THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942) ***1/2 What kind of fucking morons would allow social mores and societal roles to separate them from True Love? Even if the very question invokes serious levels of contempt, this film runs a decent fighting chance of setting you straight on your ass. It's difficult for me to imagine a novelist and director with less natural affinity than Booth Tarkington (whose memorably witty lighter works like "Penrod" and "Seventeen" are irrefutable evidence that youthful angst isn't a recent invention) and Orson Welles, and Orson resolves that dilemma in the only way that it can: he removes all of the guts and heart and feelings, strips and scrapes until all that remains are sturdy and identifiable guideposts, and then begins the precious process of transplant. It's a lot more difficult than merely making a film. Orson has a supernatural ability to focus the viewer's attention precisely where he wants it, whether in a corner or the center of the frame, then allowing the action to develop in a strange order of consciousness, as if it was a still. The action then suddenly but smoothly goes forward, as if it were all part of the same motion. Which gets me to the fundamental question about this film. Conventional wisdom is that the 88 minutes that studio idiots eventually allowed to posterity are an absolute masterpiece, but one that must pale in comparison to the prophecy that Welles turned in, which was nearly twice as long. Maybe so, even probably, I haven't seen the director's cut. But Welles generates fundamental elements of his power from visual and temporal discord-just look at the series of shots when Tim Holt leaves Anne Baxter in front of the pharmacy. Incredible, in no small part because the cuts are anything but smooth. There's a cut in the middle that doesn't even look like Anne, you can only tell that it's her because no one else would wear that hat! The difference, obviously, is that Welles made his lurches for effect and the studio heads made their cuts because they thought that audiences could only take so much. So they're at cross-purposes and it's easy enough to guess whose side I come down on. Even if Orson's cut demanded extreme and lengthy indulgence it's absolutely impossible to imagine that that he turned in an extra hour of garbage without redeeming qualities and idiosyncrasies. The message is powerful enough not be drawfed by the technique, intrigue, and sands of time. Not only the implications of the motor car, these days, after Kyoto. The message has little to do with machines at all, really, beyond their effects on the psychology of man, and even that is secondary to everything else. It's so thick that you can't boil it, but if you could you'd get down to love, generosity, and greed in their many forms. It would hardly be original for me to suggest that Welles had a unique approach to, and presentation of, sound, but surely I'm not the first one to notice that Ray Collins' bathtub faucet explodes into the opening chords of "Whole Lotta Love"? Agnes Moorehead is so brilliant that she's not even recognizable as the same performer as any of her other roles. Not that they're not great, some are, but it's such a profound and vulnerable departure. Joseph Cotten and Dolores Costello don't fail to create a love at the periphery, the centerpiece of the film, in precisely the manner Welles knew he would estimate. Ok, so, Welles, Moorehead, Tarkington, and power chords good enough for Led Zeppelin to lift, maybe it's true...maybe you can throw together any mixture of truly great ones and if they're on their games they'll either find profound and common ground, or create it. As much as any Sam Peckinpah western, this film serves as an eloquent eulogy to the passing of an age: one where people weren't too cool to sing as they rode across the countryside in a horse-drawn buggy, one where the dark side of the appeal of materialism was better disguised, one where honesty was presumed, one where utility was largely defined by decorum, where there was a greater sense of unity of purpose, where there was, as Tarkington said, more time because nothing moved so fast. A time when personal freedoms were limited not by laws, but by the very cultural blueprint. A time and a place as foreign to us now as Star Wars. Which maybe isn't all that different anyway, either. It's American art of the magnitude of Greek Tragedy, but one thing the studio idiots unquestionably did was paste on a hideously incongruous (with the film, if not necessarily the novel) Hallmark Card of a conclusion. Leave after 83 minutes.
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