Ambersons score + script = mindblowing

[Le Chiffre]

Glenn,
I hope you get a chance to read Carringer's Ambersons book sometime, because it's filled with some amazing revelations about the film. His "Oedipus in Indianapolis" essay contains some wild speculations that are not very convincing, but his analysis of the memos between Welles and RKO over the film's fate are very detailed and insightful. And you're right: the story of the film's undoing is so convoluted it is hard to know exactly who wanted what in or out of the film. It shocked me to discover, for example, that Welles himself wanted the following things OUT of the film:

1. Eugene and Isabel dancing in silhouette after the ball and most of the scene that followed
2. The famous "Iris out" the closes the snowride scene
3. Lucy and George's downtown walk, where she coldly wishes him a "splendid trip" to Europe.
4. Jack's visit to Eugene and Lucy's new home.
5. Eugene and Lucy's walk in the garden.

You may be right about the attempt at "concert symmetry" on the Hermann CD. But I was able to slow down the First Porch Scene to it's proper speed - thanks to a defective tape deck -and I think it sounds even more beautiful and more ethereal that way.

[Lance Morrison]

what were Orson's reason for wanting those scenes out?? Was it just that they told him it needed edited down so he was choosing those scenes in order to possibly save his ending?

[Cole]

Yes, Lance. Welles only made those suggestions after he was informed that the studio wanted to make drastic cuts to his film to shorten its length, and after he was reprimanded by Schaefer for making a film that looked too “arty.” Carringer goes into great detail regarding Welles’ proposals to modify the film to satisfy the demands of the studio, but I’m not sure if that tells us much on how Welles actually wanted the film to be released.

[Johnny Dale]

Ambersons Article nothing new, but I'd never seen the photo of Georgie & Isabel

MAGNIFICENT FRUSTRATIONS

Orson Welles was not only a genius—he played one on the screen. The most lavishly gifted Hollywood director of his generation, this all-around showboat both lived and dramatized the self-serving Promethean spectacle of the outsize artistic temperament laid low by the constraints of commerce.

The movies and the image will jointly be on display at Film Forum during the course of a two-month retro that opens Friday with a 10-day run of Welles's 1942 second feature, The Magnificent Ambersons. Having begun his career with a movie that continues to top critics' polls as the greatest ever made, Welles suffered a suitably outsize sophomore jinx. The Magnificent Ambersons, however different in tone and subject from Citizen Kane, gave every indication of being a comparable precocious masterpiece. Then it ran into a perfect storm of historical and studio interference, surviving today as a magnificent ruin.

Adapted from Booth Tarkington's barely remembered Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about social change in turn-of-the-century Indianapolis, The Magnificent Ambersons was in production when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Less than two months later, patriotic Welles took off on a war-related mission to Latin America that would result in his unfinished documentary It's All True. Ambersons' original 131-minute cut was entrusted to editor Robert Wise. The movie tested poorly with audiences, and the RKO brass deemed it too long and too gloomy; Ambersons was re-edited in Welles's absence, or, should we say, it was butchered.

Thus, the movie became the sacred relic of Welles's martyrdom. About 50 minutes were cut, and new material was indifferently filmed and inserted along with several crass reaction shots designed to break the flow and make obvious what particular characters were feeling. The last half was reshuffled in preparation for a new, horribly botched ending, and then—with a new management team in place at the studio—the version we know was dumped into release on a double bill with a Lupe Velez vehicle, Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost. (Legend has it that Welles left a print of the original cut behind in Brazil; were it ever to turn up, this lost ark would rival Greed's still-missing reels as the greatest archaeological find in movie history.)

"It was a much better picture than Kane—if they'd just left it as it was," Welles famously told Peter Bogdanovich decades later. But even still, The Magnificent Ambersons is a pretty sensational movie. The film language is more fluid and adept than Kane's, the expressionist lighting is more rigorously modulated. The astonishingly choreographed Christmas ball that serves to introduce the major characters is arguably the greatest set piece of Welles's career. The highly rehearsed ensemble, which complemented a contingent of Mercury Theater regulars (Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins) with RKO cowhand Tim Holt, retired silent star Dolores Costello, and then-unknown Anne Baxter, is sensational.

