Ambersons links and info

[Le Chiffre]

OMG, that's funny. Would have loved to have seen the look on the woman's face. If they ever make a movie about Welles's later years, that should be in it.

[JMcBride]

Yes, the main thing the portraits of Welles on film
usually lack is showing his wonderful sense of humor.
When I would come home after a long day of shooting
on OTHER WIND, my face would hurt from smiling and laughing
so much. Welles would entertain the cast (most of all the cast,
because he thought actors were the most important people on a film. set) and
the crew by telling stories and jokes and making quips and even singing
Todd School songs ("Finesse the Queen" was his favorite). Yet
the biopix mostly show him as a charmless ogre (I am thinking
especially of Liev Schreiber in RK0 281).

One exception is ORSON WELLES AND ME, in which Christian McKay captures
Welles's charm and lightning ability to rethink his ideas
and come up with better ones. It also shows his domineering
side (he was tough on the crews, but they took it because they respected him). That's the Welles I knew. He
could be moody and angry, but those times were relatively
rare and usually had to do with the understandable frustrations
of independent filmmaking. Writers hostile to Welles
stress those stories to demean him. And after doing right by Welles, ORSON
WELLES AND ME has to show him as an ogre by screwing
over the kid who idolized him, which of course did not
happen in real life.

Paul Stewart told me a great story that
should have been in RKO 281. He had never acted in a film
before, and his first shot as Raymond, the butler, was the big CU in which he lights
a cigarette and comes out of the darkness to say, "Rosebud? I tell
you about Rosebud. How much is it worth to you?" Paul was
nervous, and Welles came to him just before the camera rolled
and said, "Now remember, Paul, when this scene is shown, your
face will be forty feet high on the screen at the Radio City Music
Hall." Paul said that was the absolute worst direction Welles
could have given him at that moment, so he froze. When the
camera rolled, he went up in his lines and said, "Goldberg? I tell
you about Goldberg. How much is it worth to you?" They all
roared with laughter, Welles most of all, and it broke the ice,
Paul relaxed, and filming merrily continued. What a good and leavening
scene that would have been to show the atmosphere on a Welles set.

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks for those stories, Joe. Welles's movies do seem to have, even at their darkest, a kind of festive, celebratory mood to them; the kind of joyous creative vibe that I don't often detect in one of Hollywood's assembly-line products. Maybe it was just having the opportunity to actually create on such a scale, which Welles didn't get nearly enough chances for in his film career. There are many stories of him being a stern taskmaster, but one gets the sense that Welles was never happier than when he was on a movie set. Not so sure about Welles's happiness on the set of Ambersons, though, even though the results were sublime.

**********

Here's Manny Farber (in one of the first professional reviews of his 30-year career as a film critic) trashing Ambersons in a 1942 issue of The New Republic. Farber was 24 years old, two years younger than Welles:
TNR Film Classic: ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ (1942)

Orson Welles’s second I-did-it should show once and for all that film making, radio and the stage are three different guys better kept separated. The Magnificent Ambersons is one of those versions of the richest family in town during the good old days. Front and center of the Ambersons is the Oedipean situation between Dolores Costello and son Tim Holt, which, according to the movie, started when Dolores married the wrong man. All her frustrated love went toward smothering her son, and sure enough he grew up to gloriously rotten manhood. When the father dies, Sonny Boy keeps Mother from marrying her first love, who for some reason is still hanging around (from what you see you wouldn’t think she was worth the fuss). As a result, limpidly pretty Dolores shrinks up and dies.

