Yesterday Paul Schrader dealt a resounding blow to Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons (’42), and the tragic reputation of this alleged masterpiece (originally 131 or 133 minutes, although only an 88-minute version has been generally seen) will probably never be the same.
I’m not saying that Ambersons acolytes have fled into the forest, but they’ve definitely been told “whoa, come up for a little air” by a guy who knows a thing or two about directing and casting.
In a 1.10 Facebook post, Schrader, having recently seen the the 133-minute (or is it 131 minute?) “reconstructed” version of Ambersons, essentially agreed with a six-and-a-half year old HE column that Tim Holt‘s grating, agonizing lead performance is an insurmountable problem.
Edited Schrader: “MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS REDUX. I’ve always withheld judgment on Welles’ 1942 classic. Lost masterpeice, taken away from him and recut, he was in Brazil, blah, blah, blah. I’ve now seen the 133-minute ‘reconstructed’ version and changed my mind.
“Welles didn’t step away from the re-edit because he was cut out, and he didn’t go to Brazil simply at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller. I believe he stepped away from the film because he knew it was fatally flawed and that no amount of recuting could rescue it. And the fatal flaw was in the casting of Tim Holt.
“Welles again made a decade-spanning epic about a flawed macher, but instead of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles like a charismatic blunderbuss, it was an immature CFK, George Amberson Minafer, a snotty guttersnipe of a young man portrayed by the untalented Holt.
“Watching the film at the length that Welles originally intended, I realized that Holt’s George was hopelessly inadequate. Most of the 40 excised mintues came from Holt’s performance. Welles couldn’t have saved the film. No one could have. The studio notes, in essence, must have been this: lose one half hour, trim Tim Holt and try to make Joseph Cotten the lead.
“I suspect Welles welcomed the opportunity to distance himself from the film’s inevitable failure and, as the decades wore on and his memory dimmed, embrace the fantasy that The Magnificent Ambersons was a masterpiece which had been ripped from his hands and mutilated.”
HE’s “Horror of George Minafer“, posted on 8.17.18:
The hive-mind mantra behind The Magnificent Ambersons (’42) has been so deeply drilled into film-maven culture that even today, no one will admit the plain truth about it.
I’m referring to the fact that Tim Holt‘s George Amberson Minafer character is such an obnoxious and insufferable asshole that he all but poisons the film.
I’ve watched Welles’ Citizen Kane 25 or 30 times, but because of Holt I’ve seen The Magnificent Ambersons exactly twice. And the second viewing was arduous.
Welles admitted decades later that he knew “there would be an uproar about a picture which, by any ordinary American standards, was much darker than anybody was making pictures…there was just a built-in dread of the downbeat movie, and I knew I’d have that to face.”
He’d calculated that audiences would forget their discomfort when Minafer “gets his comeuppance” at the very end. But even in the truncated 88-minute version of the film that exists today, audiences still have to suffer Minafer’s ghastly arrogance, snippiness and smallness of spirit for roughly 80 minutes, and most people simply can’t tolerate this much abuse.
One of those who saw the 133-minute cut was costar Anne Baxter (1923-1985), who was 19 during filming. Yesterday I came upon a Baxter q & a in “Conversations with Classic Film Stars“, a 2016 book by James Bawden and Ron Miller, and came upon the following quote:
I love Manny Farber’s Ambersons review, and particularly this excerpt: “Theater-like is the inability to get the actors or story moving, which gives you a desire to push with your hands. There is really no living, moving or seeing to the movie; it is a series of static episodes connected by narration, as though someone sat you down and said ‘here!’ and gave you some postcards of the 1890s.”
The same “lemme outta here” character issue clouds the watching of Welles’ Touch of Evil — i.e., Detective Hank Quinlan is too gross, too drooling and altogether too much to take. He all but vomits in the audience’s lap.
Criterion’s Magnificent Ambersons Bluray (4K digital restoration) will pop on 11.20.