NEW AMBERSONS - Anybody seen it?

[jaime marzol]

i haven't see ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. is that with henry fonda? have heard it's great. i need to see it. i like leone a lot. people don't realize what a great effort went into making TGTBTU. There is a case of the director making artistic descissions to compensate for equipment limitations. you never see an actor say many words. usually by the 4th word he has to cut to a reverse, or the other actor reacting to what is being said. their sound wouldn't stay in synch for more that 7 seconds. it could have looked like a Hercules movie.

i also liked the 42 hr cut of ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA.

[Fredric]

Sorry this is off topic:

OUATIA is excellent. I also like the one Leone did between OUATITW and OUATIA: Duck, You Sucker! (aka A Fistful of Dynamite), a Zapata Western about the Mexican Revolution with James Coburn and Rod Steiger as a much more convincable Mexican than Heston (bringing it back to ON topic).

We should restart the thread from the old site: Great Films I Have Seen Recently.

[Welles Fan]

I'm a big Leone fan as well. I agree with Jaime that The Good, etc is the best of the bunch, but OUATITW is a very close second. I also liked that Steiger/Coburn one as well. I didn't like Fistful, the first one, because it was such a cheezy remake of Yojimbo, and the dubbing was execreble, even bu Spaghetti western standards.

Speaking of OUATITW, has anyone ever heard who dubbed the scrumtious Claudia Cardinale in that? I've always thought it sounded like Anne Bancroft.

Another great aspect of those Leone westerns is the music provided by Ennio Morricone. Who'd have thought Jimi Hendrix style electric guitars with Spanish chanting would sound so good in westerns? I like the way the climactic gunfights of For a Few Dollars More, The Good, and OUATITW consist of 10 minutes of the combatants eyeing each other while alternating closeups with sweeping vistas while Morricone's guitars and choruses reach a crescendo. I particularly like the sequence in The Good where Eli Wallach runs through the cemetary looking for the grave with the money while an operatic soprano (of near Yma Sumac range) blesses the endeavor on the soundtrack.

Also, ever see any spaghetti westerns by directors other than Leone? You're not missing anything if you haven't-they all suck (and 99% seem to have Lee Van Cleef in them). They're a great example of what the creative guy can do (Leone) and how bad it can get when non-creative hacks try to steal somone else's formula for success.

I was a bit disappointed in the Leone gangster flick. Thought it was simply too sleazy.

[dmolson]

yes, I'll agree that Sergio Leone was great. He should have his own forum/topic, like badly dubbed/synched pictures... Seriously, back on topic – wouldn't it make more sense that Beatrice's reason behind withdrawing from the publicity mill of the remake TMA is because of the clang-headed comments by Cromwell and Arau, which essentially toss bad weeds on the Welles' film mantle? Few can deny that his career hit a bit of a wall after TMA, but these two clowns are actually slagging a great film, and something that, even in its truncated, chopped form, is beyond the grasp of most modern filmmakers today. I thiink Beatrice should come out, get on the publicity tour, and put a big flaming bag of fertilizer on Cromwell and Arau's doorstep...

[Jeff Wilson]

I'm not sure if she has any reason to come out; I don't think any of the promotional material I've seen recently mentions Welles, and since RKO clearly owns the script, she really has nothing to complain vociferously about. Sure, she could take issue with Arau and Cromwell slagging Welles and the original film, but it's not the first or last time that will happen. It's probably a losing (from a publicity standpoint) battle she doesn't want to fight. Plus, if she's seen it, she may realize the original is better, and figure that she's better off letting Arau dig his own grave, so to speak.

[Harvey Chartrand]

All this talk about Ambersons...

Since a restoration of the original is unlikely to ever occur (unless some Brazilian pulls the master copy out of a vault in Rio), I agree with Orson Welles as quoted in the Vanity Fair story: "It's the past. It's over!"

But it suddenly occurs to me -- were any scenes shot for Citizen Kane that didn't end up in the final version? I understand that the Hayes Office asked for the elimination of scenes in a bordello. Were these excised from the script prior to filming or edited out of the film itself? Were any other scenes filmed and shelved? One keeps hearing about Welles shooting like crazy and then cutting like crazy (he shot like an exhibitionist and edited like a censor, or words to that effect).

