A Family in Turmoil

The A&E; television adaptation of “The Magnificent Ambersons” scheduled for Sunday has reawakened interest in the original 1942 Orson Welles film, long considered one of the most tragic victims of studio interference in Hollywood history. Even the press kit for the A&E; TV movie includes the famous Welles quote, “They destroyed ‘Ambersons,’ and it destroyed me.”

Despite its misfortunes, “The Magnificent Ambersons” has been a deeply influential film. When Vincente Minnelli was preparing “Meet Me in St. Louis,” it was the Welles film he studied. Martin Scorsese paid obvious tribute to it with his adaptation of “Age of Innocence.” Even Wes Anderson has acknowledged its influence on his current hit film, “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

British film magazine Sight & Sound conducted an international critics’ poll in the 1980s in which “Ambersons” was voted one of the top 10 films of all time. And in his seminal book, “The Liveliest Art,” film historian Arthur Knight rates it over “Citizen Kane” as an artistically more accomplished work. Welles himself always maintained that, in its original form, it was his greatest work.

Robert Wise, who edited “Ambersons,” remains sympathetic to Welles’ complaints about cuts in the film but insists that no effort was made to destroy the picture. “I have always said that despite what Orson said, since ‘Ambersons’ has come down through the years as a classic in its own right, that means we didn’t destroy it, doesn’t it?” Wise said.

Orson Welles Called It

a ‘Mutilation,’ but Was It?

For decades, Welles’ version of the supposed “mutilation” of “Ambersons” has been accepted as gospel. Only in recent years has there been a willingness to reexamine the events and dispel many of the long-held assumptions regarding its troubled post-production. With the publication of Robert Carringer’s meticulously researched “Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction” in 1993, it became possible to study precisely which scenes were cut, trimmed or re-shot.

Carringer reveals that Welles, in Brazil filming the equally ill-fated “It’s All True,” was a willing accessory in suggesting many of those changes. And he says the man who was caught in the middle between Welles and the studio was the film’s editor, Wise.

Though now best known as the director of such landmark films as “West Side Story,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “The Sound of Music,” Wise was just a 26-year-old on the RKO lot in 1941 when he was summoned to meet Welles.

After recently viewing the new TV adaptation (“It makes you appreciate our version that much more”), Wise reflected on the events of 60 years ago.

“The first time I met Orson, he was already shooting ‘Kane,’” Wise said. “It was the scene where he was playing Kane as an old man, and he had on all this old-age makeup. He wasn’t happy with his original editor, a rather old-fashioned fellow, and since we were the same age, he thought I might work out.”

“Citizen Kane,” of course, went on to secure a place in film history and earned Wise his first Oscar nomination for editing. When Welles began “Ambersons,” he sought out Wise again.

“I was looking forward to working on ‘Ambersons,’ because I remembered being so moved by the radio program. [Welles had presented a radio version of the play in 1939 as part of his Mercury Theatre series.] I was so moved by it, I was really excited when I learned that it was going to be the follow-up to ‘Kane.’ I thought, this will show those people who thought ‘Kane’ was cold; this will be Orson’s chance to prove that he has heart.”

Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons,” which won the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, held special meaning for Welles. He maintained that the character of Eugene Morgan was based on his father, who had been an associate of Tarkington. He felt an affinity for the portrait of a wealthy family’s fall set against the backdrop of fin de siecle America being overtaken by the ensuing Industrial Age, and he played the part of the spoiled protagonist, George Amberson Minafer, in the radio production.

But when it came time to shoot the film, he selected cowboy actor Tim Holt for George. Welles also used some of his Mercury Theatre stock company from “Kane”--Joseph Cotten as inventor Eugene Morgan, Agnes Moorehead as the repressed Aunt Fanny and the jovial Ray Collins as Uncle Jack--to fill out the cast, choosing then-unknown Anne Baxter for the ingenue role of Lucy.

Principal photography began on Oct. 28, 1941, and there was a great deal riding on the film. “Citizen Kane” had gone over budget and had not performed well at the box office. RKO chief George Schaefer had signed Welles to a much-publicized contract guaranteeing him unparalleled artistic freedom, but with the poor returns from “Kane,” Schaefer was under mounting pressure to have Welles deliver a hit.

But it was events in far-off lands that sealed the fate of “Ambersons.” As the crew assembled on a Monday morning in December to shoot the scene in Eugene Morgan’s auto factory, the world had been irrevocably altered by the attack on Pearl Harbor the day before. Overnight, the mood of the country was transformed. America was mobilizing for war.

As “Ambersons” drew to a finish in January, Welles began acting in “Journey Into Fear” in the evenings. Additionally, he had been persuaded by Nelson Rockefeller to aid the war effort by shooting a film in South America and prepared to fly to Rio de Janeiro. Wise assembled a rough cut of the film, which he took to Miami to discuss with Welles. On Feb. 5, 1942, Wise spent the day recording Welles’ narration, and the next day Welles composed a telegram that gave Wise the unquestioned authority to supervise all aspects of post-production.

