Review: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

* * * 1/2
Director: Orson Welles
Starring: Tim Holt, Joseph Cotton, Anne Baxter, Agnes Moorehead

The Magnificent Ambersons has the dubious honor of being Orson Welles' follow-up to Citizen Kane, a film so great that it was destined to cast a long shadow over whatever came next, and so disasterous in terms of box office that it pretty much guaranteed that the studio would feel it necessary to undermine the artistic vision of its boy wonder director. Ambersons is famous for having been chopped up by the studio, which not only cut 50 minutes from it, but tacked-on a happy ending that's about as out of place as a musical number would be at the end of Saving Private Ryan. All that being said, Ambersons is still a really good movie, which is a testament to the power of Welles' vision and skill.

Adapted from the novel by Booth Tarkington, Ambersons charts the decline of a wealthy midwestern family against the changing face of America, marked by the invention of the automobile and the subsequent shift from small, cloistered communities to sprawling suburbs around urban hubs. At the head of the family is Major Amberson (Richard Bennett), whose daughter, Isabel (Dolores Costello) is much sought after by the young men in town. For a time, it seems as if she will choose Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), but his wildstreak proves to be too much for her and she turns instead to the staid and dependable Wilbur Minafer (Don Dillaway), whose eventual death is met with the declaration that he was so quiet, no one will even realize he's gone.

Isabel and Wilbur have one child, George Amberson Minafer (Tim Holt), who runs through the town like a holy terror and knows he can get away with it because he's an Amberson (he's never referred to as a Minafer and frequently other characters call him "Mr. Amberson" and then have to correct themselves). By the time George is college-aged, Eugene returns to town and reconnects with the Isabel. Now a wealthy man, he also has a daughter, Lucy (Anne Baxter), who falls in love with George despite his overwhelming arrogance. Although George and Eugene clash from the beginning over both the Eugene's familiarity with Isabel and his introduction of the automobile - an invention George believes to be a "nuisance" - to town, things are relatively cordial between them until George is informed of rumors that Eugene and Isabel are in love. Isabel, bound by love for her son, agrees to go away to Europe with him and breaks off her engagement to Eugene. This is the beginning of the end for the Amberson family.

I've yet to read Tarkington's novel so I don't know what to attribute to him and what to credit to Welles, but I really love the way that this story is constructed to show the incredible transition not just in this one family, but in the organization of society as a whole. It begins with a delightful voice-over by Welles, who sets a scene of Old Worldesque gentility, where everyone in town lives side by side along a handful of streets, all close together, all very much involved in each other's lives, with the Ambersons and their enormous mansion at the centre. With the introduction of cars, the population becomes decentralized; people move out and into the suburbs (getting there, incidentally, along streets named for the Ambersons), and the community becomes less closely-knit. Throughout the film it is said that people can't wait for George to finally get his comeuppance and the tragedy of the story is not that George eventually does get it, but that there's no one left who cares because everyone has forgotten about the Amberson family.

When you hear that the studio cut nearly an hour from the film, you're inclined to think that it must have been really long to begin with, but Ambersons wasn't. The original cut ran about 2 and a half hours, not an exorbitant running time at all when you consider that many "prestige" films today run to about 3 hours. The final cut of Ambersons is 88 minutes and covers a lot of ground. I could easily have sat through another 50 minutes of this movie - I would have loved to see another 50 minutes of this movie. Save for the ending, I enjoyed every moment of this film, which sparkles with life although there is the sense as it reaches its conclusion that pieces are missing. While I would never argue that it's a better film than Citizen Kane, I would say that I like it more, perhaps because it carries less academic baggage. Welles said that if the studio had left it in his hands, Ambersons would have been at least as good as Kane. I totally believe that.

100 Days, 100 Movies: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Director: John Huston
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt

“I know what gold does to men’s souls,” the old man says in this film that looks like a western, but plays like the deepest of psychological dramas. Writer/director John Huston perfectly balances a narratively intimate character study with larger than life entertainment and in the process gives Humphrey Bogart the best character he’d ever play. Greed, paranoia, treachery, action, adventure and madness are all woven seamlessly together in this one of a kind film.