While telling this story, haltingly and clumsily, the movie runs from burdensome through heavy and dull to bad. It stutters and stumbles as Welles submerges Tarkington’s story in a mess of radio and stage technique. The radio comes in those stretches of blank screen when the only thing present is Welles’s off-screen voice mellifluously setting the period and coyly reminiscing, talking and drooling, while you sit there muttering let’s get on. And at the times when something is on the screen and Welles tells you what for. Meanwhile, for something to do, you count the shadows. Theatre-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 1890’s. The first ten have to do with costume. Then some on the many-gabled architecture. Then the first automobile, the second, the third, and you wait for somebody to say “Get a horse,” and finally somebody does. Eventually the main people come on and act mostly on a dime (Welles, off-screen, says Isabel Amberson is rejecting a suitor and you see the suitor rejected). Then, cut, and you’re on Main Street with the average man. Now back for another fond look at the Amberson mansion with the camera ostentatiously snailing its way into coiners and crevices until finally a face turns in out of the stage-muddy murk, looks or talks or walks upstairs or, if it’s Agnes Moorehead, has hysterics. The pace of the camera (Stanley Cortez’) is too slow for movie eyes, and the pace of the story (Orson Welles’s) too labored to create any emotion but boredom.

Aside from all the dead spots the story is told as badly as would seem possible. The incidents selected don’t explain themselves sufficiently to be there, and moreover, are ineptly chosen to get across the psychological workings of the Ambersons, which is the main concern of the movie. Repetitious display of Aunt Fannie’s hysteria is good theatrical bombast, but every fit after the first is irrelevant as far as the story’s concerned. Toadying like this to melodramatic effect strips the other roles, particularly the two older lovers’, to almost nothing. So that you feel that you’re looking at the main plot—the triangle of son, mother and lover—through the wrong end of a telescope. There are long, awkwardly handled scenes that add up to nothing. There are some plain cheap effects: Richard Bennett as old Major Amberson is finally given his due when they set his face to the camera and Welles tells you he’s scared to die. The two minutes you’ve seen of him before wouldn’t prove it (in fact you wonder who the old geezer is), but even if you accept this fact what have you got? The transitions are handled miserably, and in the midst of all the redundancy the story thuds suddenly into situations without any reason that you can see. Just before the end, pace, characters and feeling change abruptly and sprint to a hearts-and-flowers finish. Much of this seems the fault of blundering editing.

In keeping with this eclecticism are photographic tricks from everywhere, so unintegrated you can’t miss them. These aren’t as objectionable as the general theatrical use of the camera, which subscribes to the theory that six shadows are six times as dramatic as one and the blacker the better. This eighty-eight-minute dim-out negates nearly everything a camera can do.

On the credit side is Welles’s drive, as in Citizen Kane, toward three-dimensional characters and away from standardized movie types. He wants realism and there’s no one in Hollywood to touch him in its use. He directs his actors in more meaty portrayals of neurotic people than any other Hollywood director. But even this, which is so admirable, suffers from the general clumsiness, and from the fact that stage acting is more boring than not on the screen.

Movies Aren’t Movies Any More: The Gimp Takes Over in Hollywood (Manny Farber, 1952)
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/arti ... akes-over/

Movies have seldom, if ever, been so physically overbearing in their effect. The scenarios are set up so that the story can be told with a small cast, little movement, and few settings. The camera fastens itself on the actors with such obsessive closeness that every moment becomes of overwhelming importance and threatens to disclose some terrifying psychic or emotional fact. The effect becomes even stronger and more curious when the actors occasionally move across the room and this all-revealing eye just barely moves to keep them in focus-as in Something to Live For, when a worried advertising ace paces his office, while the camera seems to move back and forth no more than a fraction of an inch. One has the feeling that nothing is any longer of importance except a magnification of face, gesture, and dress, and that these can tell you all you need to know about life in our time.

_____________

All this seems to have started in an exciting. if hammy 1941 picture called Citizen Kane. This grim mixture of suspense thriller and tabloid obituary, in which most of the surface facts paralleled events in the career of William Randolph Hearst, combined the thunderous theatrical trickery of Orson Welles with a reckless use of darkish photography and funny angles by a top cameraman named Gregg Toland. Toland threw into the film every device ever written into the accomplished cameraman’s handbook-everything from under-cranking (to make the people in “newsreel” clips jerk and scuttle) to crane-shots, two-shots, floor-shots, and his favorite perspective shot in which figures widely spaced and moving far off down long rooms were kept as clearly in focus as the figure closest to the audience. This stuff helped make an exciting film, though marred by obvious items of shopworn inspiration: camera angles that had been thoroughly exploited by experimental films, and the platitudinous characterization of Kane as a lonely man who wanted love from the world but didn’t get it because he had no love of his own to give. This unpeeling of a tycoon was clearly the most iconoclastic stroke in major studio production since the days when D. W. Griffith and his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, were freeing movies from imitation of the stage. Orson Welles’s bold jumbling of techniques from theater, radio, and film led inevitably to a shock-happy work that anticipated everything that has since become fashionable in American films.