The plan was to have Wise fly to Rio with alternate shots and music cues, to give Welles the widest possible latitude in determining the final cut. These plans were abandoned when the government refused Wise permission to travel to Brazil. On March 16, a screening for RKO executives did not go well.

After it, Jack Moss, Welles’ business manager, uttered a prophetic line: “We’ve got a problem.” The next day, a preview was held in Pomona, and the reception was catastrophic.

Wise recalled the preview. “At a certain point, the studio became concerned because they had a lot of money tied up in the picture, about a million dollars, which was a big budget in those days. So we went out for some previews with our work print to Pomona, and the preview was just terrible. The audience didn’t like it, they walked out, they were laughing at Aggie Moorehead’s character, and it was an absolute disaster.”

One of the most startling revelations of the Carringer book was that, contrary to legend, Welles himself had ordered a massive cut in the middle of the film before the disastrous Pomona preview. Welles’ own gutting of the film resulted in a jarring and overly melodramatic second act. Combined with the scenes of a hysterical Moorehead and the unsympathetic nature of the spoiled protagonist, it proved to be too much for the wartime audience.

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“We took it the next time to Pasadena, and it played a little better but still not acceptable,” Wise said.

“We then cut some more and rearranged things, and the third time we took it to Inglewood, but we had cut so much we had continuity problems and needed some new scenes to bridge the gaps. We then took it to Long Beach, and they sat for it, they didn’t walk out, they didn’t laugh. And that’s the way it went out.”

The Last-Minute

Rewrite of the Ending

The most controversial deletion was the final scene, set in a boardinghouse. Although the original script had kept the same ending as the novel and the radio program, Welles rewrote the scene at the last minute and had it take place in a boardinghouse where Aunt Fanny lives.

Eugene comes to visit and recounts the same dialogue as in the earlier (and later) versions, with the primary difference being that Moorehead sits in a rocking chair in something of a catatonic state as Eugene prattles on, oblivious to her distress. Welles claimed it was the best scene in the film, but the reaction at the time suggests that this long scene ended the film on a sour note.

Carringer has stated that Welles never did find a satisfactory conclusion for “Ambersons,” not in the radio version, not in the original draft and not in the boardinghouse scene.

This scene was not quite the dramatic conclusion of the film that Welles always claimed; that moment is reached when George is alone in the deserted Amberson mansion, weeping for his dead mother’s forgiveness. It was there, as Welles’ commentary so aptly informs, that George Amberson Minafer got his comeuppance. Having reached this dramatic climax, all that is left in the film is epilogue, whether set in a study, a boardinghouse or a hospital corridor.

Assistant director Freddie Fleck shot a different ending that retains Cotten’s dialogue from the earlier ending but sets it in a hospital and implies that Eugene and Aunt Fanny will get together. This was the version that Schaefer approved for release, but for him it was too late.

The Welles debacle had forced the tiny studio to borrow money to cover costs and, in June 1942, Schaefer was fired. The new regime had little patience for Welles or “Ambersons,” and the film was unceremoniously released a month later.

Welles returned in August and began decrying the changes to the film that occurred in his absence. He had neglected to bring home the complete 132-minute print, leaving it in Brazil, and it vanished. Film preservationists dream that it survives. But until some cinematic Indiana Jones uncovers Welles’ print, the 88-minute version is all we have.

“I’ve always maintained that in its original version, ‘Ambersons’ may have been a greater work of art, but we had to get the film so it would hold people’s attention,” Wise said. “Remember, back then the average picture was 90 minutes; if you had something that went over an hour and a half you were in trouble.”

Wise also rebuts the claim that the excised footage was destroyed as a personal attack on Welles. “It was standard practice that, after the previews, when you’d come back and take sequences out, you’d put them in the vault. About six months after the films were released and if you didn’t need to change the film, they’d sell the footage for the silver.”

Despite lack of support from the new regime at RKO, “The Magnificent Ambersons” received four Oscar nominations, including best picture and best supporting actress for Moorehead. It won none.

“Orson was as close to a genius as anyone I’ve ever met,” Wise said. “But he was undisciplined. On ‘Kane,’ he was totally focused on the film, but on ‘Ambersons,’ he was doing his radio program, he was producing and acting in ‘Journey Into Fear,’ he was getting ready to go to Rio; he just had too much else going on.”

To the end of his life, Welles bitterly spoke of the “mutilation” of the film. He may also have underestimated the magnitude of his own accomplishment. Despite the post-production traumas, “The Magnificent Ambersons” remains an artistic achievement, a powerful examination of love’s tragic consequences set against a vanished Eden.