#46: The Magnificent Ambersons

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Welles)

Horray Youtube! (No, seriously, I'm going to pay for all the stuff that anyone has decided to release in the US.)

The first thing I will say is that I have no tolerance for changing sad endings into happy endings to make a movie more marketable. In high school I read the play for Streetcar Named Desire then saw the movie. They kept the ending unhappy but had Stella run out on Stanley at the end, and even that pissed me off. For this movie not only did they cut out 60 minutes, replace a sad ending with a happy ending, but they destroyed the removed footage so Welles could never fix it. Maybe the reason Criterion hasn't picked it up yet is that they're still holding out hope that some day a copy of the original will be discovered somewhere, like just recently happened with Metropolis.

Despite the best efforts of the movie studio, it's still a great movie. It's like a movie adaptation of the song 'Like A Rolling Stone'. The performances are incredible. George Amberson thought he never had to make any money of his own because he could spend his life spending his grandfather's. Then, oops. It's great to see the town start as a classical rural setting then turn into a smoky modern city. It's weird that so many important plot points happen between scenes, but of course, that wasn't the way Welles intended. And the happy ending added on by the studio doesn't really make much sense. It's like all the characters decided to be saints at the last minute just to accomodate the happy feelings of the audience. There's this one episode of 'The Critic' where a film studio edited the ending of Casablanca to have Ilsa decide at the last minute to parachute down from the plane and be with Rick. The ending is like that, only not a parody.

I read that the 2002 version which claims to be based on Welles' original screenplay really isn't at all. So maybe I should read the 1918 novel the movie was based on to see what the story was supposed to be.

Rating: *** 1/2 / 5
Probable rating of the movie Orson Welles made: **** 1/2 / 5

Other films I've seen for the first time lately:

The Double Life Of Veronique: *** 1/2 / 5

Great main plot, great imagery, maybe a little too overly quiet and subtle. The idea is that two women who look identical were born at the same time with a subtle psychic link to each other, and one gradually discovers this. It's got the same sort of implied knowledge themes and spiritual congruity as the Three Colors trilogy, but doesn't draw you in the same way Blue and Red do.

Now the pace of my getting through the hundred will probably slow down considerably, cause I'll have a lot more to do for a while, and also various TV series will be airing new episodes again.

12/100