Ambersons links and info

[bord]

Hi all,
I am 99% done with a small Ambersons project and I need a little bit of help identifying one of the music cues.

I have taken a Criterion laserdisc rip and used the video, along with stills from the carringer book and a clip or two from the trailer to create an 'illustrated' version of the Tony Bremner recording of the Ambersons score. It isn't a complete narrative, but a great way to give visual context to the score.

The only problem I have left is identifying the cue: Isabel's Return. Going between Carringer's text and the booklet from the CD case I simply cannot find it. The closest thing I can find according to descriptions is the Romanza, which is essentially Jack's return.

If anyone can give me some help in identifying the piece I would really appreciate it.


While I am starting a new thread I will also throw out another question to anyone who might have more information: How many stills of cut Ambersons material exist outside of what is in Carringers book and floating around the net (at Ambersons.com etc)? My next project is a reconstruction essay and I have limited resources as far as stills are concerned.

Best,
bord

[tony]

bord: you should ask Roger Ryan, a member here. Just in case you don't know, he did a reconstruction of Ambersons a while ago.

"Second Nocturne" must be the same as "Isabel's Return" as it's between the "Romanza" and the "Departure". Check it with the film, if it's in the film. I have always found the Preamble Ambersons cd completely confusing as to what is what.

[bord]

thanks tony, i'll check with roger too.

the second nocturne is actually a second missing night veranda scene, this time with fanny and the major. the recorded score places it out of sequence with the original film continuity, another problem with this recording.

the isabel's return cue was recorded originally but dropped from the final cut of the film, though most of the scene still appears. most of the music cues are very close in length to the scenes to which they correspond, even the romanza, whose scene is 90% missing, matches up timewise with what is in the script... but i can't find anything to match isabel's return. perhaps it simply didn't make the recording.

[Roger Ryan]

Hello bord - You are correct that "Isabel's Return" did not make the Bremner CD; in fact, I believe the liner notes mention this omission. One must assume it wasn't a substantial enough cue to warrant inclusion. Personally, I thought the scene would play better with music, so for my reconstruction I reused the later cue that plays when George learns of his mother's death from Fanny. I'm fairly certain the "Isabel's Return" cue was cut from the film because it bridged the carriage ride into the hallway scene in the original edit. When the hallway scene was deleted (along with a few seconds of the carriage ride), the cue probably no longer worked (Check Page 2 in the "Welles And New Digital Technologies" thread for more info on how I utilized the Bremner recording).

There are quite a few "Ambersons" stills available in the Lilly Library collection in Bloomington, IN, many of which show up in the Carringer and Bogdanovich books. Some are actual frame enlargements from the cut footage...although, unfortunately, it seems that some of these may have disappeared or been misplaced over time. Joseph McBride has mentioned seeing a frame enlargement of the final matte shot of the dark, looming city as Eugene's car pulls away from the boarding house; this was in 1970 when Bogdanovich had possession of supposedly 70 - 100 such stills. According to McBride, Bogdanovich claims to have turned over all of those photos to Oja Kodar who may still have them in a box somewhere in her Croatian home!

[bord]

Thank you, Roger. I really appreciate the information! I guess I can call this part of my project complete then.

[Le Chiffre]

Hate to beat the Ambersons drum senseless, but people keep coming up with this good stuff lately. This Mike Thomas blog entry, found at the Wellesnet Facebook page, could prove to be a significant document down the line:

http://mtatthemovies.blogspot.com/2009/ ... rsons.html

[Roger Ryan]

Wise demonstrates in this interview that his memory was pretty good even as certain events start to combine in his mind (considering these events happened within weeks of each other 60-some years earlier, that's no surprise). I can't say I disagree with his viewpoint, with the exception that I definitely think Welles captured the heart and soul of the novel on film, much more so than he did with the radio play.

The story of how Wise ended up overseeing the final takes on the Major's fireside reverie is a good one and demonstrates how difficult it can be to access who did what.

[Le Chiffre]

Yes, january 1942 sounds like it was a mad scramble to finish the film. It would be interesting to have a list of all the scenes that were shot during this time. The fact that the factory scene was shot right after the Pearl Harbor bombing was something I didn't know before.

