The Magnificent Ambersons ***** (1942, Tim Holt, Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Agnes Moorehead, Anne Baxter, Ray Collins) – Classic Movie Review 743

Orson Welles lost control of his 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons to RKO, who cut more than an hour of footage and shot a happier ending. Film-maker Brian Rose has revealed his plan to restore the destroyed cut footage by use of animation. 

The 1942 American period drama film The Magnificent Ambersons, with a screenplay by Orson Welles based on Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1918 novel, is two thirds of a cinema masterpiece. Unfortunately, clumsy butchering by RKO studio executives completely ruins the final section of Welles’s otherwise glorious 1942 film portrait of early 20th century American society, then poised between the old aristocratic elegance and the flashy new world of the car.

The dramatic arc of the film’s emotions and dynamics is destroyed by the sudden ending and added newly shot footage (‘Cut in my absence by the studio janitor,’ said an understandably bitter Welles). But overall the film’s glory is intact, and The Magnificent Ambersons is still a beautiful work of art – more reflective than its 1941 predecessor Citizen Kane – and one that usually appears in critics’ all-time top ten lists alongside Kane.

Welles’s screenplay is exceptional, and so are Stanley Cortez’s gleaming black-and-white cinematography, Bernard Herrmann’s score and Mark-Lee Kirk’s set designs. The film is also highly notable for the graceful performances from Agnes Moorehead, Tim Holt, Anne Baxter, Dolores Costello, Ray Collins and especially Joseph Cotten.

Cotten gives the most delicately subtle and carefully ambiguous of performances as Eugene Morgan, the story’s sympathetic and distinctive symbol of the brash new era of the burgeoning 20th century. This is arguably this great actor’s finest film performance. Tim Holt also gives a career-best performance as the spoiled George. The townspeople in the US Midwestern city, where the Ambersons are the wealthiest family by far, long to see George get his ‘comeuppance’. Agnes Moorehead is also on tremendous form as Wilbur’s sister Fanny Minafer.

The exciting, dashing young Eugene wants to marry rich upper-class Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello), but she weds the dull and steady Wilbur Minafer (Don Dillaway). Their son George (Tim Holt) grows up a spoiled brat. Years later, Wilbur is dead and Eugene, now a widower and a successful car maker, again proposes to Isabel.

She has always loved him and she agrees to marry him. But George resents Eugene and he and his crazy aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead) kill the relationship. Then a chapter of disasters afflicts the Amberson family…

The long-held dream – to find Welles’s missing footage trashed by RKO – has so far not turned into reality. ‘It was a much better picture than Kane,’ said Welles, ‘if they’d just left it as it was.’

The RKO release version runs only 88 minutes differs greatly from Welles’s original rough cut of the film, which ran 148 minutes. Welles felt that the film needed to be shortened and, after it received a disappointing response from a 17 March 1942 preview audience in Pomona, Los Angeles County, film editor Robert Wise cut several minutes from it. The film was previewed again at 131 minutes, with a similar poor reaction.

Welles had conceded his original contractual right to the final cut, so RKO took over editing once he delivered his preview cut.

RKO deleted more than 40 additional minutes and reshot the ending in late April 1942 and early May, directed by assistant director Fred Fleck, Robert Wise, and Jack Moss, the business manager of Welles’s Mercury Theatre. The retakes replaced Welles’ original ending with a happier one that broke the film’s dark mood and elegiac tone, though the reshot ending is the same as in the novel.

The negatives for the cut footage were later destroyed to free vault space, though Welles’s extensive notes on the film’s editing have survived.

Welles narrates commandingly, but you can’t help missing him acting in the film. There were four Oscar nominations, including Best Film, Best Supporting Actress (Moorehead), Best Black-and-White Cinematography and Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, but shamefully no wins.

The budget was $853,950, around the cost of Citizen Kane, but the film went over budget to $1,013,760. RKO’s changes cost $104,164, so it cost $1,117,924 in total. The film earned $1 million at the North America box office rentals by January 1943, but it recorded a loss of $620,000. Really, there is no happy ending to this story.

22 years later, in 1964, both Cotten and Moorehead starred in Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

Cotten and Welles appeared in Citizen Kane and went on to make The Third Man in 1949.

Bernard Herrmann insisted that his credit for the score was removed when more than half of his score was removed from the soundtrack.

Welles did not approve of the cuts but, because he was simultaneously working in Brazil on the unfinished film It’s All True for RKO, his attempts to protect his version failed. A print of the rough cut sent to Welles in Brazil has yet to be found and is considered lost, along with the prints from the previews.

US film-maker Brian Rose revealed in January 2021 his ambitious project to restore the original version of the film by use of animation. Rose has used the latest technology to reconstruct the lost material and animate charcoal sketches. He built the entire physical set, working out camera angles from surviving evidence, including screenplay versions and storyboards. He said that, out of the 73 scenes in the original film, 21 were completely cut or reshot, and 39 were shortened. He has taken about four years to recreate about 30,000 frames.

The cast are Joseph Cotten as Eugene Morgan, Dolores Costello as Isabel Amberson Minafer, Anne Baxter as Lucy Morgan, Tim Holt as George Amberson Minafer, Agnes Moorehead as Wilbur’s sister Fanny Minafer, Ray Collins as Isabel’s brother Jack Amberson, Erskine Sanford as Roger Bronson, Richard Bennett as Major Amberson, father of Jack and Isabel. Don Dillaway as Wilbur Minafer, and Orson Welles as narrator.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 743 derekwinnert.com