NEW AMBERSONS - Anybody seen it?

[mteal]

Jaime,
I think it was Emilio Fernandez you're thinking of. He was also in another good Peckinpah movie PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID, this time playing a victim. Maybe there should be a special thread here on westerns. I like Leone's films too, and after all, Welles himself appeared in a couple of westerns. TEPEPA, mentioned recently here, is one of the best of Welles' 'acting only' films. Too bad it's only available here in the U.S. in a cheap pan-and-scan video of the shortened version, known as BLOOD AND GUNS.

This new Ambersons is starting to sound sickening. Our local paper here gave it 2 stars, calling it mediocre and mannered. You have to wonder why they bothered in the first place.

[jaime marzol]

mteal:
you just cleared up a mystery. was wondering what the hell this film BLOOD AND GUNS was. there was a 16mm print of it on ebay a while back for 80-bucks.

emilio fernandez, that's the man. just looked him up on WWW.IMDB.COM, he has quite a long list of credits, along with 40 credits as director. he was excellent in WILD BUNCH.

never saw PAT GARRET AND BILLY THE KID. liked peckinpah's BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, and also liked OSTERMAN WEEKEND, but i haven't seen them in years, not sure if i would like them today.

after reading lillian ross' PICTURE i gained a whole new understanding of how a great movie from a great director can get whittled down to nothing, as must have happened to some of sam's movies. so we have to learn to appreciate what we have.

i hated THE GETAWAY, thought it sucked, but my dad liked it a lot, and he has good taste in films, so it maybe it's not that bad, but it's not for me.

and we should have a thread for leone, westerns, and good western character actors. we'll put it right next to the bad ambersons thread.

strother martin in THE WILD BUNCH was excellent, martin and the other eunic that hung out with him. you get the impression they were having sex with livestock.

[Lee Gordon]

New Ambersons airs tomorrow. I wonder if another thread could be started for the other directors.

Articles on new Ambersons:

http://www.calendarlive.com/top....0.html?

http://www.calendarlive.com/top....0.html?

http://www.startribune.com/stories/459/1020530.html

[Lee Gordon]

More Arau's Ambersons Articles:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2....printer

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin....0020113

http://www.dailynewslosangeles.com/life/articles/0102/13/lif02.asp

[Jeff Wilson]

Well, having watched the new Ambersons on and off during the evening, it was alternately bad and tolerable. The low points for me were the performances of Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Jennifer Tilly. Both were terrible, Tilly in particular. Why Arau felt she would make a good choice for Fanny is a major question.

In the end, it's hardly worth commenting on; it simply proceeds in its dreary way, a three hour lump. It fails to move the viewer (this viewer at least) emotionally or otherwise evoke much interest of any kind.

[Rick Schmidlin]

It's a mess...a stinking mess...............

[jaime marzol]

i didn't watch it.

i passed by the tv several times while wife was watching it, glanced at it, it looks like every other tv movie, only with familiar dialogue. it didn't hold my attention enough to distract me from what i was doing.

[dmolson]

Thank god my wife insisted in watching another Law and Order spin-off instead of Arau's Magnificent Like Chocolate brittle... I did catch a cruel 10-minute match-off between Tilly and the Georgie character, chewing the scenery like rabid dogs. Tilly, who can be funny and tolerable when playing her usual tart part, is nothing like Agnes Moorehead, nor is she anything of the proper age or carriage. The lines still ring like she's doing a 1899 version of Born Yesterday. The Georgie was too volatile, trying to emote with his green eyes splashed in closeup across the screen, then flapping loudly. the only thing that would have made it tolerable would have been the two accidentally choking on a pretzel

[Harvey Chartrand]

I watched a bad X Files episode instead, although I caught a few minutes of the Ambersons remake. William Hootkins does a great impersonation of Orson Welles circa 1976. Hootkins' farewell monologue at the (Dublin?) train station was masterful, although I agree that Jonathan Rhys-Meyers was terribly miscast. (Odd, because many critics thought Tim Holt was miscast in the original.) Overall, the A&E version was handsomely mounted and benefited from superb production values, but yeah, it seemed bland.
However, even if Arau's take on Ambersons had been a worthy follow-up to Welles' original, nothing will erase the tragedy of what happened 60 years ago -- how the drawing-and-quartering of Ambersons blighted what should have been one of the greatest showbiz careers in history. Nor does it eliminate the anguish all Welles fans feel over the irretrievable lost footage. (An aside: I was in Rio de Janeiro in '84 and I met a few old-timers who actually recalled seeing Welles in party animal mode 42 years earlier. One could say that Welles 'paid the piper' for the rest of his life.)

