegram, orchestrating what cuts to implement, though by this time, the film was clearly falling out of Welles’ hands and wasn’t being helped by how wrapped up he was in his Brazil project, It’s All True. The studio wanted to make Ambersons into a lighter film and seemed uninterested in Welles’ input in accomplishing that, so they deployed Wise to trim the film down further. Meanwhile, a more upbeat ending was re-shot, overseen by assistant director Fred Fleck, which is perhaps the most strikingly out-of-place part of the film’s final 88-minute cut.
Among Orson Welles aficionados, it’s the consensus that having The Magnificent Ambersons thoroughly butchered more or less broke Welles in a way that he never truly recovered from. An oft-cited Welles quote is “they destroyed Ambersons, and it destroyed me”. However, the fact that the origins of this quote are hard to pinpoint speak to the Welles-ian myth that’s been created over this movie, whether he said it or not. Either way, what’s most tragic is that the missing 43 minutes of the original cut was supposedly melted in order to preserve nitrate for the war effort. This led to Welles and Welles fans over the years painting Robert Wise as the villain in this whole affair, which seemed particularly easy when Wise would go on to become an incredibly successful director of Oscar-winning films like The Sound of Music and West Side Story, which though classics, don’t have the misunderstood artistry inherent in Welles’ filmography. That said, Wise always maintained that the original cut was undeniably a better version of the film, but that he’d still done the best he could to hone a version of the film that was both true to Welles’ vision while also appeasing the studio.
Yet despite all the compromise and dashed potential of Welles and The Mercury Players creating a worthy follow-up to Citizen Kane, even in the severely hatched 88-minute version that we have, it’s still a pretty darn great movie. In many ways, it’s a far more personal film than Citizen Kane, as it inhabits roughly the same world that Welles grew up in during his childhood spent in the Midwest, as it centers on an upper-class family who see their small Indiana town grow over the decades while the family’s influence and magnificence fades. It was often claimed by Welles (including in his 1970 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show) that in the novel by Booth Tarkington that the film is based on, the character of Eugene Morgan (played in the film by Joseph Cotton) was actually based on Welles’ own father, who was a friend of Tarkington’s.
It’s a film whose visuals are just as memorable as the ones captured in the innovative Kane, though there’s a little more restraint here, which perhaps is trying to capture both the nostalgia and the elegance of the novel it’s based on. Still, there are many sequences that show Welles’ mastery of the form, particularly the film’s opening prologue, which depicts through a glossy montage how exactly the Ambersons came to rule “their midland town” which they over the years saw “spread and darken into a city”. The fluidity of Welles’ camera is also on display in a wonderful ball sequence at the Amberson mansion, though that was one of the many sequences that was supposedly shortened. In fact, the first half of the film bounces along in such a charming, visually sumptuous manner that you could easily make the case that this first half of Ambersons is just as good as any stretch of Citizen Kane. There’s also something remarkable about the attention to detail in the film, which feels far more novelesque than any film I can think of from this period. This could be due to how closely Welles follows Tarkington’s novel, though this also might speak to why audiences at the time perhaps didn’t have the patience for a film of such literary aspirations.
In the film’s second half, it’s hard not to notice that there seems to be something missing. This was supposedly the portion of the film whose downbeat nature caused the studio to panic and that was most thoroughly re-cut. This is also the portion of the film where we’re supposed to see the town become more industrialized and alien to the Ambersons, while George Amberson (Tim Holt) slowly spirals toward the comeuppance that Welles’ narration foreshadows at the beginning of the film. There is a striking sequence where George walks through his unrecognizable town before quietly contemplating his mother’s death in a starkly lit bedside scene that surely captures the mood Welles was looking to strike in the film’s second half. However, the pacing chugs along at too fast of a clip to get there and it isn’t helped by the punctuation of the tacked-on ending that sees George’s spinster aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead) and Joseph Cotton’s Eugene more or less ride off into the sunset together.
While it is a tragedy that the original, almost certainly better cut of The Magnificent Ambersons was not long for this world, there are still some silver linings to be found in this final version of the film. For one, there are countless films from Hollywood’s first few decades that have been entirely lost, and particularly in Welles’ filmography that were never finished in his lifetime, including The Other Side of the Wind, which was finally released on Netflix in 2018. Also, even despite superfluous cuts in the existing version of Ambersons, it’s filled with many marvelous sequences and performances that show what Welles could do at the peak of his powers and with the studio’s backing, even if only while filming was underway. There’s also an element of being able to have your cake and eat it too when it comes to watching this film. You can both view it and enjoy the existing cut for what it is, but you can also ponder how much better the film would’ve been in its original 131-minute version, which very well could’ve rivaled Citizen Kane.
It’s also possible that there has been a tendency to over-romanticize what this original cut looked like, just because the road not taken is often the one most appealing. In her essay about The Magnificent Ambersons written for the film’s Criterion release, Molly Haskell points out that some of the scenes in Welles’ cut may have been too indulgent and may have lingered too much on the Ambersons’ later, more miserable years. She also begins the essay by pointing out that “never was such a grim film so buoyant”. It’s a quality that The Magnificent Ambersons almost certainly would not have developed if it hadn’t been condensed into a lean 88-minutes. It’s probably worth taking both Wise’s and Welles’ word that the original cut of the film was better, but there are still about a million different things to be enjoyed about the cut that exists. Additionally, an expedition to track down and make a documentary about the original print that was shipped to Welles while in Brazil was announced last year, and while it does seem like a long shot, could finally give us the answer to whether that original cut is really as good as the one that only exists in our minds.