As for Sergio Leone, he was a great director but he has no place on this board. If you want to discuss Italian Westerns, kindly talk about 'Tepepa/Viva la revolucion', in which Welles essays the role of one Colonel Cascorro.

[Lee Gordon]

see interview below

[Lee Gordon]

Entertainment: 'Magnificent Ambersons' is hardly magnificent for Madeleine Stowe Copyright © 2002 Nando Media

The Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune online By JEFF STRICKLER, The Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune


LOS ANGELES (January 5, 2002 10:53 a.m. EST) -

During interviews to promote the sci-fi adventure "Impostor," Stowe had something else on her mind: a made-for-cable remake of Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" in which she gets top billing. The movie debuts on A&E next Sunday. Stowe won't be watching.

"A&E, on their behalf, really, really cared about putting on a wonderful production," she said. "But the director has his own vision, and it reflects what he thinks."

At least, she thinks that it reflects what he thinks. She can't be sure because the director, Alfonso Arau, never told anyone what he was thinking.

"The director did not have a point of view," she said. "Or, at least, one he was willing to discuss. I was bewildered. ... He didn't really want to share what was going on in his head with the cast. You couldn't ask him questions because he believed the director was the total authority."

"He was an odd choice" because he's a foreigner, Stowe said, noting that "The Magnificent Ambersons" is considered a quintessential American story.

Stowe had high hopes when the project began.
"It was a really intriguing prospect," Stowe enthused. "We had a great, great cast. People like James Cromwell and Bruce Greenwood. Gretchen Mol is sensational in it. [There was] a great costumer. The production values are outstanding. And the script was tremendous. Everyone who is involved in cinema should have a chance to read this script. I wish I could tell you that it was better, but... "

By her account, the cast and crew had no input into the project. By the time they arrived on the set, Arau had pre-staged the actors' movements and pre-blocked the camera shots.

"All we did was get in there and try to match what he'd already done," she said. "I don't have to have input, but I want to know where my character is headed. [As a director] you have to explain your point of view to your actors. If you don't let them know where you are coming from, it's a problem."

When Arau did talk to the cast, it had nothing to do with the movie.

"I tell you," she said, rolling her eyes in exasperation, "he had very peculiar fascination with incest, and that was about the only thing he'd talk about."

Stowe stopped short of predicting that the movie would be a bomb, acknowledging that it's what ends up on the screen that counts, not the behind-the-scenes angst. Her frustrations spring largely from what she considered difficult working conditions that should not be visible to the viewers if the cast and crew did their jobs properly.
"

[Harvey Chartrand]

Thursday » January 10 » 2002

Like Orson Welles original, controversy dogs Magnificent Ambersons TV remake

JOHN MCKAY
Canadian Press


Wednesday, January 09, 2002

TORONTO (CP) - It's the stuff of Hollywood legend. In 1942, film boy genius Orson Welles tried to bounce back from the controversy surrounding his unrecognized debut masterpiece Citizen Kane with a screen version of The Magnificent Ambersons.

Like Kane, Booth Tarkington's 1918 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel told of how the 20th century brought about the downfall of a self-made American aristocrat, in this case the head of a wealthy midwestern family called the Ambersons.

Although as stylish and innovative as Kane, Ambersons has languished in second place in Welles' belatedly honoured oeuvre, largely because the project was taken away from him by RKO, cut from 131 to 88 minutes, and had a different upbeat ending tacked on.

It was the seminal moment in Welles' own creative downfall.

Now A&E has embarked on a lavish, three-hour TV remake to air next week, and it, too, has become mired in controversy.

It began with Mexican director Alfonso Arau (Like Water for Chocolate, A Walk in the Clouds), accused by his leading lady Madeleine Stowe of botching it. Stowe was quoted by the Calgary Sun's Louis B. Hobson as saying Arau created a "disaster" with his determination to focus blatantly on the incest that is only hinted at in the original book and the Welles screenplay.

"It breaks my heart that we didn't do the material justice," she told Hobson.

The remarks have stunned veteran TV producer Norman Stephens, who says he had no idea Stowe was so disillusioned by the filmed-in-Ireland project.

"I don't think anybody can say that the film is a disaster," Stephens said in a telephone interview from New York. "I've been in the television movie business for 20 years. I can tell you what a disaster looks like. This is not in that category at all. I'm certainly sorry to hear that she felt that way. It was not evident to those of us who were there."