Oddly enough, this film, which had the biggest cultural build-up before release since Eisenstein’s Mexican film, made little impression at the time on Hollywood’s veterans. Only a few years ago did the ghost of Citizen Kane start haunting every “A” picture out of Hollywood. Before the advent of Orson Welles, the most important thing in motion picture technique had been the story, the devising, spacing, and arranging of shots into a plot line that moved easily from one thing to another. Welles, more concerned with exhibiting his impudent showmanship and his deep thoughts about graft, trusts, yellow journalism, love, hate, and the like, fractured his story all along the line, until his film became an endless chain of stop effects. At every instant, the customer was encouraged to pause over some Kubla Khan setting, some portentously lit floor-shot of an actor, or some symbol (the falling-snow toy, the bird screaming in escape), and think in the terms of what it had to tell about a publisher’s immoral pursuit of love-power-respect. The plot was simple enough: a famous man said something (“rosebud”) just before dying in his castle on a mountain, and “March of Time” sent out an inquiring reporter to make a story out of it. Eventually we did get the answer, not through the flash-backed memories of those interviewed—Kane’s oldest friend, his newspaper manager, the girl, the butler in the castle—but in a final nerve-tingling shot, privy to the director and audience, of the “Rosebud” sled of Kane’s lost, barren childhood. The story was presented in such complicated ways and made so portentous with the shadows of meaning cast off by a hundred symbols that you could read almost anything into it, including what Welles had put there. There were certain dramatic high points like the rough-cut in the “March of Time” projection room, the kid outside the window in the legacy scene, and the lurid presentation of an electioneering stage. But in between these was a great deal of talk, much less action, and almost no story.

[Wich2]

(... because he thought actors were the most important people on a film. set)

A-HA! Joe, at long last, the ultimate proof of the man's brilliance!

[...his domineering
side (he was tough on the crews, but they took it because they respected him)...
ORSON WELLES AND ME has to show him as an ogre by screwing
over the kid who idolized him, which of course did not
happen in real life.

As my late pal (the real archetype of that kid) told me (confirming the first sentence of your quote),

"Orson was a genius - and a pain in the ass!"

Pray (if so inclined), take good care, and be well, all.

- Craig

[Wellesnet]

The Culver City Historical Society discovered and has preserved some of the elaborate stained glass windows seen in Orson Welles' THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. Check out a video of their impressive work.

https://www.wellesnet.com/culver-city-ambersons-windows/

[Roger Ryan]

It's amazing those windows still exist. I believe the "Spring" window shown being restored in the video was used as the middle window for the second floor staircase (it's visible only briefly in the shot of George and Isabel walking from the staircase to Wilbur and Isabel's bedroom following the "Last Ball" - the two are discussing Wilbur's health at the moment the window is seen). In all, there were nine individual "stained glass" windows used in the film, three for each floor of the mansion. The first floor windows (with the words "Hope", "Faith", "Charity" visible on each) are the ones most clearly seen during George and Fanny's first big confrontation on the staircase following the dinner with Eugene. The second floor windows only appear fleetingly in that one shot with George and Isabel, and the third floor windows can be seen during the "Last Ball" just before George sits down on the staircase to continue his conversation with Lucy (the one is which he learns the "odd duck" is Lucy's father). The third floor windows are not illuminated from the outside (correctly since the scene takes place at night), so it's difficult to make out the designs.

[atcolomb]

I saw the seven minute video and i am also surprised it's still here today. Happy to see folks care and restore parts of our cinema history.