I’m a big Orson Welles fan, even though I’ve only seen a handful of the films he directed (Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil among them). I’d never seen The Magnificent Ambersons, because I had always heard that it had been butchered (Read about what happened here). Ambersons was on Turner Classic Movies this weekend and I finally decided to take the plunge.
It was great. The ending does suck and you can clearly tell how out of place it is from the rest of the movie. The funny thing is that the dialogue is pretty much as Welles had planned, but the context is completely different and alters the meaning of the dialogue incredibly.
The film is adapted from the Booth Tarkington novel. It tells the story of the fall of the most powerful family in a Midwestern town around the turn of the last century. As George Minafer, the lead character, thinks in a scene towards the end of the book, “…in his reverie he saw like a pageant before him the magnificence of the Ambersons — its passing, and the passing of the Ambersons themselves. They had been slowly engulfed without knowing how to prevent it, and almost without knowing what was happening to them.” There’s the story in a nutshell.
The most powerful scene is one involving Richard Bennet as Major Amberson, the patriarch of the clan. The Major is old and his daughter Isabel has just died. He sits before the fireplace, simply staring, while the narrator (Orson Welles) speaks. In the original version of the script, here is the full text:
And now Major Amberson was engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life. He was occupied with the first really important matter that had taken his attention since he came home after the Gettysburg campaign and went into business; and he realized that everything which had worried him or delighted him during this lifetime between then and today — all his buying and building and trading and banking — that it was all trifling and wasted beside what concerned him now. For the Major knew now that he had to plan how to enter an unknown country where he was not even sure of being an Amberson — not sure of anything, except Isabel would help him if she could.
In the book This Is Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles discuss Bennet:
PB: In the scene where the Major sits in front of the fire, Richard Bennet really looked like he was dying.
OW: Yes. Dear man, I loved him so. I’d been such a breathless fan of his in the theater. He had the greatest lyric power of any actor I ever saw on the English-speaking stage.
PB: Really?
OW: There’s no way of describing the beauty of that man in the theater.
PB: He was the father of the three Bennett girls [Barbara, Constance, and Joan]?
OW: Yes, and he was great and famous on the stage. By that time, he was incapable of remembering even a single word of dialogue, so I spoke every line and he repeated it after me, and then we cut my voice from the sound track… I’d found him out in Catalina in a little boarding house, which was, I guess, the inspiration for the boarding house at the end of my original version of the Ambersons. He was living there — totally forgotten by the world — this great, great actor. And think what it meant to him at the end of his life to be brought back and to suddenly play an important role! And to have people admire and respect him, as we did — as we all did… Right afterwards, he died.
Welles refers to his ending of the film. In the re-shot ending, Eugene Morgan speaks to Fanny Minafer as they walk down a hallway towards the cameras. It’s played pretty straight, as Eugene reveals he has reconciled with George. In Welles’ version, Eugene visits Fanny in the boarding house where she now lives. It is quite apparent that he is doing very well in life, while she has fallen on hard times. She is hardly responsive to him as he pours out his heart; she is clearly bitter, having fostered an unrequited love for years. Eugene leaves the house, which is the former Amberson mansion. Eugene comes across as completely insensitive to Fanny and her desires, but then he seems to have overlooked her his entire life.
The whole film is a marvelous meditation on power and privilege, the passage of time and the good and bad of a powerful love.
UPDATE: Hello visitors from GreenCine Daily, a truly awesome movie site. I keep thinking about the difference between Welles’ original ending and the one in the film and I wanted to clarify my feelings. I’ve heard for years how bad the ending is and when you compare it to the script, it doesn’t seem too different. But they are totally different. Eugene Morgan says the same things, but in the film version, his words have no deeper meaning. It’s all on the surface. In the script, all the other elements are undercutting the words, casting a wonderful counterpoint. And that makes all the difference. It adds an element of tragedy to what is ostensively a happy ending.