But if Stephens expected Stowe's co-star, Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood (Thirteen Days), to rally to the project's defence, he would be equally disappointed.

Reached by phone in Vancouver, Greenwood offered nothing but silence when asked about Stowe's criticism.

"Next question," is all he would say when pressed.

Asked for his own opinion of the film's outcome, his only reply was a terse: "Haven't seen it."

Persistent attempts to get him to open up were greeted with more lengthy bouts of dead air on the line.

But was it an intimidating experience, trying to remake what is now regarded as a Welles classic, albeit a flawed one?

"Yes, of course," Greenwood said guardedly. "You try and remake Welles, you better hope you're going to do something as innovative as he was when he did it. Because if you don't, there's not much point."

In the story, spoiled heir Georgie Amberson Minafer is furious over the growing romance between his widowed and ailing mother Isabel and Eugene Morgan, her one-time childhood sweetheart and now a nouveau-riche automobile pioneer.

He scuttles their rekindled love in an Oedipal-fuelled fit that is, admittedly, more obvious in Arau's reworked vision. Greenwood concedes, though, that the complex four-way relationship (Georgie is also fond of Morgan's pretty daughter Lucy) was beautifully depicted by Tarkington himself, an author he says he was raised on.

"On some levels, it's almost a shame to have ever made a movie out of it. Because the book is so good."

Greenwood had never seen the Welles screen version, but took a look prior to assuming the Eugene Morgan role first played by Joseph Cotten.

"I looked at it much more for Welles' visual style," he said. "But it's also difficult to ignore Cotten because he was so great."

Then, the actor says, he tried to put Cotten out of his mind because he realized he would have to do something else with the Eugene character.

Although much of the new version painstakingly mirrors the source material, neither Greenwood nor Stephens can point to which of the fresh scenes - the TV movie runs about 140 minutes - are replications of the 40 minutes or so of excised Welles footage that is presumably lost forever.

Stephens insists it's a new vision of a classic, not just a remake, but admits friends in Hollywood told him he was out of his mind to attempt it.

"In private moments, we sort of hope that Orson Welles is smiling at us. He might be a little pissed off at us, but that's OK, too."

-

Some quotes from those involved in the upcoming A&E TV remake of The Magnificent Ambersons, the Orson Welles classic based on the Booth Tarkington novel:

"We certainly haven't done a terrible job. . .you can't look at that movie and say that this is a creative television-movie disaster on any level." - producer Norman Stephens on criticisms by actress Madeleine Stowe that it was a botched production.

"It's a remake. You can't help but it be a remake. I mean it almost doesn't matter how original your vision is. If you're working with a script that's the same script, it's going to be a remake." - star, Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood.

"It's certainly a lamentation over the way progress inhales things of beauty and belches out ugliness in its wake, while at the same time goes towards something higher." - Greenwood on the fin-de-siecle backdrop of the Amberson family's downfall.

"I was just really happy to get a part that didn't require me wearing a Spandex dress or a little tiny bikini." - actress Jennifer Tilly, cast against type as fussy, homely spinster Aunt Fanny.

"I just updated the real problem with the Ambersons, which is totally an Oedipus and Electra complex. It's almost Freudian." - director Alfonso Arau on the story's love affair gone wrong.

"A gift from God. . .such a talented person." - Stephens on Bruce Greenwood.

"They destroyed Ambersons. . .and it destroyed me." - Orson Welles on disowning the film after RKO took control of the final version away from him.

© Copyright 2002 The Canadian Press








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[Jeff Wilson]

THE YEARS HAVE NOT BEEN KIND TO THE POOR 'AMBERSONS'
By JIM BECKERMAN, STAFF WRITER
The Record (Bergen County, NJ), Jan 10, 2002 pF6


Orson Welles has been betrayed twice.

The first time was in 1942, when he completed "The Magnificent Ambersons," the follow-up to his classic "Citizen Kane." The movie had the potential to be another classic. That is, it did before RKO studios took advantage of Welles' absence to recut the film, remove key scenes, and change the ending.

For decades, film buffs have salivated over the missing footage. Now Mexican director Alfonso Arau ("Like Water for Chocolate") purports to show us "The Magnificent Ambersons" as Welles intended it. He's remade the film in color, and allegedly used Welles' original screenplay (no other screenwriter is credited). The new "Magnificent Ambersons" airs at 8 p.m. Sunday on A&E.

