Wise Watch: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

Watched:  01/12/2025

Format:  Criterion Disc

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Orson Welles/ others/ Robert Wise - some scenes

This year we're going to try to watch every film we can find directed by American film-director Robert Wise.  We will watch them in order of release.

Wise is the director of innumerable, truly great movies, but it's odd how rarely he gets discussed by film fans.  From film noir like The House on Telegraph Hill to the classic that is The Sound of Music and the ever-controversial Star Trek: The Motion Picture to one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, The Haunting - our fellow has range.   

Starting our journey with The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), famously an Orson Welles directed movie, will seem odd.  However, it seems Wise first got to direct during re-shoots for the ending of the movie, something allowed him as Welles was in Brazil on behalf of the Good Neighbor program instituted during WWII by FDR shooting a different movie for RKO. 

Up to this time, Wise was an editor, including on Citizen Kane and big movies like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Dance, Girl, Dance - both of which we covered here last year.  After The Magnificent Ambersons, he continued editing for a bit but had the opportunity to start directing at RKO and the rest is history.  

We'll largely discuss this movie as a Welles movie, though, and move on to Wise in our next installment.  

I can only imagine what RKO execs were thinking as dailies came in for The Magnificent Ambersons.  And that they felt they needed to strand Welles on another continent to try to "save" the movie is perhaps not a surprise.  The movie is deeply weird, uncomfortable to watch, nihilistic, and experimental in some ways.  

It's also one of the movies with the most mythology around "what could have been" of any movie I'm aware of.  The footage was all, in fact, shot, and test screenings occurred where people saw a 131 minute version of this movie that is now 88 minutes.  It has a studio-enforced happier (if not "happy") ending.  And I'd guess someone came along and insisted they edit for standard clarity as the movie progresses, but were unable to muck about with what Welles had shot and Wise edited for the first half hour or more as the movie required those scenes to make any sense, and they'd been shot in a way that required the montage feeling.

In fact, I think the rumors are true.  If they'd left well enough alone, Magnificent Ambersons would be the movie we'd be discussing just as much as Citizen Kane as technically groundbreaking - and maybe is with people really in the know.  The cinematography is absolutely singular - capturing strange scenes that seem like post-cards (a criticism of the film at the time), bringing picture-book scenes to life, but as an audience, we're aware of the rot underneath.  

I truly don't understand how they got the effect and will need to look at the special features on my disc to see if there are clues.  

But there's also just shots, like the motion and changes of levels on the stairwell after George has wrecked his mother's chance at happiness, that are just...  amazing.  And, holy shit, Agnes Moorehead...  so @#$%ing good.

You can feel Welles' radio background in the film's soundscape - characters talking over each other to reveal just what Welles wants you to hear in any given moment, but retaining a feel of the natural as people trip over each other.  But, he's also leaning into his stagecraft and theater background - understanding how to keep the camera still and yet have different people and conversations draw focus.  It's an odd matter of blocking and focus in any scene, whether it's the gala at the Amberson house and guests drift in and out of frame, or the conversations in the kitchen as people enter the room.  

The story is equal parts melodrama about a spoiled child of generational wealth coming of age in the Gilded Age and a metaphor for the development of America from the Gilded Age to urbanization and modernization.  It's a story of the cancer of class privilege, of the self-harm imposed by the rules of polite society.

Describing the plot will do it no real favors.  And who knows what was lost in the massively slashed runtime?  But twenty-plus years before the start of the action of the film, a young inventor (Joseph Cotten) woo'd the daughter of the wealthiest family in Indianapolis.  After a drunken goof she found embarrassing, the daughter (Dolores Costello) kicked her suitor to the curb and settled with a sedate businessman - producing a single heir, George (Tim Holt).  

The heir now home from college, he meets the daughter of the inventor (Anne Baxter), and the old drama reignites as his mother is thrilled at her former-suitors return, and her sister-in-law (Agnes Moorehead) rekindles the torch she once carried for him.  

Cotten's horseless carriage becomes industrialized and mass-producible and he begins accumulating great wealth while George flits about, coasting on his fortune and not understanding with Anne Baxter won't marry him.  (He's also generally a heel.)

But, as I say, this story is an excuse to observe what happened in America as we hurtled toward the 20th Century, and the coming changes we'd see with the car, and the explosion of urban and suburban life from America's pastoral origins.  

Robert Wise comes into play, I am thinking, in the final sequences, trying to stitch together what happens to George - who isn't even really seen in his own final scenes, and, instead, is discussed by others.  I can't say for certain, but this does seem to be the ending that isn't a walk to the gallows, and I can see how they might have known what to shoot, edit and cut.

Anyway, it was an absolute joy to return to this movie.  I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I really like it.  I have theories about what got cut out - but can't be sure.  I'll need to do some digging.