The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942. Directed by Orson Welles, written by Welles (and fully credited to him), with additional dialogue by fellow legerdemain Jack Moss and pal Joseph Cotten. Starring Tim Holt, Anne Baxter, Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, the incredible Agnes Moorehead, Richard Bennett, and narrated by Welles.
Available on DVD exclusively at Cinema Revolution.
In this state, which is not madness
but Michigan, here in the suburbs
of the City of God, rain brings back
the gasoline we blew in the face
of creation…
From the files of street critic Sandoth “Guy” Fresno.
I’ve spent a good quarter of my life looking for the lost hour of The Magnificent Ambersons. I’ve trudged through old warehouses, stolen into the archives of RKO, been locked away for a month waiting for a lawyer just to give the world what it deserves. Because Ambersons is a signpost, a warning. It’s Michigan, man. Sure it takes place in Indian, God-freakin’ Indiana, home of the Danforth Quayles, but it’s about Michigan, Damnit. Or: it’s about what was coming to ruin us all.
Welles was looking for something lost, a time of innocence, of simplicity. Just like always, he wanted the dreams of childhood which, when he grew old, he mistook for reality. Check out those Ambersons in their buggies! Dancing in a ball, laughing, scraping their upturned noses against the sky. Bastards. It kills me to watch the thing, knowing I’m supposed to care about these sons-a-bitches. Only I don’t. Care about them, that is. Who I care is Joe Cotten, reeling over what he’s done. He’s brought the gasoline-soaked clouds down on top of all of us. And now he’s sorry.
And I care about Agnes. Agnes Moorehead. It’s the movie that made me think Agnes Moorehead is a beautiful woman. That’s saying a lot because she seemed to make it a point to play spinsters, to tie her hair up tight and harden her features. Even here. Watch her while Tim Holt shovels his God-damn dessert down his throat and Agnes swallows her pain. Your throat will hurt for the rest of the movie, or you’re dead.
It’s the typical Welles soaker about lost love, an innocent past, men and women who don’t realize what they had in their hands until it had flown away, never to return. The Mighty Ambersons, holding onto the past, wasting their money in creaky investments and turning their nose up at progress. Only progress eats them alive.
Bratty little Tim Holt confronts Joe Cotten over the coming of the auto-age. No, not because he really gives a rat’s-ass about the automobile, but because he’s spoiled and his widowed mom is paying just a bit too much attention to old Joe. And Joe Cotten, doing what he does best, loping around, bewildered, even as a successful man knowing that he can’t hold onto the reins. He gives a little speech, when he’s been insulted and knows he, too, can’t have what he really loves. And it’s beautiful, man, a sweet punch in the face in a small but testy fight in some backwater arena.
Listen to Joe for a moment:
With all their speed forward, they might be a step backward in civilization. Maybe they won’t add to the beauty of the world or lift our souls, I’m not sure.
But automobiles have come. And almost all outward things will be different because of what they bring. They’re going to alter war and they’re going to alter peace. And I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles.
And it may be that George is right. Maybe that in ten to twenty years from now, if we can see the inward changes, by that time I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine.
I don’t know if Booth Tarkington wrote that, or Welles, or who, but that’s it, man, that’s Michigan. That’s the ruined wasteland of Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, Jackson, the whole rotten constellation of half-empty blue collar towns. A story of the bastard rich that reaches right down and scratches our flea-bitten heads. Rich and poor: we all breathe that gasoline air. We all punch our clocks and drink away our pain and then go through the same thing over and over and over again. Sometimes we quit drinking to think we can live better, but then the clouds clear and we sit over a ruined plate of eggs and know that life isn’t going to get any better than this, without any more color than the Saginaw Bay in February.
Ambersons is a wreck, though. You can see what a masterpiece it would have been, if they hadn’t taken sixty God-damned minutes out of it. From 150 to 88 minutes? Holy shit. I spent two years nonstop, with the memory of Detroit haunting my every step, just looking for the footage they lost. And keeping my eyes and ears open since. Everyone said it was gone, melted down for the silver, but I just couldn’t believe that. Those moronic scholars speak of it in hushed tones, but movies should never be analyzed, just felt. And I can feel in my bones that that sixty minutes is out there somewhere, like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It was a corporate decision to hack the thing, just as it is a corporate decision to belch carbon monoxide into the air, just as it is to invade countries, just as it is to grind the human soul into a lubricant to run the machines.
I don’t know, man. Sometimes the movies just bring you down.
…If the Messenger entered now
and called out, You are my people!
the tired waiter would waken and bring
him a coffee and an old newspaper
so that he might read in the wrong words
why the earth gives each of us
a new morning to begin the day
and later brings darkness to hide
what we did with it.
—Philip Levine, “Rain Downriver”
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