The Magnificent Ambersons

Year of Release:  1942
Director:  Orson Welles
Screenplay:  Orson Welles, based on the novel The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
Starring:  Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Richard Bennett
Running Time:  88 minutes (cut from 148 minutes)
Genre:  Period drama

The Ambersons are an old, vastly wealthy Midwestern family at the turn of the 20th Century.  However they face a change in fortune as the proud and willful son of the family, George (Holt), refuses to allow his widowed mother (Costello) to reunite with Eugene Morgan (Cotten), who she was involved with before George's father came along, and has remained her one true love.  Meanwhile the world around them is changing due to increasingly industrialisation, particularly the growing influence of the motorcar, and George refuses to move with the times.

This was Orson Welles' follow-up to Citizen Kane (1941).  The film was controversially re-edited by the studio who felt it was too long and depressing, so they cut it by an hour and substituted a more upbeat ending.  While this was going on Welles was in Brazil working on another film.  We are unlikely ever to see a Welles cut of the film, because the original negatives of the cut footage were destroyed, although Welles detailed notes for the film survive.  The composer, Bernard Herrmann, was so incensed by his score being cut by an hour that he demanded his name be removed from the film.  While we don't have the Welles Ambersons what we do have is a powerful and impressive film.  It's stylish and visually striking, and there are some fantastic performances from Welles' Mercury Theater company.  The opening sequences are masterful creating a surprisingly humorous elegy for a forgotten world.  It is a film about the dangers of overweening pride as well as the perils of refusing to move ahead with the times.  There are a very few places where it shows signs of heavy cutting, and the ending looks very obviously tacked on (which it was, of course) and doesn't work with the feel of the film.  While it is no Citizen Kane, there is still brilliance here and it has it's own flawed magnificence.

Anne Baxter and Tim Holt in The Magnificent Ambersons

Citizen Kane

Year of Release:  1941
Director:  Orson Welles
Screenplay:  Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles
Starring:  Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Agnes Moorehead, Paul Stewart, Ruth Warwick, Erskine Sanford, William Alland
Running Time:  117 minutes
Genre:  Drama

Following the death of controversial tycoon, Charles Foster Kane (Welles), one of the richest and most famous men in America, newsreel reporter Thompson (Alland) is sent to get a fresh angle on Kane's life by investigating the meaning of his last word, "Rosebud."  As he interviews those who knew and worked with Kane, Thompson builds a picture of his life from his poor childhood in rural Colorado, to his foundation of a huge newspaper empire, to his political ambitions, and troubled private life.

This was the first film of legendary actor, writer, producer and director Orson Welles, who had already made a splash with his Mercury Theater company, and his notorious radio production of The War of the Worlds.  It was a very experimental film for the time, with it's non-linear structure, unconventional camera angles, and pseudo-documentary sequences.  Famously it often tops polls as the best film ever made, while I am not sure if it is or not, it is a personal favourite of mine, and it is certainly a great film.  It offers much, but reveals little.  The great writer Jorge Luis Borges described Citizen Kane as "a labyrinth without a centre", and it is an entrancing puzzle.  It's mysteries, even when revealed, seem to lead to yet more mysteries.  Ultimately we end where we begin, outside, the forbidding gates of Xanadu.  The film is a technical marvel, and full of images that have become iconic.  The complex, literate script is beautifully written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, and the performances are very impressive all round.  The film pretty much disappeared on release, thanks in no small part to real-life newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who was enraged by the film, believing that Welles was having a go at him, and he tried to ensure the film was buried.  Fortunately Hearst failed, and this dazzling film could be reappraised as the masterpiece it is.

Orson Welles as Citizen Kane