[Colmena]

Just watched Magnificent Ambersons again. It's been so long, this may be only my second time. And it was during that first time watching MA that I was able to appreciate Welles' genius for the first time, specifically the dramatic intensity and technical prowess of one of those scenes with George and Aunt Fanny in the staircase. (By contrast, the first time I saw CK, in college, I didn't get it. The complexity of the plot & structure was too much for me, I was confused, couldn't get a grip on it.)

With CK we have this heady & paradoxical combination of a brilliant young man, in his ambitious, open-minded, show-off manner, taking on an old man's sad story: the dual failures of Kane's life of loss, his dying alone, combined with Thompson's failure to identify "Rosebud."

With MA, this paradoxical conjunction of a young man seizing upon an old man's POV is heightened into what is, for me, this massive puzzle: How does it happen that someone so young, so brilliant, so successful, so full of energy and life as OW in his mid-20's would want to put forward this movie of historical pessimism, romantic pessimism, and existential fatalism?? (By existential fatalism, I mean the theme of the inescapable total loss of life's force and meaning, which would have been the point that the movie would have left us with, in the final meeting of Eugene and Fanny, if MA hadn't been tampered with.)

He was drawn to the pessimism(s) in Tarkington's novel, and then (as he says) consciously determined to intensify it.

If pressed to explain Welles' precocious fascination with pessimism, decline, fatalism, self-destruction, morbidity, etc. I turn to his life experience of

a) Losing the pre- 20th century backwater of Grand Detour, his own lost "Rosebud."

b) Seeing his father destroy himself through alcohol.

c) Losing both parents, as a child. And with both we have certain particular and peculiar intensities: Cutting himself off from his father, which I take to be the grounds for him saying that he "killed" his father, and that intense deathbed scene with his mother. These may be relevant.

Anything else to say about the sources of Welles' precocious pessimism?

[Le Chiffre]

I think, as you said Colmena, that losing both parents as a child certainly helped make Welles into a “profound pessimist”, as he once described himself. I remember reading one critic (can’t remember the name offhand) who, after watching a revival double feature of KANE and AMBERSONS, noted how obsessed with death the young Welles seemed. Not just the deaths of individuals, but the deaths of ages as well, particularly the period just before he was born. As art historian James Beswick Whitehead put it, the artistic and cultural legacy of the Victorian Age was so massive, so voluminous, that the 20th Century could think of little to do with it except consign most of it to the attic of history. I think it’s likely though, that another reason why Welles had such a love for stories of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, besides wanting to rescue them from that attic, was because that was also the world his parents had lived in. In bringing to life the world of the Ambersons – surely one of the most astonishing and poignant evocations of a vanished age ever put on film – Welles was, in a sense, symbolically bringing his parents back to life through the magic alchemy of celluloid.

As far as Welles’s “fatalism” goes (which is defined - yes, I had to look it up - as “the acceptance of all things and events as inevitable and unalterable; submission to fate"), Welles appeared to have had an ambivalent belief in curses (the power to control someone else’s fate), and even had personal experience with them, so it’s logical to assume he had an ambivalent belief in destiny or fate as well. I think it was a question that he wrestled in his art with throughout his entire career. It’s probably a reason, for example, why he has Joseph K fight back against his assassins at the end of THE TRIAL, rather then submit passively to his fate, as K does in Kafka’s novel.

Welles obviously, was one of the true trans-Atlantic figures of the 20th Century, as he embodied both pessimistic and optimistic attitudes. Like that other mid-westerner George Amberson Minafer, he became less optimistically willful and more pessimistic and fatalistic after a long sojourn in Europe, but never abandoned hope entirely. As Welles said, he was a profound pessimist, but he was allergic to despair.

[Colmena]

Thanks for the reply, Mteal.

Where does that Welles quote come from, if you please.

Thinking about his topic (the childhood of trauma of losing one's parents that hangs over the adult Welles) brings me back to the import of Rosebud. When Welles confesses to having /losing his own Rosebud, in interview with Peter B, it pertains to a simple matter of losing childhood happiness, esp the scene of him dancing by himself at Grand Detour. But Kane's "Rosebud" involves both a loss of childhood happiness (of sorts) and also the trauma of losing his parents (esp his mother), and it is a trauma that hangs over his adulthood. Tho we don't find this out until the end, when we see him crying when he first whispers "Rosebud," after smashing up Susan's room... and then the sled.

