In some senses, Orson Welles is a filmmaker who’s under-discussed as a director. Not that he isn’t talked about, or his films aren’t discussed at length, but they’re always mired in stories of their production; the woes of a geniuses at odds with the capital forces driving the film industry. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), above all the others, is trapped in this conversation: the butchered film, the film made and unmade, the lost masterpiece, the beginning of the end. The film’s speculated more for what isn’t there than what still is, which is a shame because out of all that destruction at the hands of a hostile studio, Ambersons is still one of the greatest films ever made. It speaks to Welles’ talent (his magnificence, if you will), that even in the remnants of a complete picture is one of the great monuments of cinema. Ambersons is unlike any film that came before, and only flashes of it have come since.
One of the keys to Welles’ genius still emerging even in cut-up iteration is that his method of storytelling comes from a background in adaptation, one seeking to condense, re-organize, and retell for efficiency, clarity, and sharp dramatic effect. It’s no wonder that the boy wonder who condensed Shakespeare’s Henriad into a single (if bloated) play in his early-teens is able to make easy work of the triumphs and flaws of one of the most interesting and irrelevant multiple Pulitzer Prize winners—Booth Tarkington—one who’s irrelevance is interesting precisely because the work is about irrelevance.
The decline of the Amberson family is a story of many an old-moneyed, Gilded Age clan, the kind who’s Victorian manors dot the landscape of all American cities whose worlds were uprooted by the automobile and drove the ultra-wealthy to the outskirts, away from the pollution and populations of the US’s newly industrialized metropolises. After the elliptical nostalgia of the Ambersons’ opening, they’re quickly thrown into decline—they’re of the conservative wealth that once led the social scene but cannot imagine the new one that is leaving them behind. Maybe automobiles are a ruckus, but they’re here, and if the Amberson family doesn’t get with the program they’ll fall off into obscurity.
We first enter the Amberson manor through what would become the last of their great parties, the wind crashing into the foyer as the camera breaks with its stage-y Silent Era format and pushes in through the grand doors. The mansion’s packed with all the local well-to-do’s, for the very last time. Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotton) accompanies his daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter) into the declining estate, where his (Henry) Ford-like inventions will soon become the harbinger of doom for this stagnating family, and Lucy will become the lost love that could’ve saved them. Once almost all of the partygoers leave, the Ambersons are left as ghosts in their own house, peeking out between the shadows and banisters. Eugene dances with Isabell (Dolores Costello), the Amberson who went and married a Minafer, begetting her son George (Tim Holt), but always secretly in love with Eugene. George is the last of the Ambersons, the end of a great line, one who aspires to nothing but yachting or perhaps running a charity or two, not realizing his days of idleness are numbered. In failing to court Lucy, and learning about Eugene and his mother’s love, George becomes jealous—everything is wrong, it’s not lining up how it’s supposed to. He senses it, something is wrong with the Ambersons, something he can’t see. He forces his mother to travel the world with him to get her away from Eugene, but upon her return she becomes gravely ill. George, in his own hubris has killed his mother, his lifeblood, the family that birthed him with such privilege—he’s squandered it all.
As Isabel’s lying on her deathbed, the doilies canopying her bed wrap shadows around her face. As the light from the sun fades the pattern seems to warp, twisting around her as her soul slowly leaves her body. Her father, Major Amberson (Richard Bennett), has seen his family fall into ruin and companies into debt. Fire dances around his face as he stares practically into the camera and contemplates how the earth came from the sun and we came from the earth, the great man faced with cosmic mortality that’s terrifying to grasp. George and his aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead, who gives one of the greatest Hollywood performances) become abstract figures of light and shadow amidst the empty columns and blanketed furniture that dot the dying estate as they discuss what on earth they’re supposed to do—they haven’t any money, something they’ve never had to think about before. George tries to get a job as a legal aide but has to tell the man at the firm it doesn’t pay enough nor does it pay soon enough to cover his and Fanny’s new boarding house. George walks home for the last time in the most stunning sequence of Welles’ entire filmography, an abstract montage of power lines, factories, and manors turned to split apartments as the once quiet midland town has been turned to a bustling metropolis. It’s a sequence that at once calls to mind Dziga Vertov’s collages of industrialization and foreshadows the ghostly decay of Tobe Hooper’s Down Friday Street (1966).
All of this survives in the Ambersons of today, the one taken from Welles’ hands. The ending, one of pure decline for George and Fanny, is replaced by the studio while Welles was in Brazil working for the War Department on It’s All True (1942), supplanting the brilliant demise that Welles envisioned with the ridiculous and farcical ending to Tarkington’s novel where, after George is ironically run down by a motor car, he’s reunited with Lucy and Eugene’s fortune saves the last of the Ambersons. In one way, I could say this ending has a Sirkian quality, wherein the tacked-on happiness at the end of the bleak melodrama does nothing to quell the feelings created by the film, rendering the ending as creepily inauthentic, but in another way there’s a truth still there at the end of Ambersons—the wealthy, despite their inherent competition with each other, do have an unsettling class solidarity. It’s a fantastical hope by Tarkington, that hack conservative who bullshitted most of his career after a couple of insightful hits, but it’s one that really happens. It’s not the happy ending it thinks it is (depending on your worldview), and it says something about Welles in that trying to destroy his vision still somehow renders a masterpiece.