Detailing the decline of a wealthy family and the much deserved "comeuppance" delivered its scion, Georgie Minafer (Holt, with an uncanny resemblance to the young, petulantly entitled George W. Bush), The Magnificent Ambersons is unusually somber for a Hollywood movie. What American secrets are being hidden here? The Amberson mansion is a miniature Xanadu, with Welles's camera relentlessly craning up or prowling around its gloomy grand staircase. Filled with dark nostalgia for the artist's Midwestern boyhood, Ambersons may be Welles's most personal film—he would maintain that Tarkington had based the character of the automobile inventor (Cotten) on his own father.

Welles had adapted The Magnificent Ambersons as a radio play two years before (assigning himself the role of Georgie), and not even Kane made more effective use of dramatic sound. Again, and with greater subtlety, there are Welles's trademark overlapping dialogue and his construction of aural "deep space," a brooding Bernard Herrmann score, and the clever deployment of a naturalistic Greek chorus. Most remarkable, however, is the voice. The Magnificent Ambersons is the lone Welles feature in which the maestro does not grace the screen. Still, he is overwhelmingly present in the insinuating invisibility of his tender, omniscient narration. The movie is haunted by Welles's voice, by his youth, and by a sense of a lost America that he would never again visit—and mainly by its own lost possibilities. It might be unfolding in his mind's eye—or inside the snow globe Kane dropped.

Film Forum's series mixes Welles's movies with his performances in other people's movies (famous for scenes in which the undirectable sacred monster directed himself). All the completed features, save for the wonderful Henry IV adaptation Chimes at Midnight, are included—some in new 35mm prints. The series ends with a one-week run of Carol Reed's 1949 The Third Man, the movie that, as André Bazin wrote, transformed Welles into a myth.

[RayKelly]

Quartet Records out of Madrid is offering a remastered reissue of the acclaimed 1991 recording of Bernard Herrmann’s lost score for THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS on audiophile CD. It is limited to 1,000 copies. Ordering details at http://wellesnet.com/bernard-herrmann-sacd/

[PMBen]

Sadly for me, the Preface CD doesn't include the waltz the characters dance during the last Ambersons party.

[edmoney]

Sadly for me, the Preface CD doesn't include the waltz the characters dance during the last Ambersons party.

I also wondered about that. Perhaps that waltz wasn't composed by Bernard Herrmann but by Roy Webb.

[Le Chiffre]

There were two waltzes heard during the party scene. One was Waldteufel's Toujours ou Jamais, the main Amberson theme, variations of which dominate the beginning of the film, and then another one where George and Lucy watch Eugene and Fanny dancing, which I don't know the name of. There was a third one that went along with Jack and Eugene discussing George and the olives, but it was cut along with the footage. Something to do with students as I remember.

It's possible Webb composed some of the party music, just as it's likely he composed the Toujours ou Jamais reprise for the studio's end credits. The butchering of Bernard Hermann's music score seems to be one of the less researched parts of the film's undoing; yet in the end it was Hermann, not Welles, who demanded that his name be taken off the credits.

[Roger Ryan]

There were two waltzes heard during the party scene. One was Waldteufel's Toujours ou Jamais, the main Amberson theme, variations of which dominate the beginning of the film, and then another one where George and Lucy watch Eugene and Fanny dancing, which I don't know the name of. There was a third one that went along with Jack and Eugene discussing George and the olives, but it was cut along with the footage. Something to do with students as I remember.

It's possible Webb composed some of the party music, just as it's likely he composed the Toujours ou Jamais reprise for the studio's end credits. The butchering of Bernard Hermann's music score seems to be one of the less researched parts of the film's undoing; yet in the end it was Hermann, not Welles, who demanded that his name be taken off the credits.

It's possible Webb reworked some of the party scene diegetic music once the film was being re-edited, but it's also likely that the Preface CD did not include the party scene music since it was largely, if not entirely, non-Herrmann compositions only orchestrated by Herrmann. The music that ends the ballroom party scene, for example, is Kerry Mills' "At A Georgia Camp Meeting" (1897)...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT7-J4Yt-oE

[tonyw]

Warning.

I ordered THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS CD as advertised on the Hone site but they sent me CITIZEN KANE instead. Since the postage was high (probably due to tariffs!) I've requested the proper CD but thought I'd warn those of you who are considering ordering it.

For those of you who have and received the wrong CD their response is No Reply email so going on their sire and finding contact us may be the best method.

[tonyw]

New Update. They are sending me the correct copy today and I can keep the KANE CD they sent by mistake.