Also, re W's precocious fascination with death, it's Welles who plays the part of Death in "Hearts of Age," right? I've also heard said that it's Vance.

[Le Chiffre]

He plays some kind of ghoulish old man in HEARTS OF AGE, but whether that's supposed to represent death I'm not really sure.

That quote came, I believe, from a 1962 interview with Huw Wheldon concerning THE TRIAL, where Welles said something to the effect that, as an American ("hard-wired for optimism" as Alvin Toffler once described us), he could not buy in Kafka's bleak worldview completely.

[Wellesnet]

Nice webpage, despite the fact that the author spells Orson's name wrong:

http://retailfix52.wordpress.com/2011/0 ... cleveland/

Especially interesting is the still from the 1919 film, "House Without Children".

[Le Chiffre]

The last novel of John O'Hara - a writer who admired Orson Welles, and was admired by Welles - was called THE EWINGS, and was published posthumously in 1972. I read it some years ago, enjoyed it quite a bit, and was reminded quite a bit of Ambersons, although the O'Hara book is somewhat darker and raunchier, and takes place in Cleveland as opposed to Indianapolis. I'm glad to see that the renowned film and literary critic Stanley Kaufmann noted the similarities too when he reviewed the novel in 1972. I wonder, was that Kaufmann's mistake when he mis-identified John O'Hara as "Michael O'Hara"?:

The Ewings

By Michael O’Hara

(Random House; $6.95)

I came to bury Caesar, not to praise him, and was wrong on both counts. This is John O'Hara's last finished novel but not the last of the finished work that he left; and there's no point in pretending that he didn't know his job. That job is of some interest in American literary history.

Through most of his career, even those who disliked O'Hara's work conceded that he was a sharp social historian, a ruthless investigator of sexual mores and a connoisseur of cultural data. Many, including myself, then went on to say that he was in effect merely an aggrandized stenographer with narrative skills, an enervated tag-end of naturalism being maintained for its own exploitative sake. There is no grand revision in order for O'Hara, no great quarrel to be picked with the serious consensus about him, but this last novel is at least an occasion to mark his merits, along with the rest of him, and to note that a certain kind of writing energy is now absent from the literary scene.

In his first two pages O'Hara displays his technique, his perception, his cheapness, his power to keep you reading. First page:

"It was a four o'clock wedding,which gave the bride plenty of time to change her clothes and make the eight-fifteen to Detroit, which made connection with the nine-fifty to New York. But instead of taking the nine-fifty to New York, the couple took the train for Chicago, which left fifteen minutes later, and meant that they did not have to spend their wedding night on a train."

I'd stake my life, without looking up the details, that O'Hara was accurate about this 1913 train schedule. In a long line of lesser novelists following Balzac, he showers facts on us to fix era and custom and also to show his bona fides, to persuade us that a writer who takes such trouble with details must be reliable in all matters and must have a story to tell. Then, on the second page, comes the other half of the O'Hara one-two punch. He says of the bridal couple:

"There was something in the atmosphere of New York, the foreignness of it, that brought them together and relaxed them, and Edna even had her first bowel movement in four days."

I laughed when I read it, both because of the intended anti-romantic jolt and because it showed that O'Hara was still in good form. One of his basic techniques is to weave a web of social convention, then lift it to reveal sex or scatology. In old-time burlesque there was a standard gag in which a girl walked out sedately in a hoopskirt, then strong lights came on behind her to outline her legs and bottom. That's a not over-simple analogy with O'Hara.

This time the main setting is Cleveland and the main characters are lawyers and their wives. The period is the First World War. Bill Ewing gets married, turns down a law job in New York on his honeymoon and comes home just in time to see his lawyer-father die. Page seven! O'Hara uses death better than Nero. We feel that, with the successful father dead and the young pair stepping into prospects, the word Beginning is writ large. Another writer might have felt he had to cook up some trouble for the Ewings: not O'Hara. The couple lose one child in the diphtheria epidemic, otherwise everything is clear sailing. O'Hara holds our interest with the very clearness of the sailing, feeding our vicarious ambitions with Bill's professional cleverness, his happy marriage, his steady progress. The variations --not exactly drama--come from their friends and from Bill's mother. There's a wicked German scientist, there's a suicide and a murder, and there's homosexuality, both latent and blatant. Bill's mother, widowed in her early fifties, rich and handsome and lonely, virtually kills an old friend with heart trouble by performing fellatio on him, then discovers the discretions of lesbianism and goes off to live in California with another rich widow.