Bogart, Walter Huston and Tim Holt star as Dobbs, Howard and Curtin, three Americans who set off into the mountains of Tampico, Mexico to make their fortune in gold. Of the three, only Howard is an experienced prospector, a man whose exuberant eccentricities hide an observant, knowledgeable person. Before they’ve even set off, he pretty well knows how things will turn out, his words laced with warning. “As long as there’s no find, the noble brotherhood will last, but when the piles of gold begin to grow, that’s when the trouble starts.” Given his past experiences, it’s a wonder that he goes at all, but the promise of gold is enough to overcome any misgivings and, besides, he knows that without him, Dobbs and Curtin would be done for.

True to Howard’s prophesy, the partnership begins to go sour once they start to find gold. Dobbs, in particular, insists on dividing the loot at the end of each day, rather than simply dividing the money after they’ve returned to civilization. It’s here that the film begins to seem claustrophobic, giving us more frequent close-ups, having the characters occupy smaller spaces together and letting the camera close in tightly on them (many shots are set-up to make it look as if the three are practically standing on each other so that it seems as if there’s not enough room for all three and the camera on what is meant to be a wide-open mountain). The paranoia implied by immediately separating the shares is increased by the fact that all three hide their shares at the end of each day, making them naturally suspicious whenever one of the others disappears on some unexplained errand. In one scene, Curtin accidentally comes across Dobbs’ share, almost leading to a showdown between the two.

Besides having to contend with their own psychological turmoil, the trio is in for more grief with the arrival of Cody (Bruce Bennett), a fellow American who meets Curtain when he goes back to town for supplies and then follows him back up the mountain and tries to muscle his way into the operation. Shortly after Cody come a gang of bandits and the film’s most famous line: “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!” Cody is killed by the bandits, who are run off by the approach of the Federalis, and Dobbs, Curtain and Howard are free to make their way back to town with their loot. After Howard is separated from them, Dobbs’ madness takes over and he kills Curtin (or so he thinks), determined to make off with all the money himself, not stopping to think that it might not be such a good idea for a man to try to make his way through bandit country on his own.

While the film can function on the level of pure escapist entertainment, it also functions on a deeper level, where it exposits an anti-Colonialist/anti-Capitalist message. The pursuit of wealth – specifically of wealth to be hoarded by one person – is characterized not only as bad, but as dangerous, and the act of foreigners coming into a place and staking a claim where they have no right is shown to be futile. Aside from the fact that Dobbs is willing to kill anyone who comes between him and the loot, there’s also the fact that Dobbs and Curtain are brought together in the first place by McCormick (Barton MacLane), a fellow American who cons them into working his oil field and then attempts to cheat them out of the money owed to them. But the trio isn’t really better than McCormick, because they, too, engage in shifty behaviour in order to retain something that isn’t rightfully theirs. They have no real claim to the gold in the mountains, a fact which they fully admit to each other and which necessitates disguising the mine and camping elsewhere to make it look like they’re just hunters. However, the knowledge that the gold isn’t rightfully theirs doesn’t stop them from taking it, or from being willing to kill anyone who comes near it. In Dobbs' descent into madness we see played out on a smaller scale the greedy, brutal mentality of every Colonialist expedition to enter a foreign place and slaughter whomever was in the way in order to secure land and goods. When the gold is found dumped on the ground and being swept back into the mountains by the wind, Howard is right to laugh because it’s only fitting. It was never “their” gold and now it’s being returned to where it belongs.

Of the three main actors, Huston was the only one to be nominated for an Academy Award (which he won). Bogart would have been equally deserving, fully committing to Dobbs’ descent into insanity and desperation (regardless of what Dobbs has done beforehand, it’s difficult not to feel for him when he’s cornered by the bandits at the end and attempts to talk his way out of it), delivering soliloquies which attempt to justify what he’s done and convince himself that he’ll get away with it. As Curtin, Tim Holt has an unfortunate role, stuck as he is between these two giants of characters. However, he does a serviceable job, acting as the balance between the two extremes played by Huston and Bogart. As a director, Huston only makes one misstep, and that’s in showing Howard’s time in the Indian village, which completely detracts from the tone the film has built up until that point. It’s a scene that belongs in a different movie and it’s jarring to see it played out here. But, leaving that aside, what Huston delivers here is a taut, effective psychological drama that has been often imitated, but will never be surpassed.