[akio]

Of course the new Ambersons would suck when compared to the original. But even on its own, the new version was still pretty weak. It's one thing to tell a story in a series of flashbacks, but the story line was all over the map. I think this is partly due to the fact that, for television, a movie has to be cut so that commercial breaks come at specific high points in the narrative (every 8-10 minutes). Acting wise, Rhys-Meyers was pretty one-dimensional: an unredeemable ass. You can't sympathize with him, you can't see what Lucy sees in him, so you really can't care what happens to him. Holt's portrayal is more ambivalent: he's an obnoxious spoiled brat, just as all of us have been at one time or another, but his love for his mother isn't fetishistic and it sure ain't incestuous.

Eugene came off as pretty flat as well. Oddly enough, I thought Tilly was pretty good. She's no Moorehead, and I don't think she was even trying to be like her. I really enjoyed that thrashing she gave Georgie. Pretty cathartic. ???

[Harvey Chartrand]

This surprising discovery gives one hope that the lost Ambersons footage might still turn up.
_

From today's Internet Movie Data Base:

Color Footage Found of Charlie Chaplin

Color footage of silent-movie legend Charlie Chaplin in his film The Great Dictator has been discovered - 60 years after it was shot. The footage shows how the famed last reel, which was a heartfelt plea for peace, was an improvised solution to an extremely difficult set piece. Chaplin wanted his 1940 satire on Nazi Germany to end with two opposing armies coming together in a dance, and the newly- discovered film shows him struggling to get it right. The 25-minute color footage of Chaplin at work was found in a suitcase at his former Swiss home. It was shot by Chaplin's elder brother Sydney and reveals his obsessive perfectionism, keeping crowds of extras standing around while he repeatedly practices his Nazi salute. Chaplin historian Kevin Brownlow says, "This is an amazing find. It includes shots of scenes which never made it into the final film, as well as footage of Chaplin at work. The fact that something like this can be found after remaining hidden for 60 years is amazing. It provides a unique insight into one of the world's greatest films and the man who made it." Brownlow will include the footage in his documentary The Tramp And The Dictator, to premiere at the Berlin Film Festival later this year.

[mteal]

Watched about half of the new Ambersons last night. What I saw was even worse then what I expected, and my expectations were pretty low. The acting was amatuerish, the direction incompetent. Everything about it was an absolute insult to Welles, especially towards the end. If he hadn't been cremated he'd be rolling over in his grave.

[Jeff Wilson]

LA Times article about Wise's experience on Ambersons and focusing on the Carringer version of events:

http://www.latimes.com/enterta....1.story

[mteal]

Very good article Jeff, thanks. I don't really blame Wise for what happened to Ambersons. The butchered studio release was the creation not only of Wise, but Jack Moss, Joseph Cotton, George Schaeffer and others, including - yes - Welles himself. It's just a shame that the scenes that do survive - many of them among the most powerful Welles ever created - cannot be seen in their original context.

Hopefully something good can come out of A&E's "boondoggle", as Jonathon Rosenbaum described it. Maybe there will be enough interest in the original AMBERSONS to do a GREED-style restoration. I think that's the only way we're ever going to have any idea of what Welles' original was like.

[Jeff Wilson]

The thought had occurred to me that maybe the miniseries would spur some action, but until Warner Bros changes its mind about catalog releases, we won't likely see anything. Another thing that might spark some interest is the next Sight and Sound poll; doesn't that take place this year? Considering that Ambersons made the '92 list, maybe another appearance would give an extra nudge. We won't see anything for the 60th anniversary, though.

And going back to Harvey's post about the lost Chaplin footage coming to light, we can always hope for the Ambersons print to surface. Stranger things have happened, like the print of Passion of Joan of Arc being found in a Swedish insane asylum, or was it Norway? Anyway, you get the idea.