The sex details raise matters of veracity quite different from railroad timetables or the long parade of vintage automobiles. How does O'Hara know that Bill Ewing, in 1915 or so, would have reacted so calmly to the news of his mother's homosexuality? Or that the mother herself would have reacted so calmly to frank language used by a seducer? O'Hara doesn't know, of course; he imagines it because he enjoys imagining it and because he knows, quite well, that his readers want him to imagine it. It's one of the increments of a long author-reader relation. His readers have learned, through personal observation and experience, that much of his contemporary sexual detail is accurate, so they take O'Hara's historical sex on trust, even though very few people now alive know how a middle-aged Mrs. Ewing of that day would have reacted to four-letter words in a sexual moment. There's no history of such matters to be checked, and O'Hara himself was born in 1905. (However, novelists of the future may check O'Hara, among others, for such details about the present!)

And what does it all come to? Count all the merits: the skillful selection of scene and focus, the paring-off of fat, the deftness of transition, the skill in making us accept innumerable viewpoints, the character sketching (with the Ewings themselves the least vivid, incidentally), the rhythmic recurrence of narrative pulses to keep the story moving, the close-fitting jersey pullover of minutiae that clings to the body of the book--and then what? At first there's an impulse to put The Ewings in the class of American expose, the line of Hawthorne and O'Neill and Grace Metalious that discloses the truth behind respectable facades. Then it's clear that expose, disturbance, alteration are not remotely what O'Hara is after; that essentially he's telling us all's right with the world, that Pippa may screw a little as she passes but she's still caroling that God's in his heaven, and that the Protestant ethic, battered but dependable, will bless us as we go.

There is a line of American novelists, realistic In tenor but sentimental in gist, of whom O'Hara is the descendant. William Dean Howells may be best of breed, but O'Hara is closer to Booth Tarkington. From The Magnificent Amhersons:

"In that town, in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet, and when there was a new purchase of sealskin, sick people were got to windows to see it go by."

It's the O'Hara tone. The obvious difference between the two authors is that Tarkington was socially and sexually sentimental, while O'Hara goes through Cleveland yanking down bloomers and ripping open flies. But many elements in the two men are similar--family ties that bind and loose, youthful romances traced to unromantic conclusions--and the principal theme is the same: money as progress, money as the mainstream by which, perhaps with a coyly helpless shrug, one is carried along. Vernon Parrington described Tarkington's general thesis: "Life is an agreeable experience--to the successful, hence it is well to rise." It seems equally true of O Hara.

The most interesting question raised by O'Hara's death (in 1970) is whether he will be replaced, whether we will get another high-grade popular naturalist pouring out one heavily detailed novel after another, ostensibly giving us the low-down on American society, making his ruthlessness plausible by his commanding technique, his frightening eye and ear, his pleasantly insulting insistence on the dirtiness of sex; and yet for all his Diogenes air, a celebrant of the status quo.

Seventeen novels and eleven volumes of short stories. (Among the latter are some of the best stories ever written about Hollywood, not just a writer's revenge on the studios.) When a man has written that much as well as O'Hara and has' been as widely read, his disappearance leaves a gap. My chief curiosity about that gap is to see whether any new author has the energy to fill it--not to mention the professionalism--to patrol that area of the print spectrum; because the popularity of an adroit, nasty, industrious, superficial but intelligent writer like O'Hara was a tribute, in its way, to the very idea of the novel.

Stanley Kauffman is the film critic for The New Republic.

By Stanley Kauffmann

[DrG]

Hi,
is anyone aware of these two books by Laurence Klavan? I'd be interested about some whereabouts...