100 Days, 100 Movies: The Third Man (1949)

Director: Carol Reed
Starring: Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Orson Welles

The light goes on, illuminating the face of Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who smiles slightly. The light goes off and he disappears. But Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) knows what he saw and has discovered the identity of the mysterious third man, a man who was supposedly a witness to the death of Harry Lime. It’s one of the best movie entrances ever, played exactly right on every level. And in the corrupt, topsy-turvy world of The Third Man it makes perfect sense that Lime would be a witness to his own death.

Carol Reed’s masterpiece takes place in a crumbling post-war Vienna divided into zones by the Allied troops, where the decadence of Old World art lives side-by-side with the black market commerce of the New World order. Holly has arrived to visit his friend Harry Lime, but instead finds him dead. He quickly falls for Anna (Alida Valli), Harry’s lover, and soon after discovers Harry, whose involvement in black market smuggling and peddling put a target on his back, necessitating his “death.” The British officer Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) is determined to catch Lime and makes a deal with Holly to trap him.

The relationship between Holly and Anna is interesting. He is immediately infatuated with her and wants to protect her (from both Major Calloway, who is convinced that she knows more about Lime than she lets on, and from the Russians who will repatriate her to Czechoslovakia if they discover that her passport is a forgery). She seems to like him, but also obviously sees him as a substitute for Harry (often she does call him Harry, a fact which does not go unnoticed by him). While Holly’s opinion of Lime changes with each new discovery about his business, Anna remains loyal in her love for him (“A person doesn’t change just because you find out more”), even after it becomes apparent that Lime is willing to let her take a fall with the authorities provided that his cover remains intact. Anna’s feelings for Harry never change, but her feelings for Holly are in constant flux until finally, with Harry’s death, Holly, too, is dead to her and the film ends with her walking right past him in the cemetery as if he doesn’t even exist.

Cotton and Valli both turn in good performances, but it’s Welles who looms large over the film. I don’t think any actor has ever had a presence quite like his. When he appears on screen, no matter how big the part, you just know it’s about to get so good, even if the film itself is not. This is a film that is equal to his talent and, in the relatively small amount of screen time that he has, gives him a lot to play with and supplies him with a lot of lines of the type that he knows exactly what to do with. “Victims?” Lime asks Holly as they take a sinister ride in a Ferris wheel, “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” And then, upon disembarking, he utters his famous line about the Swiss inventing the cuckoo clock. Once lines like these are said by Orson Welles, you really can’t imagine them being effectively uttered by anyone else.

The Third Man is an intricately constructed film. If you see something once (Kurtz’s dog, the little boy, the cat), it will show up again later in the film as part of an important plot turn. The story itself is constructed on repetitions. Lime is buried twice in the film, Anna is constantly being escorted away from Holly by the police, Holly twice returns to the spot where Lime died to stage a recreation. It’s as if the characters are attempting to go back in time and rewrite history. Holly himself is a writer who is, more or less, attempting to impose his will on the story and change it, only to find that he is at the story’s mercy instead of the other way around.

While the film would be perfectly good based solely on it’s writing and performances, the direction by Reed is what elevates it to the realm of masterpiece. We are keyed immediately to the fact that all is not what it seems by the way that the film is shot, with the camera tilted so that images come to us at an angle. This isn’t a straight forward, up-and-down world. It’s a world seen largely in shadow, shadows which both reveal and distort reality. The way that the film plays with light and shadow contribute in no small part to it’s atmosphere and it's success as a film, as do the surroundings on which the shadows are cast. The Vienna we see here is a decaying city, with large portions still in ruins – like Harry, the city itself is both dead and living.

The final chase through the labyrinthine sewers under Vienna is the highlight of the film. We see Lime desperate, trapped, surrounded and finally killed, more or less requesting death than succumbing to it. The way this sequence is controlled and executed demonstrates the power of Reed’s direction. It is a chase fraught with tension for both Lime and the audience, and it's directed and photographed magnificently. When Oscar time rolled around, this film was nominated for three: Director, Editing and Cinematography (which it won), and it’s easy to see why – the film is like a master class in technical perfection.