The problem is not merely that Arau is no Orson Welles - that's evident from the clumsy camerawork, and the unappetizing closeups that make actors such as Madeline Stowe, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Gretchen Mol look grotesque. Nothing here even comes close to the breathtaking visuals of Welles' film, with its camera gliding through the great rooms of the Amberson mansion, or tilting up to that enormous staircase where Tim Holt and Agnes Moorehead shout back and forth between floors.

A more basic problem is that Arau failed to capture the nuances found in Booth Tarkington's novel about early 1900s Indiana, on which "The Magnificent Ambersons" is based.

His version of turn-of-the-century Indianapolis bears no relation to the "midland town" that Tarkington in his 1918 book, and Welles in his film, so painstakingly detailed.

Costume designer John Bright's low-cut gowns would have caused Tarkington's women to be banished from decent society. Ditto the nude statues in the Amberson mansion. And the light pastel wall colors used in the mansion didn't come into vogue until decades later. At one point, uncle and nephew have a conversation in a pastel blue saloon that, if it existed in the early 1900s, no man would have been caught dead in.

The Amberson world is stifling, not airy: Tarkington called them the Ambersons because they inhabit an amber world, a world of dark mahogany and gaslight. Moreover, like flies in amber, they're trapped in it. The story of "The Magnificent Ambersons" is how that world changes - and how the Ambersons are unable to change with it.

The prosperous, respectable Ambersons are old - that is, 19th century - money. The downfall of the haughty George Amberson Minafer (Meyers) - who deliberately sabotages his widowed mother's (Stowe) romance with an upstart automobile manufacturer (Bruce Greenwood), only to find automobiles and factories swallowing up the town he used to dominate - is the story of rural America giving way to the Industrial Age.

Tarkington, once considered a latter-day Mark Twain, was a witty, energetic writer. Welles brought the same verve to his filmmaking.

There's not one echo here of Welles' deft, stylish direction. In place of Welles' opening montage, which gave us a delightful summary of early 1900s fads and fashions while slyly filling us in on the back-story, Arau has introduced a lumbering flashback. The acting in the new film is abominable. You have to believe that the director, shoving the camera in everybody's face, encouraged good actors like Stowe to chew all that anachronistic scenery.

And about that screenplay: Not only is it not Welles' original, but if you manage to make it all the way to the end, you'll discover that Welles' original ending - supposedly the point of the whole exercise - has again been dropped.

So has Arau brought anything to this new "Ambersons"? You bet - the tango.

Would characters in provincial 1900s America be doing this steamy Latin dance that came into vogue 20 years later?

No - but it looks great against all that pastel scenery.

[jaime marzol]

will we ever be at a loss of articles on how lousy the new ambersons is?

i could use more leone talk. does any one know the life story of the big, fat guy who was in FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, and THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY?

[Jeff Wilson]

No, but here is Robert Wise, from today's Internet Movie Database news update:

Director Robert Wise (West Side Story, The Sound of Music), who edited the original version of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, has added his voice to those of TV critics who have generally excoriated a TV remake of the movie due to air on A&E channel Sunday night. ("A fat chunk of lead," commented Matthew Gilbert in today's Boston Globe.) "It makes you appreciate our version that much more," Wise told today's (Friday) Los Angeles Times. Wise also denied claims made by Welles himself that the studio ordered scenes removed from the original version in order to "destroy" him. "I've always maintained that in its original version, Ambersons may have been a greater work of art, but we had to get the film so it would hold people's attention," Wise told the Times. "Remember, back then the average picture was 90 minutes; if you had something that went over an hour and a half you were in trouble."

Never mind that most of the Best Picture nominees that year were all in the 120 minute range.

[Welles Fan]

Jaime: you mean Mario Brega?



Mario is quoted as saying: " il nuovo Ambersons succhia! "

[jaime marzol]

wellesfan, you're the greatest.

MARIO: El nuevo Ambersons es suck-ola. mas vino! mas women!

robert wise sodomised the ambersons, and now he won't admit it. he dances around the subject every time. he says it MIGHT have been better in it's original form.

[jaime marzol]

the other cool mexican character actor is the guy who played the general in THE WILD BUNCH, arau's comanding officer in the film. emiliano something-or-other. he was great in the whore house scene in UNDER THE VOLCANO. someone told me he also directed films.

EMILIANO: mas vino! mas chicas!