Relating The Magnificent Ambersons
The Cutting Room: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/034 ... UTF8&psc=1
Quote the amazon page:
"Like the hero in a classic Hitchcock thriller, the innocent movie buff at the center of this witty and suspenseful novel finds his ordinary life suddenly transformed when he’s plunged into a harrowing game of intrigue, duplicity, and danger. Spurred into a frantic race from New York to Hollywood to Barcelona and back, he’ll encounter enough hairpin twists, shocking surprises, white-knuckle tension, and sinister characters to give even the master of suspense himself a serious case of vertigo. But in this scenario, the mayhem and murder are all too real.
Self-proclaimed movie geek and divorced thirtysomething Roy Milano lives alone in a cramped Manhattan apartment, toiling as a freelancer to make ends meet. It’s a life perfectly suited to the creator of Trivial Man, Roy’s self-published newsletter—filled with tidbits of little-known Tinseltown lore for the delight of other fringe-dwelling cinemaphiles. And it’s a tantalizing phone call from one such kindred spirit that thrusts Roy headlong into his waking noir nightmare.
“I’ve got The Magnificent Ambersons,” declares Alan Gilbert, host of a homemade cable-TV show about the silver screen, who now claims to possess the rarest of the rare: the long-lost and never-released complete print of Orson Welles’s classic follow-up to Citizen Kane. But when Roy arrives at his fellow movie maven’s abode to sneak a peek at celluloid history, the front door is ominously open, Alan Gilbert is dead, and The Magnificent Ambersons is nowhere in sight. Even though the cops arrest a local drug addict for the murder, Roy knows they’re wrong—because the theft of the movie masterpiece points to a different kind of junkie. The kind Roy knows only too well . . . and the kind he’s certain only he can catch.
But Roy Milano is no Sam Spade, even if he does run into more gun-toting goons, sucker punches, and double-crosses than Bogey on a busy day. And the suspects prove to be anything but usual—including a bodybuilding film fanatic obsessed with bizarre rumors about an A-list actress, a rotund reporter who holds Hollywood in thrall via red-hot Internet dispatches from his parents’ basement, and a starstruck street punk with a thousand voices. And then there’s the transatlantic love triangle that finds Roy caught between his very own eager Gal Friday and a sultry Spanish siren with a stunning secret. But when the bodies start to fall faster than a box-office bomb, Roy must cut to the chase in his perilous quest to save the Holy Grail of cinema—and unmask a killer—before everything fades to black."


Relating Jerry Lewis' The Day The Clown Cried
The Shooting Script: A Novel of Suspense: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/034 ... UTF8&psc=1
Quote the amazon page:
"Following his critically acclaimed novel The Cutting Room, Laurence Klavan returns with The Shooting Script. Establishing shot: New York City, present day. Zoom in on a run-down tenement building, somewhere west of Times Square, the home of Roy Milano, a thirtyish, divorced typesetter who lives for the movies. In fact, by pursuing the legendary uncut print of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Roy has become something of a minor celebrity among the fellow misfit film fanatics he caters to in his homemade newsletter, Trivial Man. But there’s nothing trivial when Roy’s old rival Abner Cooley shows up with a check in his hand and the words “Someone is trying to kill me” on his lips.
With his mother ailing, Roy needs the money as badly as Cooley needs someone to head off a trigger-happy stalker who’s determined to put both him and his controversial new screenplay into permanent turnaround. And though Roy does his best, like many a private eye before him, he quickly finds his head turned by an enticing distraction. Not a femme fatale, but a flick.
Roy is all but powerless to resist an e-mail from a mysterious fan that lures him with the promise of an elusive treasure as fiercely sought after by the celluloid cognoscenti as the Ark of the Covenant was by Indiana Jones. It’s Jerry Lewis' famous unreleased drama, The Day the Clown Cried. But when he arrives at a rendezvous too late to save a dying man, Roy realizes he’s stumbled into a dangerous race to possess a piece of cinema history. To catch up, he’ll have to match wits with a rogues’ gallery: a bored and bitter superstar comedian, a hot-shot producer turned drugged-out has-been, a ferocious German actor who likes to role-play off-camera, a mercurial director with a scary sense of humor, and a hard-bitten cop who’s mad about movies.
Meanwhile, Roy will be tempted by the wiles of three fetching females–and tormented by a single-minded psychopath with more faces than Lon Chaney. He’ll even go on location, pursuing and being pursued from the mansions of the Hamptons to the harbors of Maine, the boulevards of L.A. to the canals of Amsterdam. No one’s ever gone to this much trouble just to see a movie. But for Roy, the reward far outweighs the risk. And a chance to glimpse the Big Picture might just be worth coming face-to-face with the Big Sleep."

I've ordered both and intend to read them during my vacations, i can report afterwards.